35 years ago, on April 21, 1989, Nintendo's Game Boy came onto the market. We take a look back and present you 7 facts on the anniversary of the legendary handheld.
The Game Boy Camera
An absolutely strange add-on for the Game Boy was the Game Boy Camera. It came out in 1998 and was actually the one at the time cheapest digital camera on the market. Simply plug it into the Game Boy module slot and you could not only take real photos with your Game Boy, but also print them out on thermal paper using the Game Boy printer. Well, the motifs are difficult to recognize in black and white with their resolution of 128 × 112, i.e. 0.014 megapixels. Especially this one Lo-fi optics but gives the images a special charm and, yes, cultural relevance.
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Images from the Game Boy Camera are still being shared on social networks today. Artist Jean-Jacques Calbayrac posts images of the Game Boy Camera on Instagram as @gameboycameraman and has even developed a process that allows him to capture color photos using camera filters.
And of course there are a lot of brilliantly crazy mods for the camera. A reduction to normal cartridge size, an LED flash, HDR and panoramic photography, conversion into a webcam, a zoom lens and much more. The GB Camera has even been used for astrophotography. The GB Camera is still loved today and, as with the actual Game Boy, it is the limited options that make it particularly appealing to fans.
The size of games
You probably won't be particularly surprised when I say that the Game Boy games of 30 or 35 years ago were significantly smaller than today's games. But HOW much smaller is something you have to imagine. I don't even want to talk about a current Call of Duty and 100, 200 or more gigabytes. But to make the dimensions clear to you: Zelda: Link's Awakening is one of the biggest games for the classic Game Boy, and even that has it 512 kilobytes Fitted in, so half a MB. With great pixel graphics, fantastic music and lots of gameplay for hours of fun. The remake for the Switch is well over 6 GB in size, i.e. more than 12,000 times!
Many games on the Game Boy were significantly smaller than Zelda IV: DuckTales and Super Mario Land 1, for example 64KB, Tetris and Alleyway even only 32 KB. That is practical nothing. If you access our YouTube channel and of course subscribe straight away, two of the thumbnail images for our videos are already as big as a Game Boy game.
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Raunchy jokes in Zelda
I've already mentioned my love for Zelda: Link's Awakening. In a video on our sister channel Gaming Tips on TikTok – which you should also subscribe to – I explain why, for me, this is the best Game Boy game ever.
What many people don't know is that Zelda IV contains a few raunchy jokes, especially in the German translation. If you spray the stun gun enemies, which can be found east of the starting village, with magic powder, they turn into, I don't know exactly what, but if you said that they were dildos with eyes, I would Don't disagree vehemently.
You can then speak to them and they will then come up with sayings like this “Give me your juice, I’ll give you mine”, that's a quote from a Fantastischen Vier song that's about the exchange of, well, bodily fluids. If you talk to him further, he leaves an even more explicit one “NEVER WITHOUT A CONDOM” in allcaps from the stack. The third time it's a little more peaceful – “Give Peace a Chance” is of course a famous song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
For Nintendo, these sayings were obviously too youth-unfriendly and they allegedly led to significant internal consequences. These references are missing in the DX version that was released later as well as in the version for the Zelda Game & Watch and the Switch remaster. And the teasing “Don't do that, you rascal!” when later in the game you're supposed to bring the mermaid her bikini top but she's submerged in the water, was changed in later versions.
6. LAN party with Game Boys
Some Game Boy games were multiplayer capable. This is what every Game Boy became Game Link dialogue cable supplied. Back then, we always called it a dialogue cable as a matter of course – a strange word after a few decades.
But there was even an adapter for up to four players. One person plugged it into his Game Boy, the other three had to plug their dialogue cable into the adapter on one side and into the Game Boy on the other side. I had one of these, but we only managed to get together once with four friends, four Game Boys and the game F1 Race four times to play it in multiplayer. Greetings go out to Nils, Oliver and Amstein. To be honest, that wasn't that great because the game was pretty mediocre and the cables were extremely short, so we had to sit very close to each other. This was also at a time when we already had PCs and were having real LAN parties.
In this context, there is a now almost forgotten Game Boy game that took several things to the extreme: Faceball 2000, also called Midi Maze! That was, and I'm not kidding, a shooter on the Game Boy where you could shoot smileys in a real 3D maze. Of course, Faceball 2000 had a subpar frame rate and wasn't a really good game. But: It was something special, namely proof that the Game Boy could also do 3D. It included a mode that allowed you to play with up to 16 players by daisy-chaining multiple four-player adapters.
Problem: This technically didn't work with Nintendo's original 4-player adapter. The developers of Faceball 2000 actually wanted to bundle the game with its own multiplayer adapter, but Nintendo apparently didn't allow that. And so this 16-player mode just floated around as a rumor on the internet for many years.
A Reddit user named The Uncle Bob only proved in 2022 that this multiplayer mode really exists and works on real hardware. To do this, he collected this rare game 16 times over the years and modified the multiplayer adapters and Gamelink cables so that you could even play it together with different generations of the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance. What a crazy project!
Game Boy modding
There used to be screen magnifiers for the Game Boy with integrated light or the completely absurd Saitek Booster Boy to transform the Game Boy into a small arcade machine, including a joystick for the digital control pad. From today's perspective, these solutions seem almost simple.
Hardware modding on the Game Boy is still very popular today and is even becoming more and more popular thanks to tailor-made circuit boards, Chinese shops and 3D printing. It starts with case mods, thanks to which you get plastic shells and buttons in a new color or transparent. Let's continue with the display. From backlighting to new displays with IPS or even OLED panels, Game Boys of all series can now be easily upgraded. There are also solutions to the juice question – Li-ion battery mods with a USB port for charging are widespread. and then there are total conversions like the Frogboy, which brings the Game Boy Color into the Game Boy Advance format, among other things. This is a fairly high level of difficulty because you have to do a lot of soldering. Nevertheless, here too: the scene is extremely lively and produces fantastic results.
Conclusion
The term cult is used a bit too often. But for the Game Boy it's just right. 200 million consoles sold, half a billion games sold and a scene that is still active today. This is just crazy. The cultural impact that the Game Boy had and continues to have on gaming history can hardly be underestimated.