The Game Boy That Changed My Life

Quick reflections on an old gadget made new

This Is “I Can’t Live Without,” a column about the apps, gadgets, and services that make all the difference.

We lived on the 58th floor of the John Hancock Center in downtown Chicago. What was it like? The kind of place that was called a center. There was a Jamba Juice in the basement.

And even in this center — with the one old woman who putzed around the marble lobby with her bag-sized poodle, before the condo association said no more dogs — my dad wanted us to work.

The Game Boy Advance (GBA) was looming, as many issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly let me know, and I would work for it, even though I was chubby, 12, and mostly talentless. What I could do, though, was roll up to my dad’s advertising agency for a few days and document, with a black point-and-shoot camera — the kind with one of those lens covers you’d slide back like a door in Star Trek — every single insurable item in the office. I’d write numbers in thick Sharpie on scraps of paper, put them next to a printer or a lamp, take the shot, write down what I was cataloging, and continue. After a few hours, bored to tears, I pointed the flash of the camera directly into my left eye and pressed the shutter button. When I look back, the memory of this light coalesces like a cheap…