The Long Way Back to the Game Boy

Five euros at a flea market somewhere in the south of the country. That’s what a Game Boy cost me—gray brick, worn at the corners, a copy of Tetris already in the slot. I didn’t deliberate. Next to the Super Nintendo it remains the best snap decision I’ve ever made in a parking lot, a direct line back to Super Mario Land, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, and the original Pokémon, which I am not embarrassed to still think about.

The SmartBoy is a case that turns an iPhone into a working Game Boy. You slot the phone into the housing, push in a real Nintendo cartridge, and suddenly Metroid II: Return of Samus or Harvest Moon is running on hardware that costs more than most people’s rent. It’s a clever object. The nostalgia response it produces is involuntary and immediate.

The obvious question is why you wouldn’t just carry the actual Game Boy. The SmartBoy is not a slim device. You’re adding a chunky plastic shell to an already expensive phone in order to play games you could play on something that fits in a coat pocket and runs on two AA batteries. The logic doesn’t survive much scrutiny—but this is also the logic that questions why people still buy vinyl, and I gave up applying that kind of reasoning to anything years ago. Nintendo will eventually put its full handheld catalog on iOS and Android and render this whole category unnecessary. Until then, I understand the impulse, even if I’m keeping my original hardware.