Released in 1998, the GameBoy Camera was not a great camera, even for the standards of the time.
Plug it into your GameBoy system, and you’ve got an instant digital camera. A very rudimentary camera.
It took photos using only four shades of grey (or whatever not entirely unlike grey colours your GameBoy screen could show you) at a whopping 128 x 112 pixels.
By comparison, the Panasonic PalmCam PV-DC1000 camera, released a year earlier, created images in (admittedly shitty) colour with 320 x 240 pixels. It used two AA batteries and would run them down to zero in about six minutes. Like the GB camera it had no memory card, but could connect to a PC with a serial cable.
Taking photos with the GameBoy Camera is not an easy thing to do. It’s not fast, and it’s not sensitive. You need a lot of light and a patient subject. This photo of Bean was the only one of about ten tries that is recognizably a cat.
And ten is a lot, on a device that only stores 30 photos. Once you fill all 30 spots, you either delete some images – which takes about five seconds each time, or print one on the tiny GameBoy Printer, and then delete it.
If you know what this scene contains, you can almost be impressed with the detail captured in these 14,336 pixels. If you don’t know there’s a monitor on the left side, a receipt printer on the right, you might never figure it out from this image. There’s a person in this image too, but not the spooky one with horns.
The GameBoy Camera was fun, with built in mini-games, stickers, a doodling function, and different frames that could be applied.
But it was cumbersome, slow, and limited. It was hard to see it as more than a novelty.
I almost never used mine, after filling the 30 available slots. But now, 26 years later, the battery still works, the images still exist, and I found a way to download them with a $300 tool and a $3 cable.
The GameBoy Camera sold well. Total sales figures don’t exist, but within three weeks of release over half a million had reached GameBoy systems in Japan. It was released around the world, and it was in production for four years.
That’s a lot of photos taken and smiles made.
