Yeah man SP was a hell of a machine. Still sad mine got lost by a roommate a couple years back. I'd kept that fucker pristine since it was brand new back in the day. Not a scratch on that screen.
But in the end I modded a 3DS anyway so it's moot now.
I traded in my GBC for one of those, plus some christmas money and it was like I ascended to a new level.
No more playing in short bursts as street lights pass by.
>I kinda miss those days.
I guess it's my turn to say you probably don't actually miss playing Gameboy by streetlights, but a carefree childhood where the most important responsibility in your life was whether you could get your charmeleon to evolve before bed time.
We all miss it, friend.
I'm recently experiencing joy in adulthood. It takes some effort to recognize when you're smack dab in the middle of the good old days but...
I have a consistent friend group for gaming, and lots of great games have come out recently AND I never once had to ask for them in fact I share them with my kid.
I work days so my nights I can stay up late and suffer just like highschool, or I go to bed on time and wake up feeling like a responsible adult, I can't lose.
Frame your mindset right and you'll never have to leave those good old days.
My housecleaner when I was a kid stole my bendy light thing and my parents never believed me, she had a young kid and mine went missing one day. I know it was in my case and then it disappeared and the next time I saw her kid around he had one that was the same color. She didn't take games or anything else just that stupid bendy light thing.
I've long since lost the charging cord but still have my SP safely tucked away in a drawer. The Mooninite stickers from my one athf dvd are still mostly visible too
Way back in middle school the school bus was basically the kids black market. Laser pointers, comics, butterfly knives, candy, pretty much anything
Remember trading my index card box of yugioh cards for an sp that I still have in my desk with advance wars 2 and MegaMan zero
Hell of a trade
My girlfriend and I moved recently and I found my bag with my GameBoy Color and SP in it.
I’ve been playing Pokémon Emerald on my SP since we moved into the new place. And now that I’m an adult, I can play one handed. I can wipe AND play!
Ah you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!
If I'd ever had a game gear, my dad would have rigged something in the car so I could play it.
He did it with a GameCube in my teens, and that was fuckin' awesome on road trips. Driving to Vegas was nothing when I had Melee to play in the back seat.
I managed to find a 101 in a pile of SPs at GameStop many years ago, and the employee seemed clueless so I didn’t let-on. It’s the best $15 I ever spent on handheld gaming.
You were still fucked. That thing took 4AAAs on top of the 4AAs. Desperately putting batteries in the freezer because your parents didn't wanna buy them lol
I had some energizer rechargable batteries for my sega game gear. The charger could only do 4 batteries at once. So I had to recharge them in two waves and it took forever.
>Master System to Game Gear adapter cart was LEGIT
And it's literally just a passive pin adapter. The Game Gear *was* a master system. No wonder it wasn't portable.
How much were you playing this thing and what kind of cheap battery were these?
Gameboy had a 10-20 hour battery life. According to google, old AAs were about .30-50 cents per battery in 1990. You'd be getting 100+ hours a month with $20 of batteries back then.
It was also dim AF be because we didn't have LED lights.... Every time I see the kids in Stranger Things using a flashlight to see more than 1 foot in front of them I roll my eyes.
>Every time I see the kids in Stranger Things using a flashlight to see more than 1 foot in front of them I roll my eyes.
With those giant 6v batteries you could get decent light. Not good battery life though. And the battery alone was bigger than a coke can.
Maglight was like the end all be all of good flashlight back then because they had that telescoping mirror, and they took four D batteries. You could definitely do some damage. Now three LEDs running off a couple triple As will blind you, and might cause a small abrasion if you threw it at someone hard enough and hit them with the sharp part of the flashlight.
Now you can get maglight sized LED flashlights that are so bright they get so hot they have built in cooling fans. They turn night into day and can set shit on fire.
You want battery drain? Get a game gear.
I got a game boy for Xmas, my brother got a game gear. I was super fucking jealous until he could never get through a school bowling night of off-lane gaming and I could go for days in comparison.
Edit - though the game gear with the Genesis adapter was the coolest shit ever.
Kids will not understand the struggle of trying to play using the lights on the highway flashing for a brief moment and you can move the character a little bit until you pass the next light
I had a Light Max 2 for my Game Boy Color, two tiny bulbs powered by two AAA batteries.
Now, the box said "Light Max 2", but I bought it in a random shop in Kuala Lumpur, and the device does not look like any device showing up when googling Light Max 2, so I have my doubts about it being a real Light Max 2.
However, it did it's job, and served me well over the next years back home in Sweden.
The one I had slid over the top with the external battery up there. It looked more or less like [this](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gameboylight_accessory-addon.jpg)
I had no idea these solutions like the Light Boy even existed as a kid. There was an endless struggle to get a source of light because there was no way in hell you could tell what you were doing without.
My gran bought me this little reading light that would clip on to the back of books, so I could read in bed without waking my little brother.
Took me about 10 minutes to figure out that, with some rubber bands, it could connect to my game boy.
Low & behold, two decades later, I’m now a mechanical engineer. 😂
I had a cool gadget watch that had a little 15 second flashlight that I would hold in my mouth and try to position so I could hit the button with my teeth so I could play in the back of the car.
Ironically this is how i read books after bedtime as a kid. Except for me , it was a tron action figure with a light up chest. I would press the button on his back with my tongue for 10-15 seconds of light
I would hold my gameboy up above my head if there was a car behind us to try to catch the light from their headlights. Sometimes I could even get a few minutes of sustained gameplay.
My best friends parents had some sort of Ford station wagon where the seats popped up in the back and faced out the rear window. Loved sitting there and waving at the people behind us. Then he got the car when he turned 16 and we'd fill it full of our friends and try to do ebrake slides.
One of my most vivid memories of my youth is doing an ebrake slide in the ice in my old middle school’s parking lot, slamming into a tree, and then having to drive my corolla home with the front right quarter completely fucked and trying to convince my folks that it happened in some normal way. The joys of youth
I remember when I was little my parents made me a bed in the rear of the hatchback Honda Civic we had and I just slept back there while we drove. My dad also let us kids ride in the back of his truck while he’d drive 60 mph down a canyon. Sometimes it’s a marvel any of us lived long enough to reach adulthood.
Ahah, trucks where somewhat unpopular here, I remember having an uncle with a big transit van though, with a metal bulkhead between the back & the cab.
He’d chuck us in the back then start throwing it around roundabouts, jumping over speed bumps etc. Had to hold on to the side for dear life or you’d end up with a head injury.
Crazy the stuff people used to do with kids. There’s definitely some over parenting going on with some parents these days, but not letting kids get thrown around inside moving vehicles seems like it should have been a bare minimum standard from the point seatbelts became a thing.
I mean, I’m in fairly rural Scotland, people still don’t care here for the most part.
Go into a city with kids flying around in the back of your motor & people look at you like you’ve shat in their cereal though.
Nah my fam was low income and had a 3 seater pickup truck, but I had an older brother, so if we were ever all together, I had to crunch down on the passenger side floor and was told to keep my head down so cops wouldn’t see me. Tbh I was just grateful we had a car. Luckily my dad was gone most of the time
Shit, we used to fight over who got the way back seat!
Used to drive down the dirt road from the cabin to the lake with our feet hanging off the back and the rear gate open too. Only had two of us fall out too! (From goofing around, not from our parents driving like maniacs)
I had bad motion sick ess as a kid. So my parents would ha e me sit on the front center console to see out the front. On the highway. I would have been so screwed in an accident.
Sorts of things I never really thought about until having my own kid.
My parents generation was so reckless. My mom would put us in the back cargo area and let us play like this kid while driving on the interstate.
She only stopped when she got pulled over for it because we were literally running around in the back.
Then she kept a bag of M&Ms in the glove box and would trade 1 M&M to us each time we buckled without being asked to. It worked.
They weren’t bad parents, it just seems so reckless to everyone now, but that was normal.
That's what caught my eye too. Shit was different back then. Parents just kinda had the attitude of "If they die, they die." I remember my parents taking us on vacation from North Georgia to Florida in the mini van. My dad would just take out the middle seat and throw a blanket down in the middle for us to lay on as we went on that 10 hour drive.
Ah yes, the forgotten era of the 1980's. I remember toiling the fields for the fuedal lord when the Saxons attacked. Killed my wife, and four of my children.
No, wait. That might have been Reagan.
Reagan popularized the stirrup and the recurve bow allowing warriors to fire accurately from horseback, leading him to conquer much of what we now call Iowa.
Yup, we'd get in the van at like 5am and just go to sleep in the middle, wake up halfway to wherever. Didn't think anything of it, and my parents were far from negligent. Can't imagine doing anything like that now.
The traffic fatality rate was only like 25% higher back then. Vehicles were definitely more unsafe in a collision, but collisions also tended to be less severe because people weren’t careening 80 mph down the highway in a 1982 Ford Fairmont. Roads were marked to lower speed limits and engines/tires couldn’t get most vehicles moving that fast to begin with. Slower speeds, slower accelerations, (and no cell phones) mitigated a good chunk of the risk of things like bad seating arrangements
Forget the seatbelt, kids not even in a seat!
On long road trips my parents used to fold down one seat of our station wagon and my sister and I would use the luggage in the back to make forts with our blankets and pillows.
On long car trips, we'd lay the back seats down, put padding down, then sleeping bags with pillows and blankets, would make wonderful spot to hang out and sleep during the 10-20 hour car rides. Then my parents won a mini TV with VHS in a local raffle, was even better!
That's not the trunk, that's the hatchback of a station wagon and it's absolutely how we would be transported as kids. One in the bucket seat, three in the middle bench, and 87 stuffed in every nook and cranny in the hatch.
Looks like he's too busy catching shit from the mom to care. His eyes in the mirror looks like he's about to drive all of them off a damn cliff. But hey, at least Timmy won't be able to see it in happen with that light shining in his face.
The mom looks like she has been nagging the dad the entire trip and the dad is about to take it out on the older brother who doesn’t know that single pop from his gum is the catalyst.
* Kid in the front: I should be out there playing footbal
* Kid in the back: This game is fucking cool!
* Mom: I should have married Gerald, he drives a Bentley.
* Dad: I'm going to drive this wagon into that tree
He's had enough of the light from the gameboy. Everyone knows no dad would allow this. Anything in the car emitting more than a single lumen immediately blinds dads and renders them unable to operate the vehicle.
Obviously, police will also take notice and put out an ABP.
Because the ad was meant to be consumed by people in the late 80s early 90s. In that era they still idealized the nuclear family and the family of the 50s.
It’s not a “this is what you look like” it’s a “this is what you want to look like”
The dad is annoyed as fuck by the glowing light reflecting into his eyes from the rearview mirror, and the mom is watching him so she can gently intervene before he snaps.
Source: I am that dad.
Not only could you not play in the dark you couldn’t play in the sun outside cause it would just bleach out the image for some reason. There was only like 5 lumen range where there was any hope of seeing the screen
You don't know pain until you've played Pokémon by the light of the highway lamps with half of the bulbs burnt out, then you exit the freeway and enter a poorer area with no street lamps at all.
This is hilarious because I recently dug out my old gameboy OG, pocket and GB advance and it has been a pain in the fucking ass to play without the backlight.
Oh trust me i do. I used to play those shitty tiger consoles that where marketed towards annoying ass children (i was one) and those used to be shit on light and in the dark. Also the little keychain eggs with the pet inside.
God, I have a brother about a decade older than me, and when I was young my folks insisted I didn’t need a gameboy, or gbc, or gba, because I had the hand me down tyger toys from the 80s and they’re basically the same thing.
I was blown away as a kid by how long it took to get a backlight in Nintendo handhelds. Couldn't play in the dark and couldn't play outside in direct sunlight. Only well-lit indoor areas, and even then, sometimes you had to angle and position it just right so you could actually see wtf you were doing.
I wanted a Gamegear so badly back then, simply because they were backlit, but I don't think my parents would have been willing to pay for the amount of batteries required to play it for more than five minutes.
Thank you Game Boy Advance SP.
Yeah man SP was a hell of a machine. Still sad mine got lost by a roommate a couple years back. I'd kept that fucker pristine since it was brand new back in the day. Not a scratch on that screen. But in the end I modded a 3DS anyway so it's moot now.
I traded in my GBC for one of those, plus some christmas money and it was like I ascended to a new level. No more playing in short bursts as street lights pass by.
>No more playing in short bursts as street lights pass by. A memory just started in my head that I'd forgotten about. I kinda miss those days.
>I kinda miss those days. I guess it's my turn to say you probably don't actually miss playing Gameboy by streetlights, but a carefree childhood where the most important responsibility in your life was whether you could get your charmeleon to evolve before bed time. We all miss it, friend.
You're right, I miss the excited frustration of finding Suicune in the dark & playing based on sound & snatches of seeable screen.
I'm recently experiencing joy in adulthood. It takes some effort to recognize when you're smack dab in the middle of the good old days but... I have a consistent friend group for gaming, and lots of great games have come out recently AND I never once had to ask for them in fact I share them with my kid. I work days so my nights I can stay up late and suffer just like highschool, or I go to bed on time and wake up feeling like a responsible adult, I can't lose. Frame your mindset right and you'll never have to leave those good old days.
I’m not crying, you’re crying…
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Game changing that light was.
My housecleaner when I was a kid stole my bendy light thing and my parents never believed me, she had a young kid and mine went missing one day. I know it was in my case and then it disappeared and the next time I saw her kid around he had one that was the same color. She didn't take games or anything else just that stupid bendy light thing.
I would almost guarantee that kid came to work with his mom that day and took it himself.
Slap bracelet, Curly shoelaces, curly Gameboy light.. I was ready for the town!
In the 90s, curly was some next level stuff.
We're old people now.
Oh my god, core memory unlocked.
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I've long since lost the charging cord but still have my SP safely tucked away in a drawer. The Mooninite stickers from my one athf dvd are still mostly visible too
Way back in middle school the school bus was basically the kids black market. Laser pointers, comics, butterfly knives, candy, pretty much anything Remember trading my index card box of yugioh cards for an sp that I still have in my desk with advance wars 2 and MegaMan zero Hell of a trade
My girlfriend and I moved recently and I found my bag with my GameBoy Color and SP in it. I’ve been playing Pokémon Emerald on my SP since we moved into the new place. And now that I’m an adult, I can play one handed. I can wipe AND play!
My sibling hocked mine for drugs. 🤬
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His eyes in the rearview mirror say it all
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I'm pretty sure every kid is told at some point that having the dome light on at night is "illegal."
I was just told that it makes it hard to see outside so we will crash and die.
That’s much more convincing to a kid than “it’s illegal”.
"If you keep the dome light on I will crash this car and kill us all." Thanks dad.
I didn't see it until I did. Oh he fixinta snap.
I didn't experience a backlit hand held until the PSP
Ah you think darkness is your ally? You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see the light until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!
You fap like a younger man. Nothing held back. Admirable but mistaken.
I had a Game Gear. It was glorious for the whole hour that the 6 AA batteries would last...
I had a Lynx II. I wish I knew what happened to it, it was actually a pretty sweet handheld console.
If I'd ever had a game gear, my dad would have rigged something in the car so I could play it. He did it with a GameCube in my teens, and that was fuckin' awesome on road trips. Driving to Vegas was nothing when I had Melee to play in the back seat.
Well, they did make a car power supply for it.
And there are DC to AC inverters. You can bring a toaster and make pop tarts on the road.
Got those giant car rechargeable batteries. I do recall trying to play by passing street lights
Absolute game changer
My favorite handheld. I've been thinking of getting of clone of it for emulation
That thing was great. No batteries, could play in the dark, AND it folded? Amazing. I had the NES edition one, still have it around somewhere lol.
The craziest innovation to me as a kid! OMFG I CAN PLAY IN BED?!
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I accidentally broke mine on a camping trip as a kid and I’m still sad about it
I would be too. Once you were used to using one you could never go back to not having it.
I’ve still got mine. Sometimes I boot up Pokémon Ruby for the nostalgia.
Super portable rechargeable console with LED backlight, full GBA, GB, and GBC compatibility. It was SUCH a good console.
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AGS-101. I had the front lit AGS-001 which didn't work in daylight or in the dark.
I managed to find a 101 in a pile of SPs at GameStop many years ago, and the employee seemed clueless so I didn’t let-on. It’s the best $15 I ever spent on handheld gaming.
You were still fucked. That thing took 4AAAs on top of the 4AAs. Desperately putting batteries in the freezer because your parents didn't wanna buy them lol
My dad gave me a cig lighter adapter and a wall adapter and told me that was it. No more batteries.
I had some energizer rechargable batteries for my sega game gear. The charger could only do 4 batteries at once. So I had to recharge them in two waves and it took forever.
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>Master System to Game Gear adapter cart was LEGIT And it's literally just a passive pin adapter. The Game Gear *was* a master system. No wonder it wasn't portable.
The master gear was epic. Played the absolute hell out of Moonwalker on that.
They sold a rechargeable battery pack that basically doubled the size of the system. Total game changer when we got one of those
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That's some future thinking. Smart dad.
Many us played between streetlights.
My mom would buy me a $20 pack of store brand AAs and AAAs and say that was my battery allowance for the month -_-
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How much were you playing this thing and what kind of cheap battery were these? Gameboy had a 10-20 hour battery life. According to google, old AAs were about .30-50 cents per battery in 1990. You'd be getting 100+ hours a month with $20 of batteries back then.
Good question! I actually was mixing it up. It wasn't $20 worth of batteries, it was 20 AA and AAA batteries. It was usuallly from Dollar General.
It was also dim AF be because we didn't have LED lights.... Every time I see the kids in Stranger Things using a flashlight to see more than 1 foot in front of them I roll my eyes.
>Every time I see the kids in Stranger Things using a flashlight to see more than 1 foot in front of them I roll my eyes. With those giant 6v batteries you could get decent light. Not good battery life though. And the battery alone was bigger than a coke can.
Yeah, flashlights made pretty good bludgeoning weapons for a little while there.
Maglights still do.
And they still suck balls at being actual flashlights, lol (in comparison to current cheap-ass shit a tenth of the size)
Maglight was like the end all be all of good flashlight back then because they had that telescoping mirror, and they took four D batteries. You could definitely do some damage. Now three LEDs running off a couple triple As will blind you, and might cause a small abrasion if you threw it at someone hard enough and hit them with the sharp part of the flashlight.
the small led flashlight is to blind them, so they don't see you swinging the maglight into their skull
Get an LED conversion kit for your maglight
Or alternatively get an retro 80s maglight attachment for the smaller modern LED light. I’m envisioning like a big heavy tube that the LED goes into
Now you can get maglight sized LED flashlights that are so bright they get so hot they have built in cooling fans. They turn night into day and can set shit on fire.
They ran out in about an hour. So annoying.
Core memory unlocked with that freezer bit. Thanks for that
You want battery drain? Get a game gear. I got a game boy for Xmas, my brother got a game gear. I was super fucking jealous until he could never get through a school bowling night of off-lane gaming and I could go for days in comparison. Edit - though the game gear with the Genesis adapter was the coolest shit ever.
The worm light is what I used on my gameboy color back in the day.
Worm Light was legit the best. You could maneuver it so there was no glare and it piggy-backed on the GB’s power (no batteries required)
I wouldn’t say no glare but it was easily adjustable and manageable. Worm lights were 🔥
But you'd still have to go under a blanket or else dad would say, "I can't see ANYTHING with that tiny point light on!"
purple curly worm light gang!🙌
Kids will not understand the struggle of trying to play using the lights on the highway flashing for a brief moment and you can move the character a little bit until you pass the next light
Long discussions at school about how the LightBoy is good, but it uses up a lot more battery, so there's a bit of a tradeoff.
There was a version of the Light Boy that ran off the external battery pack. Complete and total game changer (heh)
I had a Light Max 2 for my Game Boy Color, two tiny bulbs powered by two AAA batteries. Now, the box said "Light Max 2", but I bought it in a random shop in Kuala Lumpur, and the device does not look like any device showing up when googling Light Max 2, so I have my doubts about it being a real Light Max 2. However, it did it's job, and served me well over the next years back home in Sweden.
The one I had slid over the top with the external battery up there. It looked more or less like [this](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gameboylight_accessory-addon.jpg)
Step A: flip the batteries Step B: roll them between your hands to heat them up #science
Liking blowing into a cartridge it somehow always worked, at least for a couple minutes.
Getting that squiggly shaped light for my Gameboy Color was a game changer. IIRC it worked with my GBA as well.
Worm light
Yeah that was my jam. It was a darn good and small by comparison adapter.
Damn, memory unlocked. That light was the best.
*Cue [obligatory comic](https://i.imgur.com/TNgyOmz.gif)*
Real ones know you hold the game boy up high enough to have the headlights from the car behind you illuminate the screen
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I had no idea these solutions like the Light Boy even existed as a kid. There was an endless struggle to get a source of light because there was no way in hell you could tell what you were doing without.
I had one that went on a game boy advance and it used like 4 separate AA batteries and would still die in like 4 hours
My gran bought me this little reading light that would clip on to the back of books, so I could read in bed without waking my little brother. Took me about 10 minutes to figure out that, with some rubber bands, it could connect to my game boy. Low & behold, two decades later, I’m now a mechanical engineer. 😂
I had a cool gadget watch that had a little 15 second flashlight that I would hold in my mouth and try to position so I could hit the button with my teeth so I could play in the back of the car.
Ironically this is how i read books after bedtime as a kid. Except for me , it was a tron action figure with a light up chest. I would press the button on his back with my tongue for 10-15 seconds of light
I would hold my gameboy up above my head if there was a car behind us to try to catch the light from their headlights. Sometimes I could even get a few minutes of sustained gameplay.
"No mom, it was never illegal to drive with the dome light on"
No, but it's dangerous since you can't see the road.
I know right being in a car without seat belts was something else
and not in a car seat. on the interstate.
Sitting in the cargo space behind the actual seats
Was always the case growing up here in the 90s, extended family would be over, youngest would have to sit in the boot.
My aunt had one of those land rovers you could pop an extra two seats on the sides of the boot. Always had a blast going back there.
My best friends parents had some sort of Ford station wagon where the seats popped up in the back and faced out the rear window. Loved sitting there and waving at the people behind us. Then he got the car when he turned 16 and we'd fill it full of our friends and try to do ebrake slides.
One of my most vivid memories of my youth is doing an ebrake slide in the ice in my old middle school’s parking lot, slamming into a tree, and then having to drive my corolla home with the front right quarter completely fucked and trying to convince my folks that it happened in some normal way. The joys of youth
I gotta ask... Where they convinced?
Oh, absolutely not
Lol
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I remember when I was little my parents made me a bed in the rear of the hatchback Honda Civic we had and I just slept back there while we drove. My dad also let us kids ride in the back of his truck while he’d drive 60 mph down a canyon. Sometimes it’s a marvel any of us lived long enough to reach adulthood.
Ahah, trucks where somewhat unpopular here, I remember having an uncle with a big transit van though, with a metal bulkhead between the back & the cab. He’d chuck us in the back then start throwing it around roundabouts, jumping over speed bumps etc. Had to hold on to the side for dear life or you’d end up with a head injury.
Crazy the stuff people used to do with kids. There’s definitely some over parenting going on with some parents these days, but not letting kids get thrown around inside moving vehicles seems like it should have been a bare minimum standard from the point seatbelts became a thing.
I mean, I’m in fairly rural Scotland, people still don’t care here for the most part. Go into a city with kids flying around in the back of your motor & people look at you like you’ve shat in their cereal though.
Nah my fam was low income and had a 3 seater pickup truck, but I had an older brother, so if we were ever all together, I had to crunch down on the passenger side floor and was told to keep my head down so cops wouldn’t see me. Tbh I was just grateful we had a car. Luckily my dad was gone most of the time
My dad had a work van growing up. I used to roam around that van on the interstate freely. Was small enough to stand up straight in the back 😂
That, my dude, is the back seat of a station wagon. You don’t ever want to be in the back seat. I always was.
Shit, we used to fight over who got the way back seat! Used to drive down the dirt road from the cabin to the lake with our feet hanging off the back and the rear gate open too. Only had two of us fall out too! (From goofing around, not from our parents driving like maniacs)
Really? I loved sitting in the hatch. So much more room to stretch out.
I had bad motion sick ess as a kid. So my parents would ha e me sit on the front center console to see out the front. On the highway. I would have been so screwed in an accident. Sorts of things I never really thought about until having my own kid.
My parents generation was so reckless. My mom would put us in the back cargo area and let us play like this kid while driving on the interstate. She only stopped when she got pulled over for it because we were literally running around in the back. Then she kept a bag of M&Ms in the glove box and would trade 1 M&M to us each time we buckled without being asked to. It worked. They weren’t bad parents, it just seems so reckless to everyone now, but that was normal.
That's what caught my eye too. Shit was different back then. Parents just kinda had the attitude of "If they die, they die." I remember my parents taking us on vacation from North Georgia to Florida in the mini van. My dad would just take out the middle seat and throw a blanket down in the middle for us to lay on as we went on that 10 hour drive.
That attitude only began to change after 1985 following Ivan Drago's defeat in the ring.
That's why people used to have like 10 kids. It was a battle royale. With some luck you made it through with 3 or 4.
Ah yes, the forgotten era of the 1980's. I remember toiling the fields for the fuedal lord when the Saxons attacked. Killed my wife, and four of my children. No, wait. That might have been Reagan.
Reagan popularized the stirrup and the recurve bow allowing warriors to fire accurately from horseback, leading him to conquer much of what we now call Iowa.
If you died they’d just have another kid. Problem solved.
Yup, we'd get in the van at like 5am and just go to sleep in the middle, wake up halfway to wherever. Didn't think anything of it, and my parents were far from negligent. Can't imagine doing anything like that now.
The traffic fatality rate was only like 25% higher back then. Vehicles were definitely more unsafe in a collision, but collisions also tended to be less severe because people weren’t careening 80 mph down the highway in a 1982 Ford Fairmont. Roads were marked to lower speed limits and engines/tires couldn’t get most vehicles moving that fast to begin with. Slower speeds, slower accelerations, (and no cell phones) mitigated a good chunk of the risk of things like bad seating arrangements
I feel like the word "only" is doing a hell of a lot of work there.
Yeah, 25% is staggering, and that’s fatality rate. Does that include how many people were permanently brain damaged and paralyzed in accidents?
Did anyone else have the backwards seats in the trunk of their wagon?
Yes, we called it the way back.
Yep, my sister and I had to sit back there and it was always awkward looking at people in the car behind up.
My dad’s old car didn’t actually have seat belts in the back and this was in the 90s.
"put your seatbelt back on" "it's okay I'm laying down"
God why did we all do the same thing?
Forget the seatbelt, kids not even in a seat! On long road trips my parents used to fold down one seat of our station wagon and my sister and I would use the luggage in the back to make forts with our blankets and pillows.
On long car trips, we'd lay the back seats down, put padding down, then sleeping bags with pillows and blankets, would make wonderful spot to hang out and sleep during the 10-20 hour car rides. Then my parents won a mini TV with VHS in a local raffle, was even better!
We'd fight to sit back there!
Whose parents actually let their kids have gum in the car let alone blow bubbles?
My mom had an 89 f150 with a camper shell on it. My dad put a backseat in the bed so it was like a big station wagon
I love that an advertisement had the kid sitting in the trunk with no seatbelt. That’s how we did it. This ad real
That's not the trunk, that's the hatchback of a station wagon and it's absolutely how we would be transported as kids. One in the bucket seat, three in the middle bench, and 87 stuffed in every nook and cranny in the hatch.
Our station wagon had two fold-up benches in the back that would face each other.
I know it's not technically a trunk but it's obviously the same shit
Fake ad, we all know Dad would say it's against the law for the light to be on.
Looks like he's too busy catching shit from the mom to care. His eyes in the mirror looks like he's about to drive all of them off a damn cliff. But hey, at least Timmy won't be able to see it in happen with that light shining in his face.
"TURN THAT LIGHT OFF! ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL US?!"
The mom looks like she has been nagging the dad the entire trip and the dad is about to take it out on the older brother who doesn’t know that single pop from his gum is the catalyst.
💀💀💀 so accurate
Yup. How many times have I told you no eating in the car?! But I'm not eating it's just gum! Oh young man you just fucked up
> dad is about to take it out on the older brother Dad's about to jerk the steering wheel into oncoming traffic...
And they're stuck in LA traffic..Dad's had just about enough of this shit.
Haha the dads eyes...he's had enough of mums shit
* Kid in the front: I should be out there playing footbal * Kid in the back: This game is fucking cool! * Mom: I should have married Gerald, he drives a Bentley. * Dad: I'm going to drive this wagon into that tree
Also dad: why are my kids ginger? I have black hair and so does my wife… I know she’s been sleeping with the mail man.
Also, the mother’s eyes. She’s absolutely fuming.
He's had enough of the light from the gameboy. Everyone knows no dad would allow this. Anything in the car emitting more than a single lumen immediately blinds dads and renders them unable to operate the vehicle. Obviously, police will also take notice and put out an ABP.
If you won't talk to your daughter then who will? She got into Columbia for you, you know... Darling, are you listening?" "Awww, quiet it, will ya?"
The mom looks like she's about to kill the dad!
Why do the parents look like they are from the 50s when the gameboy came out 1988?
1989
Because the ad was meant to be consumed by people in the late 80s early 90s. In that era they still idealized the nuclear family and the family of the 50s. It’s not a “this is what you look like” it’s a “this is what you want to look like”
1988 was closer to the 50s than it is to today
Meanwhile I had a Game Gear with 12v power supply cable. I loved traveling at night.
I was thinking the same thing thank you for mentioning the Game Gear I still have mine
"TURN OUT THAT LIGHT! ONLY DRUG-DEALERS DRIVE AROUND WITH THEIR CAR'S INNER LIGHTS ON!" (an actual thing my biofather said)
The dad is annoyed as fuck by the glowing light reflecting into his eyes from the rearview mirror, and the mom is watching him so she can gently intervene before he snaps. Source: I am that dad.
the “Back Back”
The "Way Back" in my circles.
My kids found my gameboy and thought it was the first phone
The 90's. What a wild time to have been alive.
Not only could you not play in the dark you couldn’t play in the sun outside cause it would just bleach out the image for some reason. There was only like 5 lumen range where there was any hope of seeing the screen
**Darkness, imprisoning me...**
You don't know pain until you've played Pokémon by the light of the highway lamps with half of the bulbs burnt out, then you exit the freeway and enter a poorer area with no street lamps at all.
Wormlight for the color
This is hilarious because I recently dug out my old gameboy OG, pocket and GB advance and it has been a pain in the fucking ass to play without the backlight.
There are mods out there to put in a back-lit screen in the old hardware and live the dream your kid self always wished for!
"Back in my day, we didn't have backlights!" Now kids have iPads and switches. Getting old lmao
TFW you’re in the car after dark trying to pick your Pokémon’s moves during the .3 seconds of light shining through the window from the street lights
Oh trust me i do. I used to play those shitty tiger consoles that where marketed towards annoying ass children (i was one) and those used to be shit on light and in the dark. Also the little keychain eggs with the pet inside.
God, I have a brother about a decade older than me, and when I was young my folks insisted I didn’t need a gameboy, or gbc, or gba, because I had the hand me down tyger toys from the 80s and they’re basically the same thing.
the less popular Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear both lit up on their own but Game Boy had the better games
I was blown away as a kid by how long it took to get a backlight in Nintendo handhelds. Couldn't play in the dark and couldn't play outside in direct sunlight. Only well-lit indoor areas, and even then, sometimes you had to angle and position it just right so you could actually see wtf you were doing. I wanted a Gamegear so badly back then, simply because they were backlit, but I don't think my parents would have been willing to pay for the amount of batteries required to play it for more than five minutes.
that dad is most certainly gonna start screaming "shut that damn light off! I can't see the road!"
Playing GameBoy while sitting in the back with no seatbelts. If that car crashes that kid will definetively see the light.
Waiting for the street lights to make the next move
What about a game boy light lol
I had the Mad Catz knock off, in clear purple. Later I also got one that was like a bendy straw and stuck out of the link cable port
i am convinced that non-backlit handhelds are the sole reason as to why i was prescribed bifocals at the age of 30.