It may be hard to picture now, when American children spend seemingly every waking hour absorbed in Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, but once upon a time the country’s youth contented themselves with activities that did not involve gazing into tiny screens—you know, riding bikes, throwing around a football, jumping rope.
One might assume this changeover coincided with the rise of smartphones and social media, but a new movie shows that it happened as early as the summer vacation of 1989. During that fateful interregnum between school years, kids were introduced to something that prefigured the electronic devices of the 21st century: a battery-powered, 8-bit handheld videogame device whose two buttons and chunky directional pad belied its addictive properties.
The console in question was Nintendo’s Game Boy, which, upon its introduction to the young people of America that fateful summer, was sold with the game Tetris, which, before bewitching players on this continent, had caused a sensation among the computer-savvy during the dying days of the Soviet Union. The game involves players steering variously shaped blocks into full lines; it is the sort of thing that sounds monotonous but, when tried, proves as compulsive as manipulating a Rubik’s Cube.
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