Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 217: Game Boy at Midwest Gaming Classic

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

Live! Jeremy Parish, Bob Mackey, Chris Kohler, and Caitlin Oliver discuss the Game Boy's 30-year legacy. Then Jeremy and Bob talk up the magic of Mindware's Heiankyo Alien in an impromptu chat recorded bootleg-style. [Art: Cassie Hart Kelly]

This week at Retronauts was recorded live at Midwest Gaming Classic 2019 a couple of weeks ago. The second part was recorded without a proper audio setup, so I apologize for the awful sound quality, but I promised to make it up to you someday with a proper Hey-On-Go Alien podcast. Hi, everyone. Welcome to this weekend in Retronauts. It's Game Boy's Gender Reveal Party. I think I gave it away. Hi, everyone. Welcome to our latest and most amazing Midwest Gaming Classic presentation here 2019. We are Retronauts, that being... Hey, it's Game Boy Toy Box.

Maggie. I'm here. I am Jeremy Parrish, and our guests for this presentation are... I'm Caitlin Oliver, and I was previously recording with them. I set some high scores in a splatterhouse, and I'm an amateur historian. Hi, I'm Chris Kohler. I'm Featureditor Kotaku, and yeah, amateur historian. Let's give that like that. Sure. All right, and... Nobody's are here for it. We're baby Franks. We are here to amateurishly discuss the history. of Game Boy. Actually, let's do it professionally. So a couple of weeks ago, I guess, like three weeks ago, Bob and I and some other people recorded a podcast about the 30th anniversary of the Game Boy, which is next Sunday.

It's going to be 30 years old, if you can believe that. And that episode will be going up on our podcast feed on Monday. But in the meantime, we are here live and in person to kind of talk a little bit around some of the stuff that we covered in that 30th anniversary presentation. And I couldn't come to a live event this close to the Game Boy's significant anniversary for the Game Boy without talking about the system because I've invested so much of my time over the past five years since the Game Boy's 25th anniversary to chronicling its history and its library and just exploring the games and the developers who worked on it.

So here we are. This is going to be my five-year brain dump live. and in person, and I don't know what these folks are going to do, but I think they're probably just going to avoid the splashed zone. So, I'm just going to make jokes. Okay. Should we get a tarp for the front row? So, yeah, just to begin with, I guess it might be good to kind of set the context.

You folks out here, you are familiar with Game Boy, yes? A little bit. Okay, I see some uncertainty. I see some children. This is not a Q&A session. Yeah, we're not. going to put you up here. Don't worry. But how about you folks here on the panel

with me? What was your initial encounter with Game Boy? How did you come across this magical, wonderful brick of gaming? Oh. So, my brother bought it when it launched, basically, when it came out, because he was really good with, like, saving

money and stuff. If I got $5, I just spent it on an issue of electronic gaming monthly. You know, I couldn't, like, save money, so he was good at stocking money away, got 100 bucks. We drove up from Connecticut to New Hampshire because there was no sales tax there and he bought the Game Boy. Then we pretty much just shared it after

that, like, you know, he wasn't really possessive about it. I mean, when I was younger, I didn't really have a chance to play it until my cousins got one. And then I played nothing but Super Mario and Tetris because that's what everybody played. But I got my first Game Boy when I was in high school and I got a Game Boy pocket off of a friend of mine second hand with a copy of Pokemon

Blue. That was my first game. first personal Game Boy. And now I have an entire shelf of them and you might have caught the mini I did, or micro, micro. I recorded with Jeremy about the fact that I have a rainbow shelf full of Game Boy's. And that was one of the great things about Game Boy was the panoply of colors. Initially it was just gray, but eventually they realized, well, you know, we could actually sell more of these to people who already own it if we release it in stylish colors. And they did. And we all bought multiple Game Boys. Well, I don't know that's necessarily true at the time. time. I mean, I didn't even own a Game Boy until Game Boy Color in 1998, but I did, you know,

occasionally intersect with Game Boy. My brother had one that he never let me use, and then around the time that I left for college, like five years later, my grandparents thought, oh, we should get a Game Boy for the kids to play when they're over, and that was very sweet of them, but it was completely irrelevant to me because I was in another city and never actually got to play. I think they bought it with Mega Man, which was like, they were really thinking of me there. They knew, they knew, but it was just a little too little too late but Game Boy was definitely

an object of fascination for me because of the concept of playing video games on the go these Nintendo games that I loved and so I really wanted one I just couldn't find a way to fit it into my very tiny budget but now it's a thing that I spend

way too much money on as I did this morning don't even ask about my trip to the vendor floor what was your trip to the vendor floor like you know Chris I asked Ask you not to ask you not to ask. I don't know. And?

Five, why don't you take it? I believe I got one Christmas of 1990 because as many of us were, we were all indoctrinated by Nintendo Power and Captain Nett having Game Boy as a literal character on the screen that would dance around and make you want a Game Boy. But I believe, like, before that,

it was used to sell me on a new stepdad because my mom was dating my stepdad at the time and he was a big nerd, still is. And the way to sell me on him was like, He likes video games, too. So I played a lot of his Game Boy, and is it Castlevania The Adventure or the Castlevania The Adventure? It's the Box title design is terrible, so you would not know that. Yes, I played a lot of those four levels.

So if you're a nerd, there's still hope a date my mom. It's not over. They're still together, though, so there's less so. It's getting kind of weird there. My first handheld was actually an Atari Links version two. Wow. You're a rare creature. I know.

I wish that Jen Frank was here because she always has a great story about how her parents didn't let her have video games but then inexplicably didn't consider the Game Boy a video game system at all and so... Well, it wasn't on a television and I think that's actually something worth discussing because at this point

we take things like the Game Boy for granted. I mean, the Nintendo Switch exists. That is a handheld system and also not a handheld system. It's like this Schrodinger console that you don't know what it is until you plug it in and start playing. But at the time that the Game Boy came out, you didn't really expect a whole lot from video games that you could

take with you in a car and play. You had Game and Watch, basically, and there were a few other handheld gaming systems that existed at the time if you knew where to look. But the Game Boy really was kind of revolutionary, and to really understand why it had such a huge impact. I mean, yes, there was the Nintendo dominance of the entire games industry, and there's very strong marketing, but also the fact that Game Boy gave us a new experience. It was a way to translate these Nintendo games that we loved into a new form that could be with us

anywhere instead of just, you know, when we could get time on the television when mom and dad weren't watching MASH or whatever. So that was a big deal. And to kind of set the stage, I'd like to talk about the context of what video gaming was like in 1989. I don't know how many of you actually remember playing video games in 1989. I've old enough

than I do, okay, so there's some fellow old out there, and I appreciate that. Yeah. I'm not alone. Me too. But, you know, 1988 was very much a transitional time in video games. I'm curious, a panelist, what's your perspective on the world of video gaming, set the way back machine, et cetera, et cetera. Well, I mean, okay, so there were arcades.

There were lots of arcades. They were not as big as they had previously been in years, but they were still ubiquitous, I would say. Like if you could find them at your local mall At the very least Certain towns had standalone ones And the ones I lived and definitely did Chicago's an arcade town But they were everywhere

But you couldn't really bring that home And the closest to that at that point was still the Nintendo Other options include like Tiger Electronics Handheld's a little rough Well in 1988 I mean that was the year we got our Nintendo Entertainment system And we always hear about, like, oh, the NES, it launched in 85.

And it's like, well, it did, but it's like, it's not like everybody just got one in 1985. Like, it, you know, took a while for it to really spread. And, you know, we were not, I wouldn't call us early adopters of the NES by any means. So we had, like, just gotten one. And we had played all games on our Atari 800 computer and everything like that. Oh, fancy. It was very rapid, I guess, when the Game Boy was first coming out, like, we'd really only just gotten into the idea of Nintendo.

I did not subscribe to Nintendo Power yet, you know, even though the magazines were out there. That would have been so much more economical than buying a $5 issue of EGM, Chris. It really would have been, yeah. Yeah, so I distinctly remember going to arcades in 1988,

and like Caitlin said, they really had lost the shine that they had in the early 80s when they were just everywhere and just huge. Like in the early 80s, arcades were a destination. By the late 80s, I would say, say they were a thing that was there, but they didn't really have that culture around them anymore. They were kind of like, I don't know, they had lots of cool games, but you didn't see

the crowds lining up around them. We were still a few years away from Street Fighter 2. So there was this kind of lull in the arcade scene. And really, the best arcades tended to be attached to pizza parlors, like, you know, the big pizza joints where they served you extremely bad, large pizzas, and your parents would sit there and slowly eat them while the kids. went over and played all the arcade games, or they would be attached to like a putt putt or something. Bowling out. In Northwest Indiana, we had Celebration Station,

so you had the mini golf, go-carts, and a giant arcade. So they kind of developed this like symbiotic relationship with other amusements in order to survive. And definitely home systems were where it was coming along. But, you know, on the other hand, you also had computers, which, you know, they were becoming more powerful also. But they weren't really as widely adopted due to the, the extremely high price points

of computers at that time. They were expensive and they didn't really, for the most part, do action games that well, especially like a, you know, a DOS system. It was always kind of a miracle whenever someone created a game that was Nintendo-like. You know, something along the lines of Captain Comic was

remarkable. It was amazing. How did they do that? It took a while to get to Jazz Jackrabbit. And it's like games like that were kind of migrating off of the computer and onto home consoles. You know, the Nintendo Entertainment System is very much aimed at children, and there was beginning to be that perception that, well, video games, they're for kids. And it was kind of shifting because, like, you know, computer games, you know, you'd see adults playing games on the computer, but to see an adult sitting down, like, with the Nintendo Entertainment System and playing game on a TV, there was something, there was something, like, fundamentally odd about that.

Right, we hadn't gotten to Tetris yet for Dr. Mario. Right, right. Well, that was the thing. It's like the fact that the Game Boy was off the TV, you know, it gave adults more license to play. Nintendo originally started marketing it as a kid's toy because of the Atari crash. The Atari Crash is what caused them to not market it essentially as a video game, which is why this guy here exists.

They needed to market it as a toy to get it into toy stores and marketed two kids to trying to, like, get the stigma of Atari and late Atari off of the rest of the industry. and get shelf space back because vendors did not want to touch video games at that point. Right, yeah, because if you were, I mean, it came to the toy gun. You know, if you're an adult, you just get a real gun.

Well, that's only in America, not so much at the other markets. Yeah, so real be. So at that point, it's not. Please. Nintendo had really kind of rebuilt the games industry in America from scratch almost, and they were at the peak of their dominance. I think the popular statistic is that they had 90% of the market

and the rest was kind of divided up by Sega and then like the bargain bin Atari games that were still around and you know people would buy it they were like well I got $10 to spend on a game console I think this is the one on good because it's the only one I can't get. 89 I was buying a lot of Atari 2,600 games at flea markets for a dollar along with the big NES games but yeah that market the bottom fell out of that market well it's a good thing the 7800 is backward bat will does that meant you could get boxes of games at the garage sale

for like two bucks. That's true. But in 1989, you know, Nintendo was dominant, but Sega was retooling. They were, they, they were kind of pulling back for a strategic, uh, assault with the Genesis. And the, the entire console market was about to shift. So it was really good that Nintendo released the Game Boy because it gave them a second avenue that, uh, you know, everyone else will have to play catch up with. And then of course, you also had, like I mentioned Atari, there was also NAC. And they, you know, they, had such a nice little system, had such good games, and they really just did their absolute best to fail with that thing. And it's a little heartbreaking, but they just, they didn't, it didn't

work out for them. So it was pretty much a race with Nintendo and Genesis and everything else, but Game Boy existed outside of that. And like, as we said before, it wasn't the first portable system. Earlier today, we talked with Alex Forsyth about the pocket game computer, which came out in Japan in 1984, and it had a whole five games for it that never saw a release anywhere else in the world. And five years before that, there was Milton Bradley's Microvision, which that was an interesting attempt, but the technology in 1979 was just not there for a great handheld experience. And that's a big part of what made Game Boy so compelling, is that the technology was there just barely. It was just good enough to kind of give you.

you the idea that, oh yeah, it's Mario. Oh, yeah, Zelda. Okay, I recognize these folks, kind of. This is like the loose outline of those games, and it was good enough, and that's all it really needed to be, because it was very cheap, and, you know, the games cost less than NES games or Genesis games, and so it didn't hurt so much when you were buying a game that only had four shades of gray, and you kind of had to strain to see it, and if it was, you know, anything other than the peak of noon, it was kind of hard to see what was happening on the screen, but it was an approximation, and that counted. Well, when you compare it to the competitors and things like Tiger Electronics handheld,

you can see even at the debatably good quality of the screen, for example, it's still a thousand times better than playing anything that Tiger ever made. Yeah, the Game Boy in our house definitely, like, lived right next to the floor lamp in the living room, you know, right under a chair where it's like, that's where you had to say. if you wanted to see what was going on. Yeah, I mean, Tiger Electronics made a handheld version of Castlevania 2, whereas Game Boy had Castlevania the Adventure. And Castlevania the Adventure has problems.

But, I mean, if you compare the two side by side, which would you really want to play? Like the simple digital watch version of Castlevania 2, which was kind of like, oh, I think this is a video game, whereas Castlevania the Adventure actually was kind of a sloppy Castlevania, but it was Castlevania. Yeah, the first game I owned was DuckTales. I think I mentioned that earlier. And I think that was the first time that I noticed, at least, and maybe Jeremy you could speak to this because you made a video about every game for the first few years, that it was the first, like, strict direct adaptation. It wasn't just a, a smaller but still worthwhile version of that experience. It was just that experience replicated.

Well, DuckTales is interesting because it is the NES game. They made some tweaks to a little bit of the design and layout, I think the stages. But what they did is they, you know, the Game Boy had a smaller screen resolution, not just a smaller screen, but fewer. or pixels within that screen, and what they did is they shrank everything by about 30%. So if you look at Scrooge and compare him on Game Boy to NES, he's shorter, and they kind of like make him a little bit hunched, and they make his top hat shorter, but it still works out and it plays the same. It doesn't compromise the experience in any way. It feels the same, and at the same time, you know, Scrooge is a little smaller, so he's not crowding the edges of

the screen, so you don't take cheap hits from things that appear out of nowhere. So there was a lot of kind of, you know, the best Game Boy games definitely had a sort of thoughtful design of how can we do this NES thing with less? Like, they had less to work with, and they still had to give you the same sensation of that experience. And it didn't always work out. I mean,

Duck Tales was also, was by Capcom, who also did the Mega Man games, and those early Mega Man games on Game Boy were pretty rough. But Ducktails worked pretty well, and, you know, Castlevania eventually got together with Castlevania too. And then you had games like Final Fantasy Legend, which were

absolutely not Final Fantasy, but they were great little RPGs that, you know, really fit the format and I think could get away with being a little bit weird just because people didn't know. Like, the Final Fantasy Legend was the world's first portable RPG. So what was there to compare it against? Like, what could you say? Well, I'm going to go play that instead. There was nothing. You were stuck with Final Fantasy Legend, so you had to just suck it up and enjoy it. The weirdness then of some of those Game Boy games, I certainly think, is an attempt. to counteract the, oh, this game is like the NES game but worse effect. You know, when you play something like Ducktails and it's like, oh, this is just like that game I have at home but worse. And that's why, like, for example, Super Mario Land is so strange.

Chris, if I can interrupt, like, did you really think that when you played Ducktails for Game Boy in 1990? Were you like, oh, this is worse than the games game? Or were you thinking, wow, I'm playing Ducktails in my car? Not so much me, but what the designers of the game were thinking because there's an interview with some of the Mario Land 2 designers where they

were talking about how they were very self-conscious of that fact they didn't want to put something out there that just felt like the same thing but not as good which is why they just went in weirder directions with Mario Land and Mario Land 2 and which is why I think that

after Mario Land 2 they kind of gave up on the idea of doing the original portable Mario's at all for a long time and switched over to Mario as the main character the other thing they said with Mario Land And when Wario was the main character in Mario Land 3 is that they found that people had trouble holding down the B button and then pressing the A button simultaneously, which you have to do in Mario games to run and jump. And they were like, we find that people have problems doing this in the Game Boy. So if you look at the control scheme of Mario, of Mario Land 3, WarioLand, Wario does not hold down one button and jump.

The B and the A are used separately in separate situations. So I think that's actually why they did that. Interesting. I hadn't really thought about that, but I guess, you know, the Game Boy is more unwieldy because it's top heavy versus an NES controller, which is tiny and light and fits in your hands. So that's, yeah, they really put a lot of thought into all of that.

And the interesting thing is they didn't, like, Game Boy didn't have to be worse than NES. They could have made a portable system that was on par with the NES in terms of color and in terms of power. And Atari pretty much did that with the links. And then, you know, the Sega Game Gear, which came out like three years later, was literally a master system that you could play on the go. And, you know, the master system was a more powerful system than the NES. So it wasn't a given that Game Boy had to be worse than NES, but Nintendo did that because they were like, well, it's going to be cheaper this way and people will be able to afford it more. And it was the right choice, even though it kind of, I don't know, you look back and you're like, wow, those, those,

game are kind of hard to go back to sometimes. As somebody who grew up with an Atari Links, I always wanted a Game Boy anyway. I mean, like, I got the links at a resale store. It was a mom-power resale store because my dad was taking us on a trip to Florida, and we were taking a car trip. We were driving. So I needed something to do in the car, and we found the handheld system they had for sale, which was a, like, $50 or $60 Atari Links.

So we got her pretty cheap, but I only had ever had, like, three games. It was APB, Gauntlet, and one other game. I can't remember. And they were all... Was it Dirty Larry? No. Just a winning game's popular. I would say I was, like, five or six, and it was just the bluriest screen in the world.

Like, if anything you think about the Game Boy's motion blurs multiplied by a thousand of the links. And even though it's backlit, it requires, like, something like six C-cell batteries in it? Six double-A, but... Is it a double-A's in the? It blows through them. It really does. I thought it was like C's. I don't remember.

It's intensely heavy. It's definitely double A's. But yeah, it goes through about six double A's. About two hours, whereas the Game Boy goes with four AAs for about 20, 12, 15 hours. Yeah. I was wondering the battery life of the original one because I was not the buyer of batteries in my household. And I don't remember having to ask for them that often. Yeah, I did a calculation once on like the cost difference between.

Game Boy and Game Gear, Leaks at Game Gear battery consumption, it's pretty wild. Like, that adds up really fast. If you play, like, you know, an hour of Game Boy a day or an hour of portable games a day, like, it's something like a $10 difference by the end of the month. Yeah, it's, well, and significant. To be fair, one of the things that I think it's important to remember about all portable game systems in general is that although they kind of pitch it as like, oh, you can play it on the bus. You can play it in the car.

You can play it outside of your house. A lot of portable gaming. I mean, sometimes even the majority, you know, has been done in the halls. And it's really, it's not about being able to take it anywhere you go. It's about being able to have your own screen, your own time, you know, not taking up the family TV. And so for a lot of people, you didn't really see this necessarily with a Game Boy. But if you add a links or get a game gear, you probably add the AC adapter. And you're plugging it into the wall.

Yeah. And there was no what, there was like, there was no car. adapter for the links. That was not a thing. So in the car, it was strictly batteries, and that doesn't last long on a car trip. Yeah, and on top of that, you know, the ability to link up with other people opened up gameplay opportunities that didn't exist on consoles. I mean, by far, the most famous of those for Game Boy is Pokemon. That would not have existed without the link cable, and that was not an experience that really worked in, you know, before consoles could connect to the internet.

So it was this like direct one-to-one, one system, one cartridge talking to another that was really unique to the system. And even on links, there's one game like Falcon or something, which is if you connect it by the com links cable, you actually have a unique version of that game where you're like, it's a first-person combat simulation. And it's not available like that. It's a completely different experience. and it's not even marked on the packaging or something.

It's like this hidden extra mode. But yeah, that's the kind of experience you could have. Even looking back at Game Boy's launch where you had tennis, on NES, tennis was a single-player game because you have the guy in the foreground and then you have the opponent in the distance and the way there's like the 3D perspective on the court, the person, you know, if you had a two-player experience where the person was controlling the guy in the back, they'd be at a huge disadvantage because of the perspective. But on Game Boy, you had two people with their own. screens. So each person got to be in their own foreground, and you could have this real-time experience.

So, yeah, the Game Boy's connectivity opened up some opportunities, and you did have this, like, isolated sort of handheld experience that was different than consoles. I feel we would be remiss not to mention the best thing about handheld consoles, which was absolutely 100% playing it in your bed under the sheets when your parents thought you were asleep with a warm light. I was going to say with a warm light Yeah, you had to have a light, you need the light, and you need to hide it under the sheets,

but that's what you did. Another great thing about Game Boy is that I feel like it just lent itself to pick up and play experiences and not just because of the software library, but because of the design of the system. Like you turn it on and it comes on. You don't have to turn on the console, and then the television,

it's just all right there, and, you know, it starts up really instantly. You didn't have a lot of, like, copyright screens back then. You didn't have the BIOS loading or anything like that. It was just like you turn it on, you get the ding, and you're playing. And so you could have these little compact experiences that you only wanted to play for like five minutes at a time. And that was perfect.

One of the great things about the Game Boy, I think an underrated thing about Game Boy is that the internal hardware was actually really similar to old computers from the late 70s and early 80s. And as a result, all these simple, kind of primitive, like single-player PC puzzle games and very, like, simple, not even action game, but like proto-action games, those made their way to Game Boy en masse. And they were great experiences for Game Boy, because something like, you know, boxal, Sokabon, whatever, or quirk or whatever, you could pick up these games and play them for a couple minutes and then, you know, be done with it. And that was a fun little hit of something to kind of kill time. time with. And then your mom gets it. It just plays it for like 20 hours. Why can't I have my Game Boy back, Mom? No. I'm playing Quirk.

Nope. My friend's mom did have quirk. Yeah. I mean, it was really, it really did catch on with adults and moms in a way. And I think that was also I think that was also great for the industry. Like, you know, on the publisher developer side, you had all these people who

had created these kind of interesting, innovative games in the early 80s. And the Game Boy was kind of their last shot to get those out to, like, do something with those games before they were forgotten forever. And there are a lot of games that were, you know, designed for an obscure Japanese PC, like the, you know, the X-1, is that what it's called? Or the, I don't know, the FM one. I don't know, like computers that never came to America.

The FM Towns-Murdy? And that's what the only place they were except Game Boy, and now they're on Game Boy. Do you mean the FM Towns-Marty? Yes, no, before the Towns-Money. Okay, okay. Yeah, the FZ one I can't remember Like it's all just a jumble of letters in my brain

But like those games The Sharp X-X-1 So yeah FN7 Yeah like all the Yes exactly Like before the 68,000 Like the really primitive

Right Yeah Like those games only really existed on discette In another country But then they came to Gameboy And those little cartridges Like you have to You have to like burn them

With a blow torch In order to destroy them Like they're almost indestructible. So you have all these little gyms of video game history that are only kind of preserved on Game Boy cartridges. That's the only way they're really easily accessible. And that's great. Just in case anybody isn't aware, there is a Game Boy that has survived a bomb blast in the, like, military deployment at the Game Boy World Store or Nintendo World Store in New York City. It's on display.

It's a Game Boy World Star. I do too. Now that I've said it, come on, Nintendo. Do it up. Chris was talking about adults playing Game Boy and moms embracing Tetris. As a kid at the time, I had noticed that the Game Boy was a time in history, at least from my perspective, that adults at the time, which were baby boomers, were embracing video games, not being dismissive of them. And I'm not sure if the system was marketed towards adults or had less marketing towards children, but that might have been an unintentional benefit for Nintendo that adults liked it. Well, it was originally conceived as design when Gunpei Yakoi saw a man, supposedly, saw a man playing with a LCD calculator on the train and just pressing buttons to kill time. So, I mean, it was kind of designed with adults in mind in the first place, not necessarily as a primary market, but certainly as part of the market.

Yeah, early on, Nintendo directly marketed the Game Boy to adults. I know we mentioned this in the podcast we recorded recently, but one of the earliest commercials is basically, like a businessman traveling through all these circumstances, you know, it's like oh, you're part of this work-a-day world. But there's a fun escape for you when you're sitting in an airport lobby or whatever.

You can play Game Boy. You can play Mario Land or more likely Tetris. And they packed in Tetris. And I think that's not a coincidence. And I think it is one of the best choices for pack-in titles ever. That might be the best pack-in title, at least until least four, it's honestly. It was just such

a perfect condensation of everything that made the Game Boy great and everything that made it so compelling. And, like, people still play that version of Tetris. It's great. So I think we kind of set the stage for Game Boy, and now we're almost out of time. So I had a few things I wanted us to run through, but we're not going to have time for all of those.

Oh, well. But I do want to talk about notable moments in Game Boy history. Like, kind of take the temperature of the panel here and see, like, what do you think are the key moments in Game Boy's history for you, at least? if not for the general public. We mentioned Pokemon, but we could probably mention that again. I don't know. Let's start at the end and work our way down. Chris? I mean, yeah, well, like, I didn't actually get into Pokemon on the Game Boy back in the day.

So, I mean, it's not really part of my big moment in my personal history with the Game Boy. I'm trying to think of something that's less obvious than the release of Pokemon. That is a big historical. It doesn't even necessarily have to be like, wow, this changed the course of video game. history, but more like, oh, this was a great thing. You know, I think the release of the Game Boy Pocket was for me

that first, that first taste of, oh, I'm going to upgrade, not to a new console, but to the same console I have, but better. Switch Pro, probably coming out this year. And, like, right?

Like, to just play all the same games again, but, oh, the screen is a lot nicer, then it's small, and it runs on fewer batteries and it's like the appeal is not to get new games, the appeal is to give new life to the things you already have and not have to carry around that giant brick

Game Boy anymore. That was really exciting for me, for sure. Yeah, Game Boy Pocket is... And then Nintendo was done releasing Game Boy iterations forever after. Yeah, they never made another handheld system, especially not multiple versions. The Game Boy pocket, I just was reading yesterday and studying about Virtual Boy was basically like Gunpeyokoi

sort of send off his like apology for virtual boy because he had planned to retire at age 50 and then the virtual boy project came along and he was like this is really interesting I want to do this and then things happened and it didn't turn out to be nearly the thing that he had originally envisioned and was like

I don't want to go out like this so he I didn't mean it in a bad way he was just like I don't want this to be my final statement at Nintendo so he was like okay let's let's make the Game Boy better and so you know the Game Boy just kind of had these incredibly long legs.

Like it just kept going and going. And part of that was because he went in and was like, we had the technology now that we can make this thing so much better. Like, you know, seize on all the things that made Game Boy appealing, you know, the low price, the low demand for technology, the low battery requirements. And just build on that and make like the ultimate tiny version of Game Boy. And he did. It was great. I would say Super Mario Line 2 was probably one of the early high marks for the Game Boy because it was the first time you really saw something that looked a lot like what you could get on a console.

And I have a portable experience that was more comparable to the experience you got from playing in Nintendo at home. I'm going to say, Super Game Boy, and it's along the lines of what Chris said about having the best possible experience. And I think there are many moments in the Game Boy's life where you thought it was all over. And that was one of them in a good way, though, because it's like you have accumulated a lot of Game Boy games over the past five years. Now you can play them on your TV with a better controller.

And like Metroid 2 was on the cover. That's a four-year-old game at that point or three years old. So they weren't really talking about the future. So I really enjoyed going back to all of my old favorite games, playing them on a TV. And I played Pokemon the way it was meant to be played alone on a TV. Never trading anything. Because I was 16.

I could not be. seen playing Pokemon for one. I think what's what's really kind of fascinating about the Game Boy was his longevity. The fact that Nintendo was selling, I mean, first of all, the big joke was always that they would never release a color version of the Game Boy

and done them like nine years to do it. But like getting into like 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, like Nintendo could still publish black and white Game Boy games and sell them for a long time. And Nintendo actually went back and this is one of the weird things as a collector.

there's a lot of games like Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2 the first Mega Man Star Wars, there's a bunch of those Black and White Game Boy games that Nintendo actually went to the third parties and licensed them from the third parties

and republished them. A lot of the Players' Choice editions, and if you look at some of the players' choice editions of games like Mega Man, Dr. Wiley's Revenge, oh, it's actually, it's not published by Capcom, it's published by Nintendo, because I think they just felt that there was still a market opportunity to take some of those really big games with big licenses and just put them

right back out on the store shelves. And the third parties didn't want to do it anymore, but Nintendo was more than happy to. Yeah, I mean, I certainly underestimated Game Boy's longevity. I remember like 95, 96 going to software, et cetera, or something, and just being like, oh, there's still a few Game Boy games. But by that point, the market was so just kind of like just a thing that existed that I was seeing uh japanese import games being sold new in the u.s they were just like i think distributors were just like we've got a bunch of these let's just dump them on the market so stuff like um

like i saw the japanese version of go go tank at a waldon software i remember and it really stuck out of me i was like i worked at waldon software why why is that here what is happening so to me that was like this this this console is just dead like they don't even know what they're doing anymore, but then Pokemon came out a couple of years later and proved me wrong. But even before that, the thing that I want to say was my favorite Game Boy moment was Game Boy Camera,

which came out right around the time that I actually got into Game Boy, so I got a Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Camera came out just a little before that. So, you know, at the time that that came out, it was this like wild gadget. It wasn't even really a game. It had like game-like elements to it, obviously, because

it was Nintendo, and they always gamify things. But it was more like an application. It was a gadget. It was like all these things kind of in one. It really showed off the versatility of what handheld gaming could be. And I remember at the time, EGM

Electronic Gaming Monthly, our friends there, they just loved the Game Boy camera and they like every month they just had like these goofy galleries of photos that they took and like stupid things that they did in the office and captured with Game Boy camera. That was, you know,

for like three or four months straight, there was just tons of Game Boy camera photography in the pages of Electronic Gaming Monthly. And, you know, at the time, I was in college and I was studying art and photography. So I had a digital camera that cost way, way more than Game Boy camera, but wasn't actually that much more versatile. It was, you know, like 640 by 480 resolution. That's fancy. I mean, it was a lot of money, but it was nothing compared to what I have in my phone in my pocket

these days. Yeah. And Game Boy camera was definitely more primitive than that, but that was kind of part of the appeal was that you had this like, this super minimal abstraction to everything you shot. And so you really had to think, you know, what am I doing with these photos? Like, you started to really kind of plan your compositions and say, like, how can I frame this so you can actually tell what this indistinct mass of four-colored pixels in this tiny screen? How can you tell what that is? I have to really think about my photos. And so it was a weirdly effective

tool for creativity. And I still love taking photos with Gamewood camera. I love the fact that I have an adapter to dump my Game Boy camera photos to SD cards so I can put them on computers. Like, see if you can find yourself one because they're fun little toys to have, even though

I love my Withered tech, and I love adapters that make Withered Tech work with current tech. I bought a used, like, import, game boy camera that I got with a lot of a lot of stuff and before I kind of like sold it because I already had one you know I popped it in to see what was on there and it was like a whole like a Japanese

family's like pictures of like all of that so I held on to it so I have guys pictures of him acting like a dragon ball character in a game boy camera like I don't know who this man is but I love this man so bring those game book cameras before you sound I think it trade us all for FaceTime Snapchat's all the like make yourself a dog or a year

well it was right about it yeah it was It was right around the time that, you know, print club booths were becoming big in Japan. So this was basically, you know, something we didn't even really necessarily see here in the U.S. at the time. But it was a way to take this burgeoning form of technology and say, well, let's find a way to make it inexpensive and put it in people's hands for very little money and let them, you know, let them run with it. And that was basically the Game Boy in general was just like, let's find the least expensive way to give people this experience and let them. them, let them express themselves with it. And, you know, I think that was kind of Gumpi Yokoi's philosophy writ large, honestly. And I honestly feel like the Game Boy was the ultimate expression of everything that he stood for throughout his career. He was in games for, what,

like 40 years or so, and made a lot of great things. But the Game Boy just really, it captured everything. And something that I love about Game Boy is that, you know, we talk about it being Gumpé Yokoi is his baby but really the hardware design was by Sator Okada who was also a game designer. He made some of the games for Game Boy like he directed Solar Striker

and he wasn't the only person who worked on the hardware. The sound hardware was actually put together and the link cable by Hirokazu Chip Tanaka. And so you know a big part of why the sound hardware is so good and has stereo sound is because it was a composer who put it

together and was like I want to do things with this You know, it's not as powerful as what I have on NES, but I want to be able to do things that I can't do on NES, and NES didn't have stereo sound sound. So that is why Game Boy came out that way, and, you know, it came with headphones, so you could, like, listen to it and appreciate the stereo sound effects. And so they were always finding ways to take this technology that they had and do something interesting and new with it and fun. And the Game Boy really was about that. So I think we have, like, five minutes left. How should we wrap this? Do we want to talk about Game Boy's legacy?

Or do we want people in the crowd to talk at us? Okay. Well, I don't see people in the crowd jumping up in excitement. So let's talk about the legacy. So to wrap, Chris Kohler, what do you think is Game Boy's legacy? It's enduring legacy. Hmm. I don't know.

Okay. I think it normalized playing games in public as a non-shateful act. I'm serious. No, I think that's totally reasonable and fair. 100% not sarcastic. Like, it really, it helped Nintendo walk themselves out of the toy concept they built themselves into to get back into the market. Because it was still a toy while it was in NES, and it was still seen as a kid's toy. No matter how hard they designed it to look like a piece of VCR, VHS tech that sits in an entertainment center.

the Game Boy was the first one that you saw adults buying themselves to play in public without the stigma of it being like, that's a kid's toy. I think that to this day, I mean, it's a Game Boy's incredible success at doing really, really well with a low-tech solution that really just obliterated all of the higher tech competitors that tried to come at it, every single one of them and did incredibly well. know, it's really solidified in Nintendo's mind, you know, all the way to today, this idea that you can succeed with the product that is good enough and that is, you know, cheaper but also smaller, has better battery life, et cetera, and doesn't just pursue high technology.

Sometimes that works for them. Sometimes it does not work for them. I think the switch, you know, is that being sort of proven out again. Yeah, I mean, the switch is an invidious shield, bit less powerful than the system that NVIDIA released like four or five years ago. It's less capable. And yet it's better. And not just because of the software, but because they put so much thought into the experience of it. Like, what if you could plug it into

a dock and then you'd be able to play your portable games on a big screen and they'd be a little better that way? What if you could have these detachable controllers so you could do all kinds of weird configurations? Like, what if you could turn your game system sideways? What a great idea. I love it. A fun accessory for that.

And, yeah, like, absolutely, Chris, I completely agree, and that's what I would have said, too, is just the fact that, you know, Nintendo is always at its best and most successful when it stops and remembers that the game experience, video game experience is not just about how many pixels or polygons or visual effects are being pushed on the screen, but the overall experience, the experience of owning a system, of playing a system, of interacting with other people who are playing the games. You know, Pokemon was a social experience And, you know, the Switch does not have the power of an Xbox One or a PS4 Pro But it can do things that those systems can't And they really, yeah, they really lean into that sometimes The idea that video gaming is about play, not just about the video game And yeah, well, I don't know about Brab, but he tried He did try, God bless them

And he also gave a stack up So it's, take away my blessings. But, yeah, I would say that is the Game Boy's legacy. And, you know, I think 30 years from now, people will still be playing Game Boy. Or at the very least, we'll still remember it fondly as we, you know, land on the moon colonies or fight for vanishing food resources, whatever the future holds for us. It's too real. 30 years from Nintendo will still be selling you, you know, Game Boy games.

It's new systems for $5 each. That's great. So $5 will be worth a lot. That's right, yeah. Fantastic. All right. Well, that's the future we can look forward to. Let's keep looking for the past.

But yeah, thanks everyone for coming out to our panel this year. Please do celebrate Game Boy's anniversary. However you choose to, maybe. We will be hosting a meet. Well, actually, we're crashing the Watch Outwe Fireballs meet up tonight at 1983. Yeah, 1983 the arcade bar nearby. It's like two blocks away.

8.30 tonight. tonight. So if you want to say hi, we'll be there. Yes. And if not, well, thank you for coming, and I'm sure we'll see you next year. Yeah. Thank you. My voice, maybe not. Maybe I get your talk about it. Hello everyone and welcome to this Retronauts panel.

Yeah. So this panel, I'm actually surprised by how many people are here standing around. That's awesome. But I have to confess that this was actually fake. The title of his panel is 40 years of the most important game ever. And we did not actually explain what it is. I just posted something on Twitter, so you might have seen it there. But it's actually a lie.

This is not the most important game ever, but it's a whole game. And I do want to talk about it a little bit, if only to exercise and exercise. from the podcast because if you listen to Retronauts, you know that the game, Hayanko Alien, gets brought up a lot. And so we are here to vouch for Heiom Kiyo Alien. Bob, do you want to tell everyone why you love Hayanko Alien so much? I love Hayanko Alien because I just learned how to pronounce it for the first time today. It's been a long road.

But maybe one better game about digging holes all ways. I mean, it is the game that I think gave us load runner. So I would argue that's a better game by making holes. But the thing about Aon Go Alien is that it was extremely influential. It's kind of like this missing link in a way between some of the biggest games that ever were made in the Philippines of Japanese game development. So it's kind of, you know, the bridge between Space Invaders and Pac-Man. And you may say, well, like, how does that work?

So you are familiar with Hayak, you know, awesome. If you're not, it's basically a proto-maze game where everything is seen from a top-down view. And you are a little guy moving around in this maze, and there are things moving around inside the maze with you that they touch you, and you're done. Well, that sounds a lot like Pac-Ban, right? But instead of being completely homeless like Pac-Ban is where there are no energizers, you are a man with an essential tool. you have a shovel and you will use this shovel to destroy the alien invaders

that sounds like a tall order but thankfully the alien invaders are extremely stupid just a place in ancient Japan neon era Japan so that was like what the 13th or 14th century or something so I guess you know the aliens were still kind of in a primitive space as well

so they fall in the hole so your job is big holes and wait for an alien to fall into it and then you cover over the hole while the alien is inside. In Load Runner, which is this game, helpful to inspire, for sure. The holes automatically fill up themselves, but here is a manual process. You have to go in and you have to say, well, there's an alien, and I'm going to sit here, and I'm going to slowly shovel turn on top of them, and it takes you a little while,

and the whole time you're doing that, there's other aliens that are moving chaotically around, and they can, I don't know, whatever it is the aliens do to you when they catch you and you want. So they're very, well, okay, so that's the thing. Like, this game was made in 1979, and a really big pop-luncher phenomenon in 1979 was alien. So basically, they said, Space Invaders and Alien, let's put them together, and they came up with this. I think, very, very fun and addictive game. It's 40 years old, but it still plays really well. Like, the foundations of the game are really strong.

And, in fact, it's actually recently. been remade. There have been a couple of remakes. People have started reporting into other systems, including there's an unofficial MAMICOM, NES release, last year, came from Columbus Circle, but also the people who are somehow, I'm actually interested in how affiliated with the original development team and Steve, put together a game called, I just don't like that what's called, but it's like a modern-day pack band, a X version of Hayakio, Aalian, Steve. It's got the actually effects, there's crazy stuff that happens, and it's just like super adrenaline, you know, wow, fast-paced. So, like, you know, the idea is still really strong, really sound, and translates really well, I think, into particularly gaming.

Tension now people are pre-discovering the fact that, oh, yeah, classic arcade games, those are still fun. Pac-Ban gets old, but it's still really, really good. And so this is the game that I think puts themselves well to pre-discovery, modern era. And I just kind of discovered it by happenstance myself a few years ago when I was starting by a Game Boy Works Project in front of the history of the Hanoys Library. You know, this was just a game that came up in chronology. And I didn't really know what to expect really yet except that had a really strange name and really strange box art with like this, like a wood carving of an alien,

a Japanese guy was like half a time about, like beating the alien hazard of hours. and has to devours him. It's pretty wild. So I didn't know what to expect because I started to play it in research and I realized, like, wow, there is a lot of this day. But what kind of familiarity of you have with him doing? Well, I just moved from its very odd title, and I'm kind of astounded that they didn't localize that title anyway. I don't know if they were prevented from doing so, but there's no way of knowing what it is based on the cover art and the name. So sort of like the Dalian opus, I learned as a secret clash of deep. had a spin-off game in a way.

They're in the same universe, but I never played it. I didn't know how important it was because the name was so baffling, and again, the box shows you nothing. It's about a made in a shovel, essentially. And really, I mean, some of the best games are about an ad-shovel, like Animal Cross in your income. But, yeah, so you make a point about them not localizing the name, but to me, I feel like the name has the same effect in English

that it doesn't relate to American. to English, angle of poems, as it does to people who speak Japanese. Because if you look at the title on here, if you are able to read into Japanese, you realize that Bianquio is written in, like, traditional Japanese script, Kanji. But Alien is written as Alien, like the English word alien, and the Japanese character set that is used for foreign words. So Heliotkyo means basically the same, the Hayon period of Japan, in the capital of Kyoto, that is where this takes place.

So if you know Japanese culture, you know, like, okay, so, A.N. Q, I can set this right away. But Alien is not a Japanese word. So it is a word taken from a different culture. Whereas alien is a big, you know, English language words, and Americans know very well. But A. H.R.Q.O.Q. is not an English word. So in both cultures, there is this kind of, like, there is a foreign element to it. But I think it works in a different way for English, but I think it still works. It gets the point across.

So again, yeah, it's set in basically like medieval camp, feudal japan, and you are a guy with a shovel. So automatically, it's a different kind of space invaders game. You're not shooting enemies, you're destroying them with dirt, which is one of the least technologically sophisticated means of propelling an alien invasion. But it works. So this game actually was not created originally as a commercial venture. It was created at Tokyo University by students. called the Tokyo I just was reading about this

I totally forgot TSD Tokyo's Tokyo Studies Room Okay sure But that is English like Adam so yeah Remember this was 1979

So at the time for most people computers were these advanced brain boxes that only Captain Kirk could out smart So it was like you know there was this element of mysticism to it

There's an interview up at Schlotlations.com You guys are not familiar with that site. You need to go read it and go support it because it's a guy who just takes Japanese development interviews from history and localizes them, translates him into English. It's such an amazing source of information about these games and would otherwise not be available to us. Who are like an alien idea, Bianchio, I don't know. So according to one of the original creators of the game,

basically there was a magazine that was going around to a bunch of different universities and saying, like, video games are cool and happening. Space Invaders, wow, that was a big. What did you guys got? So they were basically saying, if you are the upcoming talent, what amazing idea is do you have to continue the invaders way? And they went to TSD, and TSD was like,

ah, you don't have anything, but it's going to be like a week until the article went up into the magazine. So they basically brainstormed it said, let's come up an idea. So it's been a couple of days coming up with this idea, and then like the one guy who knew how to probe, They were like, okay, you've got an Apple to make this game. So they created this game, and it went over well enough that a company called Mindware,

Mindway, something like that, I think Mindware, it converted it into an arcade game. It was released in arcades after being this stupid project, and actually kind of caught on. It wasn't like a huge hit, but it resonated with an audience, and there was a magazine, in a kids magazine called Game Asahi that really, really latched on the Hayakio Alien. And they started doing these cartoon tips, kind of like a Howard and Nestor thing, but, you know, 10 years before Howard and Mester. So there was like this guy kind of looked like a Haru from Bursay Yatsura, like kind of a slumby-year-old, just like average kid,

who was like showing how to do the different, you know, shovel strategies for Hayon Kio-Aliu. And so all these like sort of semi-official strategies, started to emerge from this game of Asahi magazine coverage. So there's like basically, you know, telling you how you should go about digging up holes. Keep in mind that the aliens you're fighting against are completely randomized in nature. They don't have AI to speak up. They just move around and it's impossible to make what they're going to do. So you have to kind of account these strategies.

So when you sit down to dig a hole, you can dig as many as your life, but it takes a few seconds for you to dig in and move the dirt. So while you're doing this, there's these aliens moving in. these aliens moving chaotically around. So I started to be cope with strategies about how you can watch yourself, go out and protect yourself, keep the aliens from hitting to you. But an alien falls into a hole,

you have about five seconds to cover it up with dirt before it jumps out, and it's out the other side of the hole, which means it goes to the EU. So there's things like the Akukabura strategy. Yeah, basically there were these strategies, or other strategies game, where individuals came up with them,

like the developer in the game became throws at it. But anyway, like, it was a very-year-country. Even though it wasn't this massive hit, it didn't really get outside of America, or outside of Japan, and reach America or Europe. Like, it was very, very well-known in Japan. People were very, like, you know, they hated. I don't know that Duxman was created a load runner, which is very similar sort of game on from beside you.

I don't know if you ever played H.O.O.O.O.O.O.O., but it must have played Space Panic, which was developed by Universal, and was basically a side-scrolling version of A.L.U. Alien. So from space invaders, you take the aliens and aliens, you take the aliens, you get Hayakio Alien, but there you get space panic, or there you get load runners. So yeah, you also get Pac-Bad. So you have this one gang kind of sitting in the middle, like a fulcrum, all these different influences and all these different results. So, you know, it's always been a fairly absurd game in the U.S. It did come to the U.S. in New York in 1990, 1991,

This is the Japanese version, but the American version looks a lot like this. It's got, you know, it's got the red and gold on the black and gold on red. It's not a very, like, it's not a very typical view of the era. It's kind of the cover packaging, the cover illustration, where you found, like, airbrushed people with like angry eyebrows and guns. It's just kind of like, hey, here's this thing you don't know with it. like Bob said, you don't know what this art is about, but it's here. It's on Game Boy. And do you want this or Gloria? Obviously, you want to go away. I've been talking to them. We're going to pass this

over the wall. What is the best way to play this game today outside of downloading it raw? Is there a modern version? Yeah, I would definitely recommend playing this theme remake that just came out like a year or two ago. Like I said, it's a kind of a Pac-Band C sort of thing. that is like very neon stroking like wow it's crazy but it's available on steam i think it's like three bucks it's really inexpensive so that's the way to play it but there are also other ways to get a hold of it on a vintage system like i said there was a pandemic version that just came out last year you can find that pretty easily it's called neo hey on

kill a alien or if you wanted to dig up uh you know if you have access to a super EDS, port to a Game Boy. The American Game Boy existed, like the American Gayboy version existed. I've seen it out there on the trip for like 10 bucks. Probably five bucks to be just going to cart. It's an easy and cheap pickup and I definitely think it's worth $5. There was also a super heavy company that only came out of Japan. That was from... I don't know who made that, but yeah, like it's got a really, it's also got a really ugly cover, but in a different way, it's like neon green and cheap and kind of like, Yeah, it's a real eyesore, but it's out there.

And it's also a big cheap thing for me. I also want to talk about the publisher, Meldak, which is not Elf's home planet. It's Milbad. They released two games in America, right? And they're both very, very Japanese. I thought it was just that in Zombie Nation. They also released the Mercenary Force, which is also a very, very Japanese. What was that?

Mercenary Force is another Game Boy game. And you play, it's against a poodle you can. And it's like a shooter, like a batheed on a burglar, or a horse-offrey shooter. But you play as a group of peasants. It's like the peasant uprising. So you play as peasants or as a modan or a samurai or as an archer. There's a princess that you can put in your party. Having her in the party is the only way to get the true.

which is very practical, you have to, like, move the formation of people around them. So you're, like, fighting through religion and stuff against enemy ninja and hawk and things like that, demons. It's a really weird game, but it's really good. If you haven't played in Gersenary Force, came out a little after Hayakio Alien and also has a great escape cover. It looks like a PFMDF element cover, which does not say, hey, this is But it says, like, hey, this is like, you know, German techno. But it's not, it's Koodle, Japan. But I'm not done talking about Hayanko Alien yet, because they gave us 30 minutes.

I'm not going to know. But I do want to say that there's one other notable thing about the Game Boy release of Hayakio Alien, and that is, as far as I've been able to tell, I haven't done a super serious search for this, but just based on my experiences, this is one of the very first proper video game remits. This cartridge has a very very very very

very painful adaptation of the original PC game, which is just like, you know, very simplistic, black and white, top-down games, any little characters moving around, the sound effects are like, it sounds like an Apple 2, you know what this, so it's like, I'm going to try to imitate it because I can't do that, I'm not too, but please do stop all the download. The game also, the cartridge also includes a remake, which is a proper Game Boy remake that uses, you know, modern for 1990 graphics. They are more elaborate and detailed, the characters are larger, and then it adds in new game mechanics. There's these portals that open up, and you can use those as part of your strategy to craft the alien.

There's also walls, like gates that you can open up and then close. So this is one of the first times where someone took a game from, you know, 10 years back, and said, there's still something really good to this game, which worth presenting and preserving as it was. Which, by the way, this was the first home conversion of the game. No one had played it on a home console report it. Maybe on Apple 2, they imported it this guy or something. But that was pretty much the only way to get it. But they said this original game deserves to be presented as it was in its proper format.

Also, they're something here that I think we could modernize and turn it to something fresh and different. And you didn't really see a lot of that at the time in 1990. I mean, you know, Game Boy, one of its has been the best games was Donkey Kong, which where they did exactly that. They took the original game and said, this is great, but let's make it bigger and better. But in 1990, generally what you saw was, like, a game that stayed in kind of like development circulation that long, it just kind of gradually evolved as it made on a different platforms. And you look at Galaxian or Space Indeaters or something, and you were still seeing pretty faithful versions.

But you didn't see these comprehensive rebates. Or occasionally you'd see something like Data East's Game Boy version of Lock and Chase, which is almost, it's very little like the original Lock and Chase. actually there, but it's basically a new game. Like in the end it turned to the solvable, which isn't really a lot of tickets. But this was both. This was the remake and then like the port of the original version together in a single card. And that's it, I feel like it really kind of set the tone for the modern contemporary approach to preserving classic games and publishing

classes. So this may not be the most important game ever, but it is a significant game. It is a milestone in 1979, in 1990, And I still feel, you know, it's valid and relevant in 2019. So if you haven't played the YonD Alien, this is my formal pitch. This is your call to go out, get the same version, go pick up the pocket and someone in there next door, whatever. Just play this game. You know, it's primitive.

It's like lowbrunner meets Pac-Man, except Pac-Man and Lowruder are actually this game. But you kind of have to, you know, like, you know, those are the vehicles in your lights. Well, they, you know, I've heard this before. Well, yeah, that's because everyone did. Everyone did this, and that is why this game is good and a little bit. So, in conclusion, thanks for coming and listen to me. Rans about to stay for 20 minutes.

And a lot of the fighters get on so much out. But, yes, please do it come to that. Thank you. Thank you.