My first knowledge of Gameboy was learned in primary school, from my friend sitting behind me. Brandishing a magazine he brought from home one day, he chattered endlessly about the Japanese handheld – how geeky the bluish plastic surface looked like, how incredibly amazing the games must be. Though we spent nearly every second of our Sundays playing PS2, reading manga and sipping lemon soda in the living room of his parents’ apartment, a carry-around cubic gaming machine with a colored display, for us, only remained an unfathomable concept, a dream.

       Our dreams materialized when my friend’s uncle returned from Japan with a Nintendo Gameboy he brought along as a gift. I can still remember how excited we were, staring intently at the Gameboy on the table and did not dare to even open it. When finally we screwed up our courage, plugging in the only cassette we had and flipping open the display, we almost forgot to breathe until the loading was over and a pink, jumpy, round creature started to bounce around, swallowing monsters and flapping its cute little wings. It was Kirby & the Amazing Mirror, the only game we had for that Gameboy, played and replayed until we were able to reconstruct an entire level from imagination.

       I haven’t seen my friend for years, but the simple pleasure that Gameboy and Kirby brought to me tugs at my heartstrings only too frequently. I quench my thirst for good games by laying hands on more advanced machines, by walking through open-worlds created by groups of hundreds of designers. I brought myself as far as I can. I focused my eyes attentively on anything displayed in the world I entered – a piece of delicately rendered leaf, a frog jumping into a river, the groaning of an unimportant character, or even a wrinkle twitched and vanished - but with all these improvements of graphics and twists and turns of storytelling perfected and re-perfected, where’s the simple satisfaction I used to experience so lightheartedly? Most of the triple-A games I played were astonishing, but the experiences seem so similar, so finely tuned and beautifully varnished. They are games cinematized with the same ultimate goal to impress, to surprise, to attract and to brandish. I wondered about games’ unique identity if there has ever been such a thing.

        Luckily, I ran into the concept of indie game. Without financial support from publishers and retailers, a tiny group of people – maybe a single person sometimes – try to bring forth the ideas at the back of their minds, redefining definitions and expanding games’ upper and bottom line. Indie games do not have realistic graphics or stereotypical epic tales. In fact, for reasons like reducing costs and development risks, pixel art of the last generation and scroller level design become the most desirable choice. Some of the developers of indie game have to endure through years of economic plight, quitting their satisfying jobs in major entertainment studios to make the game they personally like.

        Despite all these disadvantages, indie thrived. People must have a lot to say about games and their lives. I know that childish pleasure is not retrievable as I grow older, but this is exactly why I want to make games: to give people the confidence to face their past and, although temporarily, a careless moment they can laugh from the bottom of their hearts.