Tetris on the Big Screen

You’re three hours into staring at the TV and nothing’s worth watching. The Xbox is still downloading some update nobody asked for. Everything else is garbage. So your brain keeps circling back to something old—your Game Boy, that little piece of plastic that actually had games worth playing.

Two Dutch developers named Zane Amiralis and Joshua de Haan made an adapter called HDMYBOY that lets you plug a Game Boy into an HDTV. Suddenly Tetris, Link’s Awakening, Pokemon Blue (everyone agrees the red version is worse)—all those games that mattered—appear at full size on whatever giant screen is taking up space in your living room.

There’s something beautifully stupid about it. Chunky tetrominos stretched across 60 inches of modern display. Tiny sprite art that was never designed for this scale, now rendered large. It shouldn’t work, and yet the second you hear the idea, it’s obvious. The games are good. They were always good. The screen size changes nothing except maybe making you admit you spent decades watching them on something too small.

Going back to old games isn’t really nostalgia. Nostalgia is memory playing tricks. This is closer to an apology—not for the game being primitive, because it wasn’t, but for all those years of squinting at a three-inch monochrome screen when you could’ve been watching this. It’s giving the kid who played Game Boy a second look at something that was already worth looking at.

I don’t know if the thing actually works, or if there’s lag, or if the image holds up on modern displays. Someone looked at a 30-year-old handheld and decided it deserved to be bigger. That kind of sincere, pointless idea is something I can get behind.