The Grey Brick That Came Back

Counting the hours I spent with a Game Boy as a kid would be impossible—and probably embarrassing. Super Mario Land, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, the original Pokémon games—anything that produced three-note chiptune bleeps and a grey-green image had my complete devotion. It was a perfect object. Small enough to hide under a school desk, durable enough to survive being thrown across a bedroom, and so deeply mine in a way that shared family consoles never quite were.

So when Retro-Bit showed up at CES 2017 with the Super Retro Boy, I felt something I hadn’t felt about hardware in years: genuine excitement. It plays original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance cartridges, runs for about ten hours on a charge, and costs around eighty dollars in white or black. That’s it. That’s the pitch. No firmware updates, no subscription, no account creation—just a slot for a cartridge and a screen.

Anyone who’s tried to recapture that feeling on a smartphone emulator knows it doesn’t work. The tactile wrongness of a touchscreen D-pad ruins everything. With something like the Super Retro Boy you can actually dig through flea markets again, pick up Tetris or Mega Man or Metroid for a few euros, and play them the way they were meant to be played. Like a kid with nowhere to be and a full afternoon ahead of him.