There has by no means been a tool with the number of accessories that the Game Boy had. As the primary mainstream portable game console, the Game Boy had the sort of consumer base to aid a great hardware atmosphere, and it got here into being at just the right time to need those forms of add-ons to offer an entire revel in. It becomes an excellent hurricane of hardware that led to a number of the most numerous accessories ever made for a console. Looking lower back, there have been roughly categories that Game Boy add-ons match into: the sensible and the weird.
The practical facet is much less thrilling in hindsight. After all, things like attachable lighting fixtures, link cables, rechargeable battery packs, AC adapters, and display magnifiers all make a positive amount of feel for a device that lacked those modern-day conveniences.
While it’s easy to appearance back now and derides the Game Boy (and its numerous successors) for their reliance on more gadgets, lower back then, it made feel. Nintendo was already pushing the technological envelope to the limit with the Game Boy, and there absolutely wasn’t room for those different capabilities. Throw a backlight at the Game Boy, and it becomes a battery-sucking hog like the Game Gear. The generation at the time wasn’t exactly mature, either: light add-ons for the Game Boy have been basically glorified e-book lighting fixtures that shone down at the display screen, and a chargeable battery p.C. I as soon as owned ended up being so lousy that it was almost well worth simply the usage of batteries instead.
A lot of those bizarre gadgets aren’t around anymore truly due to the fact the generation has advanced beyond it. We don’t want lighting fixtures while our monitors have backlights, as an example. Wi-Fi has changed hyperlink cables (even though not without a detour into an exceptionally weird nearby wireless adapter for the Game Boy Advance), and the life of a machine-stage OS with adjustable accessibility settings and larger screens has killed off display screen magnifiers. Technology getting better through the years is a good thing, and I wouldn’t exchange Wi-Fi or an integrated backlight for the times of vintage.
But we do lose something while we shift away from those accessories. My Game Boy turned into unmistakable mine, with a squiggly red mild and mismatched battery cowl for the rechargeable battery that protruded weirdly from them again. This feel of individuality and customization is largely misplaced in nowadays’s international of homogenous devices. There turned into a kind of magic to Game Boy accessories that let them rework the device you had been using in a bodily manner, like whilst fumbling within the dark for a mild to keep playing after bedtime or in the backseat of an automobile on a protracted street trip or placing together an epic Mario Kart race at camp through stringing four Game Boy Advances collectively.
There’s nonetheless the other aspect of Game Boy add-ons, although, just like the infamously low-decision Game Boy Camera and Printer, the Nintendo e-Reader, and the GameCube / Game Boy Advance Adapter. These projects didn’t are seeking to patch over the Game Boy’s flaws; they sought to increase the Game Boy enjoy in new and innovative methods.
They weren’t always successful. (In hindsight, having to test 5 separate fragile paper playing cards to play Excitebike changed into no longer the fine user experience.) But they challenged the way we idea about our devices and gave them new makes use of and capabilities that the unique hardware ought to most effective dream of. Why now not turn your Game Boy into a camera, a controller for your house console, or regardless of the e-Reader become alleged to be?
Much like how the legacy of the Game Boy and its dream of portable gaming has lived on with the Nintendo Switch, the legacy of out-there accessories that provide new stages of creativity and play nonetheless exists in cutting-edge Nintendo merchandise like the Labo’s cardboard creations or the Switch’s customizable Joy-Con colors. With a renewed awareness on a transportable and modular hardware with the Switch, who is aware of wherein Nintendo will take things in the subsequent 30 years?
