Last year, Forrest wrote a long and thoughtful commentary on the mysterium called nostalgia. In a desperate attempt to recreate the experience of playing The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the first time, he spent $236.74 rebuying original Xbox 360 hardware expecting to be propelled back into his childhood:
I spent $236.74 to go back to 2006, to my old room, with the Easy Mac and the Diet Cherry Coke and the perfect lighting. I wanted to boot up the old 360 again, feel the smoothness of that perfectly curved controller in my hands while I navigated that glorious Blades user interface. I wanted to feel that little hit of dopamine whenever that green-and-gray badge popped up for unlocking an achievement or whenever a friend logged in or whatever.
It worked. For a while. But then the effect started to wear off. Even more desperate methods were employed to try and relive those golden past moments, but after the 100th time of reliving it, the soft edges disappeared and even the best memories got blurry. It’s funny what our minds do: recreate past events by putting together piece by piece—often in the wrong order, or by picking the wrong piece. We don’t replay the exact past event in our heads: we re-create it, including a big margin for error.
I’ve been reading Alex Custodio’s Who Are You? Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform where Custodio argues that the GBA is not just the GBA—that is, the piece of hardware that you hold in your hand with a Game Pak cartridge. Instead, it is the GBA, the cart, Nintendo’s story, the players, the modding community, and also something very important: the unique time period in which all of this unfolds.
Trying to recreate sweet childhood memories of a robust Nintendo handheld clutched in hands, fighting for the best spot outside with indirect sunlight, will always end in disappointment. It’s no longer that time. Friends no longer show up with their Link Cables. Some software no longer works. Regardless of whether you did: the world has moved on. Any modern retro-inspired Nintendo knock-off handheld is now capable of rendering more than four shades of grey. A screen that lights up apparently is a thing. The electrical devices we love to carry around now apparently are focused on locking us in and stealing our privacy instead of just doing one thing and doing it right.
My dad often says that every era has its own charm. My response to that usually is frustration: frustration of being unable to get out of the current stressful time and frustration of being unable to go back to that time when things were still joyful and I was still oblivious to the meaning and effects of capitalism on this world. I often want to flee from the current situation and world I’m stuck in, and the number one place I want to flee to is that place this younger fellow inhabited:
Doesn’t he look happy? Game Boy pouch nearby, four spare AA batteries and a Turtles II: Back from the Sewers cartrdige no doubt inside, he found the easiest way to ignore his sisters and parents: flip that switch, hear *PLING*, and just play. Ever since I got a Game Boy, we were best friends. The above photo is taken somewhere in Spain on a summer holiday where I met locals on the poolside that were curious as to what I was playing. We didn’t understand each other. But we did. We did. Donde esta Link Cable? Mortal Kombat? Si? and to my sisters, foolish enough to engage in the act of swimming: Hey! No splashing here!
I’ve been exploring falling block puzzle games on the GB that I might have missed in my youth such as Yoshi’s Cookie. Even though I miss the physical ON/OFF flip switch, I nowadays play these on my Analogue Pocket for obvious reasons: my eyes aren’t what they used to be, and that backlit screen estate and resolution is just amazing. No perfect childhood memory recreation here but I would be lying if I wrote “I don’t care at all”. Otherwise I would just play a few of them on an emulator on my laptop—or just completely ignore the GB library. In a way, I too nearly spent €300 to relive my childhood: the Pocket is ridiculously expensive, especially if you take shipping to Europe into account. Additionally, the Pocket requires physical carts: which poor soul still scours flea markets for GB carts when any GB(C)(A) ROM can be downloaded in a whim?
But in 2026, I can’t really play Yoshi’s Cookie the way Nintendo intended it to be played in 1993. I don’t have any friends who still own Game Boy cartridges, let alone a Link Cable. Yoshi’s Cookie’s single player mode is dull: the game begs for a local competitive play. That time window has passed: the temporal context has changed drastically. I wrote about this before in Experiencing Old Games In New Eras. I have fond memories of afternoon GB sessions with friends, but I’m afraid they will stay just that: a memory. A nostalgic one with the potential of being frustrating if I don’t force myself to look at the now and into the future instead of only at the past.
More similar fond memories include blindly swapping Game Boy carts with a random local kid’s mom in the hope of getting a new Kirby game without having to ask my parents for it, exchanging fruit with American strangers at night in bed with my DS Lite by visiting their Animal Crossing: Wild World village, playing Mario Kart DS/7 with a (3)DS during lunch break with colleagues, … If everybody—especially time—has moved on, then why haven’t I?
Why do I call myself a retro gamer? I do play new games now and then but let’s not fool ourselves: every single one of these “new” titles is either a remaster/remake or a game that heavily draws from its nostalgic ancestors. The ones I love the most are the pixelated gritty ones with gameplay mechanics firmly rooted into the past seasoned with a bit of modern ease-of-use features, and that last one has a practical reason since as a parent of young kids I’m often pressed for time.
Custodio’s Who Are You and Forrest’s commentary on nostalgia made me realise a few things. First, I am not alone in longing to go back to a simpler time when things weren’t enshittified as badly as they are now and when we weren’t yet made aware of how dark this world can be. Second, the temporal aspect that plays a critical role in all this, disabling the ability to perfectly reenact a happy memory, acts as a pressing reminder for me: that I more often need to look to the here and now.
Yesterday afternoon, our family made a short trip to a nearby town looking for a nice place to walk. Our eldest of course discovered a playground in the process. In twenty years, her childlike joy in discovering ants, playgrounds, waving at strangers, and blowing dandelion seeds into the air will become just like my current nostalgic yearning. We brought along her tricycle and a passerby smiled and said to us Enjoy It! Undoubtedly, most people who throw heartwarming smiles were young parents once. I guess they mean we should “capture the moment” because before you know it, the moment is gone? But how do you enjoy the moment when you’re exhausted (there’s that word again), the toddler won’t shut up for a single second, the youngest is yelling again because he lost his pacifier, and at home more chores like sweeping, mopping, cooking, folding clothes, … are only piling up?
These current hectic and stressful moments now will become nostalgic moments later. Without a doubt, my wife and I will look back as these moments and sigh: wasn’t it great when they were little and only uttered oh and ah! instead of shut up dad, I’m not doing that? Without a doubt, our mind will have filtered out the most stressful and depressing moments. We’ll have blissfully forgotten these. Just as I now blissfully forgot the many frustrating moments of a boy and teenager living with their parents and sisters, not truly being free. I do not regret moving out as soon as I could.
If I had the choice to go back in time with some of my current wisdom still intact, I would deliberately Enjoy It more often. Caress the durable grey plastic shell. Slide in and out the carts a few more times just to hear that unique clicking sound again. Bug my friends way more about bringing their GB and Link Cables.
A growing body of research on nostalgia identifies two major types: reflective nostalgia and restorative nostalgia. The former is the kind you are grateful for, the bittersweet moments you’ve enriched your live with. The latter is the desperate and longing part that increases the feeling of loss. I might just be on the wrong side of nostalgia. Attempts to relive that nostalgic moment—and thus moving from reflective to restorative—always end in a failure. The games I play together with the DOS Game Club are another example of this effect: Jazz Jackrabbit suddenly feels like a cheap Sonic rip-off that mechanically barely holds together, while back in 1994 it was the most mesmerising thing I ever saw on my granddad’s 486. Fortunately the soundtrack still slaps, but perhaps that’s probably because of how auditory stimuli recreate these nostalgic moments differently?
In addition to trying to escape the bigger responsibility and wanting to go back to that ignorance-is-a-bliss state of mind, my second biggest reason for being nostalgic is mourning the loss of my previous selves. I often go back to the past to try and understand the current me but perhaps that’s more a bad than a good thing. Some of the things a past version of myself liked or did no longer fits with my current self. I don’t fully understand the reasoning behind this yet, but I hope I will. In the meantime, I’ve added a few nostalgic-oriented works on my reading list to gain a bigger insight into how all this theoretically is supposed to work.
Perhaps then I can start to save myself from my past self.
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