Vid2txt

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[APPLAUSE]

So in college, I was a government major, which means I

had to write a lot of papers.

Now, when a normal student writes a paper, they might spread

the work out a little like this.

So you know, you get started maybe a little slowly, but you

get enough done in the first week that with some heavier

days later on, everything gets done and things stay civil.

And I would want to do that like that.

That would be the plan.

I would have it all ready to go.

But then actually, the paper would come along,

and then I would kind of do this.

[LAUGHTER]

And that would happen every single paper.

But then came my 90-page senior thesis.

A paper you're supposed to spend a year on.

I knew for a paper like that, my normal workflow

was not an option.

It was way too big a project.

So I planned things out, and I decided I kind of

had to go something like this.

This is how the year would go.

So I'd start off light, and I'd bump it up in the middle

months.

And then at the end, I would kick it up in the high gears.

It's like a little staircase.

How hard are you going to just walk up the stairs?

No big deal, right?

But then, funniest thing happened.

Those first few months, they came and went,

and I couldn't quite do stuff.

So we had an awesome new revised plan.

[LAUGHTER]

And then those middle months actually went by,

and I didn't really write words.

And so we were here.

And then two months turned into one month.

It turned into two weeks.

And one day I woke up with three days until the deadline,

still not having written a word.

And so I did the only thing I could.

I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours, pulling not one,

but two all-nighters.

Humans are not supposed to pull two all-nighters.

Sprinkled across campus, dove in slow motion,

and got it in just at the deadline.

I thought that was the end of everything.

But a week later, I get a call.

It's the school.

And they say, is this Tim Urban?

And I say, yeah.

And they say, we need to talk about your thesis.

And I say, OK.

And they say, it's the best one we've ever seen.

That did not happen.

It was a very, very bad thesis.

I just wanted to enjoy that one moment when all of you

thought this guy is amazing.

No, no.

It was very, very bad.

Anyway, today I'm a writer, blogger, guy.

I write the blog, wait, but why?

And a couple of years ago, I decided

to write about procrastination.

My behavior is always perplexed the non- procrastinators

around me.

And I wanted to explain to the non- procrastinators of the world

what goes on in the heads of procrastinators

and why we are the way we are.

Now, I had a hypothesis that the brains of procrastinators

were actually different than the brains of other people.

And to test this, I found an MRI lab

that actually let me scan both my brain and the brain

of a proven non- procrastinator.

And so I could compare them.

And I actually brought them here to show you today.

And I want you to take a look carefully

to see if you can notice a difference.

And I know that if you're not a trained brain expert,

it's not that obvious, but just take a look.

So here's the brain of a non- procrastinator.

Now, here's my brain.

[LAUGHTER]

There is a difference.

Both brains have a rational decision maker in them,

but the procrastinator's brain also

has an instant gratification monkey.

Now, what does this mean for the procrastinator?

Well, it means everything's fine until this happens.

So the rational decision maker will

make the rational decision to do something productive,

but the monkey doesn't like that plan.

So he actually takes the wheel.

And he says, actually, let's read the entire Wikipedia

page of the Nancy Kerrigan Tanya Harding scandal,

because I just remember that that happened.

Then we're going to go over to the fridge.

We're going to see if there's anything new in there

since 10 minutes ago.

After that, we're going to go on a YouTube spiral

that starts with videos of Richard Feynman talking

about magnets and ends much, much later

with us watching interviews with Justin Bieber's mom.

[LAUGHTER]

All of that's going to take a while,

so we're not going to really have room on the schedule

for any work today.

Sorry.

Now, what is going on here?

The instant gratification monkey does not

seem like a guy you want behind the wheel.

He lives entirely in the present moment.

He has no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future,

and he only cares about two things-- easy and fun.

Now, in the animal world, that works fine.

If you're a dog and you spend your whole life

doing nothing other than easy and fun things,

you're a huge success.

And to the monkey, humans are just another animal species.

You have to keep well slept, well fed,

and propagating into the next generation, which

in tribal times might have worked OK.

But if you haven't noticed, now we're not in tribal times.

We're in an advanced civilization,

and the monkey does not know what that is,

which is why we have another guy in our brain,

the rational decision maker, who gives us the ability

to do things no other animal can do.

We can visualize the future.

We can see the big picture.

We can make long-term plans.

And he wants to take all of that into account.

And he wants to just have us do whatever makes sense

to be doing right now.

Now, sometimes it makes sense to be doing things

that are easy and fun, like when you're having dinner,

or going to bed, or enjoying well-earned leisure time.

That's why there's an overlap.

Sometimes they agree.

But other times, it makes much more sense

to be doing things that are harder and less pleasant

for the sake of the big picture.

And that's when we have a conflict.

And for the procrastinator, that conflict

tends to end a certain way every time,

leaving him spending a lot of time in this orange zone,

an easy and fun place that's entirely out of the makes sense

circle.

I call it the dark playground.

Now, the dark playground is a place

that all of you procrastinators out there know very well.

It's where leisure activities happen

at times when leisure activities are not

supposed to be happening.

The fun you have in the dark playground

isn't actually fun because it's completely unearned,

and the air is filled with guilt, dread, anxiety, self-hatred,

all those good procrastinator feelings.

And the question is, in this situation,

with the monkey behind the wheel,

how does the procrastinator ever get himself over here

to this blue zone, a less pleasant place,

but where really important things happen?

Well, it turns out that the procrastinator has

a guardian angel, someone who's always looking down on him

and watching over him in his darkest moments,

someone called the panic monster.

[LAUGHTER]

Now, the panic monster is dormant most of the time,

but it suddenly wakes up.

Any time a deadline gets too close,

or there's danger of public embarrassment,

a career disaster or some other scary consequence.

And importantly, he's the only thing

that the monkey is terrified of.

Now, he became very relevant in my life pretty recently

because people of Ted reached out to me about six months ago

and invited me to do a TED talk.

[LAUGHTER]

Now, of course, I said, yes, it's always

been a dream of mine to have done a TED talk in the past.

[LAUGHTER]

But in the middle of all this excitement,

the rational decision-maker seemed

to have something else in his mind.

He was saying, are we clear on what we just accepted?

Do we get what's going to be now happening one day in the future?

We need to sit down and work on this right now.

And the monkey said, totally agree,

but also let's just open Google Earth

and let's zoom into the bottom of India,

like 200 feet above the ground.

And we're going to scroll up two and a half hours

till we get to the top of the country

so we can get a better feel for India.

[LAUGHTER]

So that's what we did that day.

[LAUGHTER]

As six months turned into four and then two and then one,

the people of TED decided to release the speakers.

And I opened up the website and there was my face,

staring right back at me and guess who woke up.

[LAUGHTER]

So the panic monster starts losing his mind.

And a few seconds later, the whole system's in mayhem.

[LAUGHTER]

And the monkey, who remember, he's terrified of the panic monster.

Boom, he's up the tree.

And finally, finally, the rational decision maker

can take the wheel and I can start working on the talk.

Now, the panic monster explains all kinds of pretty insane

procrastinated behavior, like how someone like me

could spend two weeks unable to start

the opening sentence of a paper and then miraculously

find the unbelievable work ethic to stay up all night

and write eight pages.

And this entire situation with the three characters,

this is the procrastinated system.

It's not pretty, but in the end, it works.

And this is what I decided to write about on the blog

just a couple of years ago.

Now, when I did, I was amazed by the response.

Literally thousands of emails came in from all different kinds

of people, from all over the world,

doing all different kinds of things.

These were people who were nurses and bankers and painters

and engineers and lots and lots of PhD students.

[LAUGHTER]

And they were all writing, saying the same thing.

I have this problem too.

But what struck me was the contrast between the light tone

of the post and the heaviness of these emails.

These people were writing with intense frustration

about what procrastination had done to their lives,

about what this monkey had done to them.

And I thought about this.

And I said, well, if the procrastinator system works,

then what's going on?

Why are all these people in such a dark place?

Well, it turns out that there's two kinds

of procrastination.

Everything I've talked about today, the examples I've given,

they all have deadlines.

And when there's deadlines, the effects of procrastination

are contained to the short term because the panic monster

gets involved.

But there's a second kind of procrastination

that happens in situations when there is no deadline.

So if you wanted to have a career where you want

to be a self-starter, something in the arts,

something entrepreneurial, there's

no deadlines on those things at first,

because nothing's happening at first,

not until you've gone out and done the hard work

to get some momentum, to get things going.

There's also all kinds of important things outside

of your career that don't involve any deadlines,

like seeing your family or exercising and taking

care of your health, working on your relationship

or getting out of a relationship that isn't working.

Now, if procrastinator's only mechanism

of doing these hard things is the panic monster,

that's a problem because in all of these non-deadline

situations, the panic monster doesn't show up.

He's nothing to wake up for.

So the effects of procrastination

are not contained, they just extend outward forever.

And it's this long-term kind of procrastination

that's much less visible and much less talked about

than the funnier short-term deadline-based kind.

It's usually suffered quietly and privately.

And it can be the source of a huge amount of long-term unhappiness

and regrets.

And I thought, that's why these people are emailing,

and that's why they're in such a bad place.

It's not that they're cramming for some project.

It's that long-term procrastination

has made them feel like a spectator at times

in their own lives.

The frustration was not that they couldn't achieve

their dreams, it's that they weren't even

able to start chasing them.

So I read these emails and I had a little bit of an epiphany

that I don't think non- procrastinators exist.

That's right.

I think all of you are procrastinators.

Now, you might not all be a mess, like some of us.

And some of you may have a healthy relationship with deadlines.

But remember, the monkey's sneakiest trick

is when the deadlines aren't there.

Now, I want to show you one last thing.

I call this a life calendar.

That's one box for every week of a 90-year life.

That's not that many boxes, especially since.

We've already used a bunch of those.

So I think we need to all take a long, hard look

at that calendar.

And we need to think about what we're really procrastinating

on, because everyone is procrastinating on something

in life.

We need to stay aware of the instant gratification monkey.

That's a job for all of us.

And because there's not that many boxes on there,

it's a job that should probably start today.

Well, maybe not today.

But you know, sometimes soon.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

(applause)

[phone ringing]

Hello. Hi. You come over all the way to this side.

Okay. Behind the table.

What's your name? - Raja.

- Raja. - Marquez.

- Marquez. - Nice to meet you.

- I want to give you this. It's a blindfold.

- Cool. - So go ahead and put that on.

And I'm going to know when you're totally blind.

I'm totally blind.

I'm going to put an object over here on this table.

All right, go ahead and reach down.

Pick it up and see if you can idea.

Okay.

Oh.

It's a brick.

Definitely a screen.

Maybe a GPS.

Is this a cassette tape player?

Uh, it's a controller.

Oh, there's some buttons.

Oh, it's definitely a gaming thing.

Oh, snap.

Is it a Game Boy?

Is this a Game Boy? Oh, my God.

It's a Game Boy.

Oh, yeah. It's totally a Game Boy.

[phone ringing]

Oh, love that sound.

[music playing]

I'm Marquez Brownlee,

and I review Dope New Tech.

But on this show,

I'm rewinding the clock to discover the tech of the past

that changed our lives forever.

This is Retro Tech.

All right, it's time to break the sale on literally

the oldest piece of tech I have ever held.

The Game Boy first came out back in April of 1989.

So this year is the 30th anniversary of this release.

Let's get in there.

This is happening.

Ready?

The Game Boy is the most popular,

portable, handheld gaming console ever.

And it kind of changed the course of gaming history.

I was not a part of that.

I never used the Game Boy, never owned one.

So this is a totally fresh, true first impression for me

of a piece of tech that changed history.

I recognize this guy.

I don't worry. I know who Marquez is.

This is Tetris.

I'm holding Tetris.

Let me pop this open.

I don't know how to open this.

Think like 1989.

How would you push?

I'm pushing.

Oh, that's terrible.

That was, they could have done better there.

The unboxing experience has gotten better since that piece

happened in 1989.

This is it.

Wow, these are big buttons.

That is a thick console right there.

I'm gonna fire it up.

Oh, it lit up.

Oh.

Okay, so I've got my Game Boy, but this is the first time I've held

a piece of tech that I basically know nothing about.

So I want to speak to some people who've lived and breathed this thing

to find out its cultural impact over the past 30 years and what made the Game Boy pop.

Marquez?

- What's up? - Good to meet you.

- As well.

- So to begin, I'd like you to check under your seat.

Oh my goodness, am I in some... Oh, no.

Oh, Game Boy!

First thing I'm gonna ask is for you to look under your chair.

All right, yes.

Oh.

Oh, memories, memories.

That little ping.

You guys need more batteries.

It brings back so many memories.

Yeah, that taste.

Remember when you used to suck on your Game Boy?

Or is it just me?

All right.

In 1989, this came out.

What were the 80s like?

The 80s was a time of a massive shift in culture and technology.

This was the birth of personal technology.

I mean, this is when the Walkman first came out.

You had a lot less entertainment at your disposal.

There was no on-demand TV.

Life for a child was boring.

I mean, seriously, kids, like, you don't even know how good you have it.

You have smartphones.

You can even play on a tablet.

In the 80s, it was just painful.

Good Lord.

At the time, gaming was largely in arcade.

And then all of a sudden, home consoles really made a play.

It was revolutionary.

Everybody enjoys Atari.

No, we don't need a babysitter tonight.

The Atari was such a phenomenon that all these other companies wanted to make video games

that you get in on the action.

When it comes to space games, nobody compares to Atari.

Excuse me.

Have you compared them to Intendovision?

So a couple years later, Nintendo comes knocking and they say,

"You know, we have this video game system.

People are skeptical."

Because Nintendo started out as a card company.

They made playing cards.

Do you know how old Nintendo is as a company?

I would be guessing it started in the '70s.

1970s?

Yeah.

1800s.

Really?

Yeah.

Nintendo's been around for more than 100 years.

It was only in the very early '80s.

They start to think of themselves as a technology company.

Nintendo just took over and started spearheading the games industry.

It is the video game craze, the Nintendo craze.

Nintendo was the king of video games at this point.

You got all these great games.

You got Tuck Hunt, you got Solomon's Key, you got Castlevania.

You had Zelda games, you had Mario games, you had all the big Nintendo stars.

So when the Game Boy was coming out, there was a little doubt that this was going to be good.

And the designer behind the Game Boy was this guy named Goompa Yokoi.

And famously, he was one day on a very crowded train in Japan.

And he saw a businessman just kind of poking away at a calculator to kill time on his train ride.

And he thinks to himself, "What if we could actually

have a real mobile game you could take with him on the train?"

One of the great things about the early days of Nintendo is they really believe in R&D and experimentation.

So Goompa Yokoi came up with first the Game and Watch, which was an interesting half-way step between arcade games and home games and portable games.

Goompa Yokoi.

No, Game-Och, not a screen.

It wasn't actually any good, but it was kind of clever and fun and people liked it.

And that was the beginning of Nintendo dipping their toes into mobile games.

And then taking that forward, he evolved that concept that started with the Game and Watch into the Game Boy.

Now you can have all the power and excitement of Nintendo right in the palm of your hand, introducing Game Boy.

Nobody did hype like Game Boy did hype.

It was revolutionary.

It's Nintendo in your hand.

The Game Boy promised to take these games that we love so much and allow us to take it with us anywhere.

If someone came into school with one of them, it was like they were the cool kid.

Everyone was crowding around in the classroom, looking at that thing.

You turned it on and it was like, "Ahhh!"

It's moving and you can do stuff with it.

And I think it's something about maybe the design. It's a very friendly design.

But this thing was made in a day when people were worried about nuclear weapons.

Anything other than direct hit, this thing could survive it.

There's a Game Boy that has survived a golf war bombing and is still playing Tetris today.

Still, the single most indestructible piece of gaming equipment we've ever had.

Durability is definitely vital to the success of any piece of tech, old or new, but is the Game Boy really as tough as they say.

To find out, I've asked YouTube legend and friend Casey Neistat to come meet me at a Brooklyn warehouse.

I don't entirely know what I'm here for today, but Marquez invited me by to play with one of my favorite childhood toys,

which I probably haven't seen since I was 12 years old. That's all I know. That's all I know.

Marquez, why are we doing this again?

Okay, so there's a story of a Game Boy surviving a bombing in the golf war.

And if it can survive that, I kind of just want to know where that breaking point is,

because I feel like it doesn't get much worse than that.

So, Flamethrower, Fire Extinguisher.

I feel like I want to man the Fire Extinguisher here.

Okay, I'll man the Flamethrower first. I'm going to ask for Brian, his assistance for making sure we do this safely.

I'd help you Marquez, but I'm just going to stand over here instead.

You don't want to like, hold on doing everything?

No, no, good. You look great.

All right, so we've got the Game Boy over here.

I just have to trust my aim.

You can count on me, Marquez.

Okay, all right.

That's so much fire!

[music]

Marquez, what happened to your eyebrows?

Not the most comfortable backpack I've ever worn past.

All right.

[music]

I'm burning!

I'm so much anxious.

I think we have our first casualty, everyone.

Okay, here's the thing. The outside is really melted.

So, nearly melted.

Melted charred. The buttons are now black.

It's burned all around too. The flame really encompassed the totality of the device.

It definitely wrapped around and cooked the whole thing.

It also seems like the body was more susceptible to just melting than the buttons.

The real questions are you going to be able to get the cartridge in there.

Oh, that's going to be the hardest part.

It's softened the back.

We need the blow torch again.

Melted it. And now the cartridge might not...

[music]

Maybe you're here.

[music]

Maybe we should... we could just put it on the...

Just try to give it everything you've got.

And that sounds promising.

[music]

Fireball.

[gasps]

Come on!

[laughter]

Are you serious?

What?

Okay, so the screen is toast.

Is it?

The screen is fine.

Oh, the screen under the protector is still on.

I feel like we have a hundred percent functionality.

It completely does everything that it did before it was literally blow torched.

It just smells a little worse.

[laughter]

I'll agree with you on that.

So that's about the most incredible thing I've seen in a while.

That was like 12 hard hits.

I mean, it's not bad.

Impressive.

It's not bad.

Okay, so the Game Boy was undeniably built like a brick,

but the hardware is nothing without software.

So what about the Game Boy experience made it fly off the shelves back in 1989?

A big part of the Game Boy's success is that it was paired with the perfect Game 4.

Game Boy comes with the outrageous new game, Tetris.

Tetris was the game that everybody had to play.

It was super addictive, super easy to get into, difficult to master.

So it's like, oh, maybe I am a gamer.

If I can play this, let me see what else I can play.

Tetris has even a more unusual origin story than the Game Boy.

Tetris comes from the Soviet Union in the early '80s, where computer scientists named Alexi Pajitnov

in his little lab came up with a game that he called Tetris.

What is this?

It's my friends.

It's okay.

And he just made little copies and just kind of started selling it out of the back of the van

and backtracked and tried to get the rights from the Russians later.

That led to a series of lawsuits that fight millions of dollars changed hands

and somehow Tetris ended up on every platform imaginable

and became a part of the daily lives of millions of people around the world.

I have Tetris in my Game Boy.

You have Tetris in your Game Boy, so I feel like we can go back in time a little bit,

because we have the cable.

This is unbelievable.

Tetris was your gateway drug.

There was kid after kids.

You got Zelda, Link's Awakening, Super Mario Land, Metroid.

This is when Nintendo made its way into the American Zeitgeist.

It became the background noise for so many things.

You'd see Hillary Clinton playing one on Air Force One.

Astronauts up in space stations with Sendak photos themselves playing the Game Boy.

It's not going too well.

I think I got your number.

It's lost.

Ah.

Oh, gee.

And if your Game Boy wasn't enough, you could get a host of other weird, wacky and wonderful

add-ons.

♪ I'm your un Game Boy camera ♪

Most Game Boy accessories never really caught on, but the Game Boy had the video game

market share and fan base that could support an ecosystem of third-party accessories.

So, we've tracked down some of the most noteworthy accessories to the Game Boy,

and now I just kind of want to see if there any good or not.

This is Dopernope.

Alright, let's get it started.

First accessory, please.

Okay, we have a handy boy by S-T-D.

Okay.

The slightly lower tech screen was a bigger part of why the Game Boy was so cheap and so appealing,

but if you wanted to play at night, you need some sort of a light to see the screen at all.

Oh, yeah.

That light is good.

There's a flip down, so if I want to do not magnified, I can.

And then I got the speakers that are turned on.

Wow, that's loud.

♪ I can't say I don't like it.

Honestly, if you're looking for, like, one accessory to turn the Game Boy into something

better than it already is, this one's dope.

Alright, what do we got?

This, not a whole lot of English on this box, but this is the

Pocket Sonar.

Let's check this out.

Okay.

Okay, so this is the part that goes into the back of the Game Boy, and this is probably

used a sonar to catch fish.

Do I have any way to demo this right now?

Is there a way to catch fish?

I'm almost scared to ask.

[groans]

So, this won't be painful.

Trust me.

It's just a little sonar.

These menus are not English, so I'm going to go ahead and assume that the first menu

option means start.

I think I would need a deeper body of water for it to actually show the fish.

It's an idea. It's a concept.

But I'm not sure this is going to be winning me any dinners in the next couple weeks, so

basically, a Pocket Sonar.

Nope.

Alright, next up.

Oh, part of the fell off.

The Game Boy camera, which at one point held the Guinness World Record for the smallest

digital camera.

The Game Boy printer and printer paper.

How do I take a picture, though?

Oh, there--wow, that is the viewfinder.

Holy smokes, that is actually not that bad.

And I'm going to go ahead and hit A, and it saves my photo.

That's my selfie.

There's my first selfie on a Game Boy.

So now, I think I'm ready to print.

And now I'm sending the print from the Game Boy to the printer over this cable.

It's like a postage stamp sized little print here.

This is what the final print looks like.

It's not very good, obviously.

So the printer, I'm sure it works better back in the day.

Cool idea, but the execution not so great.

The Game Boy printer, that's a nope.

But the camera, on the other hand, that worked a lot better than I expected it to.

The viewfinder on the Game Boy screen was fine.

I can take selfies or photos of other things with the same camera.

This is really impressive.

That's dope.

The Game Boy is truly an iconic piece of tech, but back in the '90s,

it had to compete with other portable gaming consoles that seemed more state-of-the-art.

The Game Boy was actually competing against systems from Atari and Sega.

They had color screens, just big, loud displays.

Of course, you're like, "Well, I want color, so you're going to go with the Game Gear.

Wrong choice." Because for that color, for that bigger display,

you are paying in battery life.

You want to go with something that lasts long.

The Game Boy was developed with this philosophy that Nintendo really lived by.

It was lateral innovation by withered technology.

And what that meant was that they looked for tech that might have been around for a couple of years,

and the technology was mature enough that they knew how to use it.

So while other companies were putting out systems that seemed much flashier,

they didn't really know how to use all that flash.

Nintendo kind of did what Steve Jobs did years and years later with the iPhone.

They really stripped out a lot of what you didn't need.

It didn't have fancy controls. It had a little D-pad and two buttons,

and that was basically it. It had very simple audio.

And there was a slot in the back for your cartridges, and you will slide it on,

and you just wait for the...

the audio, you can only do basic loops and bleeps, and you go, "Who would want that?"

Well, it turned into a whole music genre that a lot of people love now.

The lo-fi sound of the Game Boy is so iconic that it spawned a whole genre of music called "Chiptunes."

So I've invited a Chiptune artist who goes by Storm Blooper to show me how all this works.

Chiptunes is basically the creation of music utilizing old video game sound chips.

So there's a specific chip in the Game Boy just for the music.

Just for the music, yeah. So it can only play four notes at any given time.

So it's incredibly limiting, but with that, people have made some really insane compositions.

The Game Boy's internal memory is so small that it can only handle a song about eight kilobytes in size.

In other words, one Chiptune song is about 500 times smaller than one compressed MP3.

So how do we get started making a Chiptune song?

Okay, you ready to dive in? I'm actually ready.

You're not familiar with music creation, huh?

Not really. This is all super new to me. I guess I would be going from scratch.

So...

That sounds real good.

Let me change this second note.

Beautiful.

It slaps. It's good. Okay, so far so good.

I'm going to give this this boy back to you. I'm going to let you be.

Alright, let's see what I can do here.

I'm just trying to put together something that flows from top to bottom and doesn't sound like trash.

I'm working on the not sound on the trash part really hard right now.

Okay, alright. I'm almost there with my masterpiece.

How'd I do? I mean, this is...

This is pretty good.

Let's bring in that kick drum too. Ready?

Boom. I can see a whole club bumping into this tomorrow.

I want to see what you've made because this is just me and two minutes messing around,

but you've had way more time and experience.

Let me see what you got.

Okay, let's do it.

[Music]

I definitely didn't expect you could squeeze music this fresh out of tech this old.

Considering the short life cycle of most tech around today,

the legacy of the Game Boy truly feels like something special.

So I guess the last thing I'm trying to figure out is the impact these things had on the tech we have today.

What do you think the Game Boy legacy is?

The Game Boy's legacy, it's hard to overstate.

Without the Game Boy, you don't have the iPhone, you don't have Candy Crush Saga,

you don't have smartphone gaming, you just don't.

The Game Boy single-handedly changed technology forever.

And the Game Boy was the beginning of the idea that everywhere we go in life have a thing in our pocket that you hated and to take us.

I mean, the Game Boy gave us control of free time. It changed what free time was.

You would not see everyone on their iPhones if not for the Game Boy and the huge influence it had on our culture.

And I think the legacy of the Game Boy is that minimalism in technology design is a feature not above.

I think we've now kind of come full circle to the simplicity and the purity of design.

What we saw we emerged with the first-generation iPhone, an absolute straight line that you can trace from day one of the Game Boy.

This is so Zen, right?

So clean and efficient and minimalist.

The Game Boy is so well designed, so simple that you take for granted all the work that went into giving you this piece of tech.

I mean, you sell 200 million of anything, it's tough to say it was not a gigantic success.

The Game Boy, besides being a huge seller, has made all of us into gamers.

And it became this world's wife phenomenon thanks to the Game Boy.

[MUSIC]

So, okay, before all this, I felt pretty disconnected to the Game Boy because I hadn't used one.

But now that I've talked to people who have used the Game Boy and I've used it myself and I've experienced the legend of its durability and its companionship, now I get it.

And not only that, but I also now recognize the connection between the Game Boy and the tech we have today.

Without this, there would be no this or many other pieces of tech we have today.

This is important. Thanks, Game Boy.

[MUSIC]

Hey, what's up, guys? Thank you for watching this special.

It was a lot of fun to make and I hope you had a lot of fun watching it too.

So I have some good news.

Future episodes of Retro Tech will be upcoming in December.

So if you have any suggestions for other pieces of dope retro tech you'd like to see videos on, feel free to drop them in the comment section below.

Let me know.

Until the next one, thanks for watching.

Got you guys later.

Peace.

[MUSIC]

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