I Bought A Game Boy Color & Pokémon Crystal On Ebay, Here’s How That Went

Just a week ago I’m surfing eBay in the most random pattern, enough so to puzzle future civilizations as much as we’re puzzled today by the Voynich Manuscript, and I come across a suggestion to take a look at a used Game Boy. This is all it takes to send me back down the rabbit hole into a time where my parents were too poor to afford to buy me a Game Boy and I was too determined to not miss out on the new hotness that was Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue when they dropped in the United States. [quote_right]”This is the age where I discovered emulators and rushed home from school every day…”[/quote_right]This is the age where I discovered emulators and rushed home from school every day to hop on my Game Boy emulator and loaded up the latest save point from the Pokémon Blue rom I’d downloaded from the interwebs on my 14.4k (I wasn’t even on that 56k level yet) modem. Even so, I’d spend the entirety of my school days envying my friends at school who brought their Game Boys and would huddle at the back of the class to link up and challenge and/or trade with each other. It was a visceral lesson in patience that this experience instilled in me day after day as I bit down hard, trying to offer advice to my friends while they battled without as much as a credential to show for it in my hands. They were good to me and they entertained me, but here I am years later as an adult and this deep sadness emerges from the depths as I feast my eyes on this bad boy that’s got 2 hours left on the…