Some early thoughts on what I'm learning from playing a bunch of GameBoy games
I recently started playing a lot of classic Zelda games and other RPGs on a GameBoy emulation device.
I grew up without access to these machines... I was forbidden from owning handhelds or consoles as a child because they would "rot my brain." I was gaming, but "gaming" to me was "remaking the Peloponnesian War in the Age of Empires map editing tool." I purchased my first console using my first job earnings in high school, a PS2 to play Shadow of the Colossus. I got my first handheld in my mid-twenties, a 3DS specifically to play Animal Crossing New Leaf.
This means that I missed out on a lot of mandatory brainwashing for game devs. I have no special emotional connection to any mascot character. I've played a lot of Pokemon remakes on DS, but didn't buy one the year it came out until Black 2. The only Mario game I've finished is Odyssey, and until this month, the only Zelda I'd completed was BOTW. (Still working on TOTK!!)
So I decided to tackle this gap in my experience and play a bunch of old GameBoy games. I feel like I am learning a lot! But it's taking a lot of time, and I'm going slow. I thought about waiting to summarize some of my thoughts about these games until I could speak with more confidence and experience, but that will take forever - so here is my unconfident, vague summary of The Big Difference Between These Games And All My Other Shit.
The difference is that the screen is small!!!
Oh my god, the screen is so fucking small. I fell like I now completely understand why so many game devs are allergic to text-based stories, and to text navigation and text browsing in games generally.
You got NO fucking room on these tiny ass screens, and the screens back in the day were nowhere near as large and clear as the screen on my modern emulator device. So this means that the font sizes are huge, and the lines of text are VERY spaced out. Text is an inconvenience in these games, totally alien. When text appears, it feels like a live fish in a grocery basket. Way too big, covering up everything, alive and disjointed in ways that don't make sense for the bounding-box it's trapped inside.
Compared to some of the Zelda games I've played, Pokemon is a fucking book. I'm only now realizing how stuffed with text a lot of those games were, compared to contemporary products.
I can imagine that someone growing up with a GameBoy but no PC would have grown up on a diet of games with very few lengthy or complex conversations, few chances to read, like, nice prose, and very few features which centered on analyzing text as the main activity. But in my childhood, games were practically ABOUT text, much of the time. Edutainment games, strategy games, and citybuilders are stuffed with it. When I started branching out and buying my own PC games, it was all stuff with "codexes" in it, or advisor panels, or upgrade trees - shit you have to read. I was obsessed with Oregon Trail 2... and 3... and 4, which came on 3 CDs and had a mountain of text.
I played the KOTOR games out of order, and when I bought KOTOR 2 out of a bargain bin at Walmart, I was surprised to discover it had VO dialogue - I'd assumed it would be all reading.
I've always known that it is possible to grow up playing games with almost no text in them. But it simply hadn't occurred to me that the Pokemon games I was playing were among the most textual games it was possible to get on the GameBoy. Most of these games would rather show you an animation than a text box - which they're right to do. But the entire textual domain of human experience sits so uncomfortably in these games. It's simply at odds with the hardware.
I knew this, but I didn't really know it until I played them. That screen is fucking TINY!! Some of these GameBoy-inspired throwback games I've loved on the PC over the years have an order of magnitude more text in them than any game which inspired them. I had no idea how different they were.
I kind of want to figure out how to make a game which is about manipulating and reading text on a GameBoy screen, now. I have at least one really good idea. And an install of GameBoy Studio. Maybe in 2025, when I'm less busy...