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The Game Boy is 25 years old in Europe this week, and by this point, they're pretty much everywhere. Or rather, they were pretty much everywhere. Now they're often in attics, I imagine, or in sheds, or in crates slid under beds. Nintendo made over 100 million Game Boys, which isn't bad, but today I don't want to think about that. I want to think back to a period - a period that probably didn't exist the way I see it - where there is just one of them. Just one Game Boy. The first. And somebody is road-testing it.I read a book a while back - typically, I can't remember what it was called - that had a chapter, or at least a few pages, on the invention of the personal stereo. The way I recall it going, there was a time when there were only a few of these personal stereos knocking around, and this one guy was out in the countryside having his mind blown by the fact that his music was suddenly right there with him. He was lying under trees, wading through grass, picking flowers - he was clearly a hippy - and there was suddenly a soundtrack, boomingly loud but intimate, that accompanied all of this. Private symphonies. Almost a form of madness, really - music that only one person can hear, in a landscape in which you would never expect to find it.
This is how I imagine the first Game Boy owner, except it's a city, at night, and he or she's on public transport. They're holding this strange grey box, and they're jabbing at the buttons. Except nobody sees that, because nobody really pays attention to what anyone else is doing in a public space. From the outside it looks like almost nothing is going on anyway, but to that special person, to the first Game Boy owner, games have suddenly evolved. They've broken free. They're available wherever you go now, and - crucially - they're also more private, more internalised at the same time. They have earned themselves a screen that is made for just one person. Games have become intimate.
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