Rediscovering the fun of programming with the Game Boy

The Game Boy is a handheld video game console released by Nintendo in 1989. Together with its Color successor, they sold nearly 120 million units, the fourth best-selling game console ever. Homebrew games (i.e. not made by professional studios) started being created for it in the late 90's, and still are today, thanks to constantly improved tooling and resources.

Thirty-five years later, the amateur/hobbyist video game community has changed drastically, with smartphone and web apps dominating the space. In this talk, we will explain how the Game Boy is refreshingly simpler than modern development platforms, discuss why this is (mostly) a good thing, and showcase many ways to use this old system in modern ways to just have fun, even for rookie programmers and non-programmers!