The Game Boy Color installation "was complicated and required a fair degree of dexterity to modify the shells to accept an LCD almost as wide as the console itself," Grimmett says.
Grimmett's shop relied on the AGS-101 display for one of its products, a ribbon cable that adapted the display for use in the older Game Boy Color. In the Game Boy’s heyday, there were no software updates to download, games started up at once, and a fresh set of AAs was all you needed to keep playing all day.Įnter Ben Grimmett, who runs a boutique hardware shop called BennVenn that serves the Game Boy hacking community. Nintendo engineer and Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi famously relied on a philosophy of “lateral thinking with withered technology.” In short, Yokoi preferred to find how far older, cheaper tech could be stretched to still provide hours of Pokémon-catching, Goomba-stomping fun. Always intent on making its game systems affordable and efficient, the Kyoto, Japan-based company has a long history of keeping its consumer products technologically behind the curve in an effort to hold costs down. Today's Game Boy modding scene largely sprang up in response to Nintendo’s own conservative tendencies. Groups of hackers who congregate on the r/Gameboy subreddit, on Discord, on Instagram, and across YouTube have been dragging Nintendo’s tiny, world-beating machine into the 2020s by creating a cottage industry of parts, custom components, and prebuilt modified Game Boys along the way. Rather, these underpowered, inexpensive toys are canvases for creativity and experimentation. And because the system was propped up by Nintendo's thousands-deep library of titles, the Game Boy remains one of the top-selling videogame consoles of all time.īut for a gang of modders and hackers on the internet, these machines aren’t something to be left in the past. It went through seven different design iterations, six of which were sold in the US. From its launch in 1989 until its discontinuation in 2008, Nintendo's handheld gaming device sold hundreds of millions of units.
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