Twenty years ago today Nintendo released the gamer from the tethers of cords and cables. No longer the exclusive province of the living room, den, or bedroom, the Game Boy freed the avid Nintendo player to enjoy his (or her) favorites in the backseat of the family car, at the bus stop, or on the perimeter of the playground—far removed from the athletic contests of the more vigorous.

Or something like that.

Though it seemed like nothing of the sort back in 1989, this humble little handheld device would be the lynchpin of Nintendo’s continued success and set the tack for the direction it would take in the future. Its tenure would not be without missteps and doldrums but the Game Boy could arguably be the most important game system Nintendo ever released.

I don’t intend to speak for everyone. Nor do I intend to provide a comprehensive history of the Game Boy and its contemporaries. I only intend to provide my own personal experiences with this handheld system.

Most of the gaming sites—big and small—have already covered the Game Boy’s twentieth back in April. That’s when the Game Boy made its first tentative step into the world in Japan. We Americans didn’t get ours until July of 1989. Though I have no concrete recollection, I assume that I must have received my own Game Boy that fall as a birthday gift. The timing makes sense. My parents were not inclined to purchase expensive electronics for me in the middle of the summer and 2 months, plus the lead time from being a loyal Nintendo Power subscriber would have given me plenty of time to wheedle and plead.

At the time the competition to the Game Boy was not seen as any home console, but those irritating little LCD devices. I never saw a real Game & Watch which apparently were actually kind of fun. The ones I was familiar with were typically licensed trash that mostly involved moving something from side to side as obstacles “moved” toward the bottom of the screen. They were shrill, repetitive, and not much fun. Yet those were just the things parents at the time thought of when they thought of handheld games—if they thought of them at all. Considerably pleading was required.

So one autumn day as I celebrated my tenth birthday I opened a present to find the neon blue wireframe box I so desperately wanted. Carefully removing its contents from the styrofoam—yes, they used styrofoam back then—tray I beheld the Game Boy in all its blocky grayness. It really never was much to look at.

I tell you what did impress me though: the headphones. I’d never seen earbuds before. They were so sleek, so cool. Every Walkman I’d ever owned before came with a pair of clunky padded earmuffs bound together with wire. These were tiny.

Even more impressive still to me was the little plastic case the game carts came in at the time. Over the years, these neat little dust covers have fallen to the wayside. When I first opened my Game Boy, I thought it was hot shit. It still looks pretty nifty to me today.

My plan for this retrospective is to devote a number of posts to particular high points in my history with the Game Boy. I want to spend more words than I care to tack on to this remembrance on each individual game, so I’ll be splitting them into single game posts.

Next time: In Soviet Russia, blocks stack you.

A short time back in my trolling the web for interesting cross stitch and other crafts I came across this spectacularly excellent cross stitched map of the overworld from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening by the indomitable Cross-stitch Ninja. An impressive feat of crafting, it called to my attention just how excellent a game is Link’s Awakening. I’ve continued to think on it, from time to time, because to this day it strikes me as surprisingly wonderful.

Link’s Awakening seems to come from a foreign time and place to me. It was released in 1993 here in the United States for the Game Boy. At the time, we only had the original blocky, blurry, green-screened monstrosity as far as I can recall. I own one of the original systems on which I played a great deal of Tetris, Final Fantasy Adventure¹, and little else that I can recall. I abandoned the Game Boy as a gaming platform at some point before the release of Link’s Awakening until some years later when Pokémon fever gripped the nation.

Indeed, by 1993 I had all but given up on the console, handheld or otherwise, as a gaming system. I was still very much interested in games. Contests of chance and skill seem etched on my very DNA. An impressionable 11-year-old I begged my parents for a Sega Genesis 2 , half-heartedly collected a number of titles, none of which could be considered “classic” and roundly turned to other means of recreation. Pen-and-paper games became an obsession and a neighbor had access to a seemingly vast assortment of pirate PC games (Transported on tape drives, no less!) that satiated my desires for pixelated adventure.

As such, I almost never put my hands around a Super Nintendo controller and do not have the warm fuzzy memories many of my contemporaries have of Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy III/VI, Yoshi’s Island, or Super Metroid. Nor did I play Link’s Awakening until it was re-released on the Game Boy Color in a slightly upgraded state. Indeed, my first experience with the game came from my mother’s college friend who came to visit one summer and brought a newly acquired Game Boy along as company during a long drive.

This is what I mean when I say it seems to come from a foreign time and place. Not having kept up with home and portable consoles during most of the 1990’s I find any games from the time period to be strange new relics resurrected from a time of which I was barely aware. It’s exciting, as if I had discovered a parallel universe. Or, a parallel universe’s entertainments at any rate.

So, then, back to the topic at hand. Link’s Awakening, upon final discovery in the Game Boy Color version, is a far cry different from the Legend of Zelda to which I was most intimately familiar. Keep in mind I had never seen A Link to the Past at this point even though it had been released several years earlier. While some of the elements had been teased in Zelda 2, I had not played a game in the series with such robust non-combat interaction. Here was a village of characters with whom Link could, nay must, speak. Link’s Awakening introduced, fully, the fetch-quest structure that was featured in every game hence. It also showed me a Zelda game in some semblance of 3-dimensions with hills to bound over and enemies that couldn’t be hit from below.

It was also kooky. Both the townspeople and monsters of the game’s setting Koholint Island are quirky and humorous. Many puns are used throughout the adventure. Children in the village break the fourth wall by telling you how to play the game, but claim ignorance of the meaning because they’re “just a kid!” The object of the game, though it is not immediately obvious, is to awaken the Wind Fish, a flying whale who sleeps in a giant egg atop the highest peak on the island.

Despite being a handheld game Link’s Awakening takes major steps to refining the core game play that would define the series. The items and weapons found in the game’s dungeons are essential to progress, even more so than in the NES games. More than any other early handheld game Link’s Awakening demonstrates that portable does not necessarily mean substandard. Through it we could see the first glimpse that handheld gaming could be just as significant as home console games.

Okay, so maybe A Link to the Past might have been more significant, but I played this one first, and it stuck with me. With its whimsical setting, endearing characters, and solid gameplay it has stayed one of my all-time favorite games on any platform. Honestly, I think it just might be my favorite Legend of Zelda game.

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¹ It was actually a Seiken Densetsu game, a series that would be released here some time later as Secret of Mana.

² “Sega does what Nintendon’t!”

A while back I interviewed Joshua Davis a.k.a. Bit Shifter in hopes of getting posted on the site I worked for called Crown Dozen. I neglected to run this by the owner/editor of the place, and when he said it wasn’t appropriate for the site I got pretty pissed and some nasty words were exchanged. Then, I realized I was being a jackass and we’ve since ironed things out.

The other day I was going through some of the documents I had saved either as reviews or would-be reviews and came across this. I thought I might as well get it posted somewhere, so here it is.

Joshua Davis, a.k.a. Bit Shifter, plays music on his Game Boy. Deftly mixing the three simple waves and noise channel from the Game Boy soundset he creates tunes that defy the simple nature of the hardware. It’s all done on an honest-to-goodness Game Boy, the very same gray brick (the original model is reputed to produce the best sound) you wiled away your spare time playing Tetris. There are no tricks, no sampled beeps played back on a computer, this is the real deal Nintendo-philes. Did I mention that it’s really good? I probably should mention that.

Benjamin: So, the obvious question first: Why Game Boy?

Bit Shifter: There’s a twofold reason, really, a long-standing love for the Game Boy soundset combined with the availability of tools to access and manipulate it. As a kid I was never a die-hard video game player, but the sounds and music always held a certain fascination for me. I suspect a lot of it is association, the Game Boy soundset can really evoke feelings of space, of storyline and continuity, things like that. But without any expertise in programming for the Game Boy (or for anything really), it was a fascination that I couldn’t explore or apply, beyond occasional 8-bit sound mimicry on conventional synths for kicks. But cut to a few years ago, when Johan Kotlinski and Oliver Wittchow were independently developing and distributing Little Sound DJ and Nanoloop, respectively, and suddenly the keys to the secret kingdom were being handed out to anyone who wanted them. Nanoloop and Little Sound DJ are custom-written program cartridges (or ROM files depending on how they’re purchased) written specifically for the purpose of musicmaking on the Game Boy. They turn the Game Boy into a music workstation, capable of multitrack sequencing and internal synthesis. They differ pretty significantly in their interfaces and their conceptual models, but both serve the same fundamental purpose. So from my perspective as a non-programmer, these two tools provided access to a soundset that had been previously off-limits to me. There’s also an enormous subversive appeal to repurposing a device as familiar and ubiquitous as the Game Boy into a musicmaking platform. Combine all of this with the objective appeal of a self-contained, hand-held, completely portable, battery powered musical composition and performance platform that you can use on park benches, in cafés, on subways, etc., and you can probably see why it’s such a fun piece of gear to use.

How many Game Boys do you own and which model do you use most often?

I have, I think, eight Game Boys (might be down to seven now, I dropped one at my last show). But several of those were incidental acquisitions that came as parts of eBay sets where an accessory I wanted was only available as part of an auction lot including one or more Game Boys. But the end result is kind of a cool accidental parody of the gratuitous racks of Les Pauls that guitarists often have. Most of those are the Game Boy Classic model, the biggest, oldest ones. Also in there is a Game Boy Color and a Game Boy Light. For composing and performing I use the Classic models as they have the best overall sound (better bass in particular). For file saving and loading I use Mega Memory Cards (standalone gaming backup devices) with either the Color or the Light (they don’t seem to function at all when used with the Classic). So a live show will consist of three consoles, the Color or Light to do the file loading and two Classics on which to perform.

Any musical training or expertise? If so how does this affect your chiptune creations?

I took some piano lessons as a kid, and since high school I’ve always been involved in bands, playing guitar, doing vocals, etc. I think my experience with music has afforded me at least some intuitive grasp of melody and structure, but any expertise I’ve acquired I now enjoy squandering on indulgent and dimwitted idioms. I wish I could say that I was classically trained and that I’m working on a Game Boy sonata in four movements, but I can’t. But you know, stand by for some more Game Boy gabber beats.

I suppose the medium begs the question: Are you much of a video game player, or were you in the past? I’ve come in contact with the movement through my love of classic video games so I may be looking at this sort of music through a very different perspective than you.

As much as I enjoyed video games as a kid (and still do), it never became more than an occasional hobby, and I think I liked the aesthetic more than the games themselves. We had various video game consoles when I was growing up — Atari 2600 and later an Intellivision — and they saw moderate, consistent use, but I can’t say I was a die hard video game junkie. I did develop attachments to some of the background music; I used to borrow my sister’s Game Boy and her copy of the game Balloon Kid to record the music onto my tape deck. I still don’t know who the composer was.

What are your musical influences? Do you pay attention to what video game composers have done with the same technology for inspiration? Do you prefer to consider the Game Boy wholly separate from its original purpose?

I haven’t really educated myself much about video game composers’ work. I probably should. Although nowadays when I’m playing old video games I’m much more conscious of the music, and have found a lot of inspiration that way.
In terms of my musical influences in general, my tastes are kind of haphazard, scattered across a range of idioms with an anchor vaguely settling, for better or worse, somewhere in the punk rock / hardcore area. Although I guess that’s more an indicator of my history than it is of my influences. Without wanting to dodge the question, it’s tough for me to say where the Bit Shifter material comes from. For me it’s a very exploratory project, the negative result of that being that there isn’t a lot of thematic consistency from track to track. So I guess I’m drawing from different sources based on whatever mood I find a track to be taking on. I can’t say I’m out to deliberately separate the Game Boy from its original purpose; in fact I wish I could say I had any definitive, decisive musical or artistic objective in mind at all. The first thing I wanted to do with the Game Boy once I got my hands on these cartridges was to explore traditional video game music, to try it on, as an idiom. Since then I’ve just been wandering, like some half-witted, wide-eyed kid in a giant toy store, paying no attention whatsoever to where I’m going and immersed in a single continuous stream of amazement and fascination with the environment. Although I guess there has been a bit of an unconscious shift over time. Initially I was using the Game Boy to make soundtracks to nonexistent video games; now I’m just trying to make it sound mean.

I’ve only briefly experimented with the trial versions of Nanoloop and Little Sound DJ and I can’t say as I understood either one of them very well. Is working with them akin to working with samples? I suppose what I’m asking is what process do you go through to write a new tune?

The specifics differ between the two programs, but fundamentally the end result is similar, you end up with a song constructed out of a series of short patterns, strung together end to end, and arranged across concurrent tracks (four in Little Sound DJ and three in Nanoloop). Neither program is sample-based, although LSDj contains an array of sampled drum machine kit sounds and speech phonemes. Both programs instead work with the Game Boy’s onboard sound synthesis, and provide an interface to control it. Once you get the hang of it it’s actually very intuitive, and honestly these programs facilitate a spontaneous musical creativity that I’ve never really found using any other tool, synth or sequencing environment.

Personally my process basically involves plugging notes into a looping pattern on a whim until I stumble upon something that sounds interesting, then building complementary patterns around it. After a while I step back and see where I’ve ended up. Sometimes I end up with a promising start to a song, sometimes I abandon the idea. I almost never come to the Game Boy with any preconceived musical notion; and when I do, those are often the songs that hit dead ends. The platform and programs seem instead to facilitate a really spontaneous, stream-of-consciousness approach to songwriting, which I’m really unaccustomed to, so it’s been a really fun experience working in these programs’ environments.

What’s your recording setup? Is the sound on the album essentially just recorded straight off of the headphone jack?

Yeah, the audio is digitized into my computer via the Game Boy’s headphone jack. Left alone, the signal sounds flat to my tastes, so once the audio is digitized I apply a little reverb to add some depth and a little EQ to enhance the bass. Then I compress the hell out of it. Mostly to maximize overall volume. I tend to overdo it at this stage.

When you’re working with a such a low-tech medium the sound is defined by its limitations, and those limitations are what make the sound so interesting. Do you ever feel stifled by the technology? Anything you wish you could do, but just can’t? Ever thought about adding other instruments or sounds?

For some reason I tend to work best in limited environments. I guess I can more readily conceptualize them, I feel more comfortable that the hardware and software boundaries and capabilities are either known or knowable. Put me in front of Cubase with dozens of effects at my disposal and I’m useless, I get paralyzed by the array of options. Plus, at least for now, I’m really into the conceptual simplicity of doing everything on a single Game Boy. Although I confess I recently did a remix which involved using two synchronized Game Boys, but I figure it was still close enough to the original concept that I won’t consider it cheating.

I’ve found your stuff to be much more accessible than other chiptune artists, who tend to more technical compositions. Did you make a conscious decision or is this just a result of your own tastes and influences?

Not a conscious decision, at heart I’m into doing music that I would want to hear, and for better or for worse that generally means doing music with at least some accessible elements, whether that’s an overt melodic sensibility in a poppy chiptune or a solid 4-on-the-floor beat in a more abstract track. These are the elements that grab me, that capture my attention while I’m composing, so I adhere to them without subjecting them to much critique, such as “Is this artistically challenging?” or “Does this flout convention?” Regrettably the answer to both is generally “no,” but the songs make me happy.

Of all the tracks you’ve released or posted I’m probably most impressed by the live improvised collaboration with Meike Randow, mostly because I don’t understand how it’s done. This goes back to an earlier question, but maybe you could discuss how live performances on Game Boy.

Solo performances generally involve loading pre-written songs onto cartridges, and then modifying them on-the-fly during playback, in an attempt to introduce some human interaction. Live performance is something I’m not entirely comfortable with, and I’ve been looking at live shows as a means of field-testing different methods of performing. The jam with Meike was actually more of a true performance in a lot of ways, and really opened my eyes to new methods of performing. In that instance, she and I were both running Nanoloop cartridges on our respective Game Boys, synchronized via a Game Link cable connecting the two. So both Game Boys were locked to one another in terms of time and tempo, and each was sending its own audio out to the house mixer. And as the song progressed, we were loading different combinations of patterns over one another, changing patterns, recombining them, etc., to create something that was really spontaneous and fun. Neither of us had any idea beforehand what sort of patterns the other had at the ready — although we knew we both shared similar musical sensibilities — so it was really a spontaneous creation. One that turned out really well, I thought. That was some of the most fun I’ve had in doing Game Boy performances so far.

Malcolm McLaren made some pretty sweeping claims in the Wired article in which you’re mentioned. Do you agree with his assessment that chiptune is the punk of this generation?

I think Malcolm McLaren’s piece romanticized this movement at the expense of accuracy, and I’m not ready to subscribe to his idea that this is going to be something huge (if that’s what you mean). I personally see a lot of basic conceptual parallels between punk rock and the chiptune movement. But Malcolm’s piece was disconcerting in that it presumed to speak for the entire movement, and ascribed overt political ideologies where I’m not sure any have really existed. This is difficult for me to comment on as I don’t feel qualified to speak for the “movement” myself. As with any idiom, the practitioners of chiptune music are individuals with their own motives, and I can’t really speak for them. But if I were to make a wildly speculative generalization, I suspect that most people doing Game Boy music, for example, are drawn to the concept purely out of a nameless affinity, an intangible urge that makes us identify this idea as “cool,” and not as an extension of any formalized philosophy about reclaiming or humanizing electronic music, or about making a statement against ProTools, or against samplers, against guitars, etc. I think the pursuit of novel soundsets and musical devices is a common impulse among the musically minded, and one that’s a means to its own end. What Malcolm read into the movement was flattering and exciting, but was ultimately speculative interpretation on his part too. It was cool to get his external perspective on this stuff, and I think he’s an insightful and capable commentator. But as to whether chipstyle the punk rock of this generation — it’s anyone’s guess.

Life’s A Bit Shifter is available now from the artist, 555 Records, or Darla. Bit Shifter can also be heard on the 8bitpeoples release The 8 Bits of Christmas and a number of other compilations.