Game Boy Camera Guide / Shrine

The Game Boy Camera is exactly what it sounds like.

It was a Game Boy cartridge with a rotating, bulbous camera lens on the top. Released in multiple colors, each one was an exact match for whatever color of Game Boy Pocket you might have had.

While browsing this website, you may have noticed some black and white photos in the sidebar. You've probably guessed that they’re Game Boy Camera photos, and yeah, they’re ripped directly off of my Game Boy Camera. Using one today can be a bit of a pain in the ass. Did you know these things needed to be calibrated? I didn’t. For decades, my camera’s photos looked like complete ass. I figured it’d have been the camera itself, or something involved with the primitive tech. None of that was true though. Basically, over time, it’d wiped its save file and lost its calibration.

There's a lot more to this than just that though. This thing is one of the most complex accessories Nintendo ever released. If you're looking to get in on this, we're the place you want to be. I don't know of anything more in depth online about this thing. Mind you, I didn't look, so whatever.

If you think you can just buy one of these on eBay and be taking pictures immediately after it shows up, I have news for you. Sure, you could, but there're a few things you'll wanna do if you're looking to take decent pictures and keep them long term. Time has made these things both more useful than ever and more difficult to use. It's a weird catch 22. You owe it to yourself to replace the battery and calibrate the camera. Trust me, it'll make your life easier.

The power of commercial jingles is terrifyingly delightful. I remember all the local San Diego jingles from the 1990s like I heard them yesterday. Most of them were for plumbers and A/C guys. Imagine being a licensed plumber and taking the time to hire some dude to write you a jingle for your new commercial. Nobody does that anymore and it’s a clear sign of our country's decline. One commercial jingle that will never leave my brain is the one for the Game Boy Camera. Before the internet ruined everyone’s lives this was how I’d learn about most new things. I was 7 or 8 when it launched, which meant that my brain was primed and ready to remember commercials. “SMILE! YOU’RE ON GAME BOY CAMERA!” Ohhh Jesus please no; get out of my head.

I’m not here to talk about a commercial, but rather, the product the commercial caused me to become obsessed with. Any time I’d pop Nickelodeon on to watch Rugrats or CatDog, that commercial would be there, implicitly begging me to ask my parents to buy me a Game Boy Camera. The answer was no, which I believe came down to an exchange between my mom and I where I professed that I’d use it to take pictures of my ass. I know I remember thinking about how awesome it would be to do that, because I loved screwing with people. Some time shortly after, I happened upon a Game Boy Camera “demo” at some big box retailer. It was blue, and it was housed within a blue Game Boy Pocket. I excitedly tried it out, only to struggle with the menu system. I remember vividly how I was mashing Start, going in and out of that one space menu with the trippy transition effect. I never actually got to take a picture with it because I both couldn’t figure out how, and was enamored by the physical design of the thing. I recall seeing what I presume to be a four foot section stocked full with Game Boy Cameras and Printers. Nintendo was pushing this thing pretty hard. Not long after that, my dad, who for whatever reason would watch UPN in the morning, had left the TV on. There was a weird cartoon, where this kid was running around with two other kids and a yellow mouse thing. It took a few weeks to stick, but that cartoon ended up causing me to forget about the Game Boy Camera entirely. Still, it was more related to the Game Boy Camera than I could have ever known, which blows my mind a little bit.

It’s funny to me how Nintendo’s ambitious Camera and Printer combo would end up being steamrolled by Pokemon, which would go on to accomplish exactly what the Camera and Printer set out to do in the first place. From what I can tell, these over the top accessories were created to breathe new life into the Game Boy brand while Nintendo was finishing up the Game Boy Color. They needed something to remind people that this thing existed. Nobody, and I mean nobody, was talking about Game Boy in 1998. We all had them, but not many people were playing them. After Pokemon came out though? I wouldn’t see such ubiquity again until smartphones became dominant.

I would end up getting a Game Boy Camera around the time Pokemon died out. I had a Game Boy Advance SP at this point. I don’t know what I was looking for but I went into a Funcoland or Gamestop, I don't recall. There was a period where the two were interchangeable. The stores back then looked almost like they do now, gaudy, crap everywhere. But among the crap, I found my Game Boy Camera. it was just hanging there, in a bag ~for $5~. Me, slightly older but still a child, asked the adult I was with for the money,, which they obliged. That was the moment I became the owner of a Game Boy Camera. The same one I’ve had for over 20 years at this point. The same one I’m using now (mostly) to create this entire thing.

To say that this device had an impact on me would be an understatement. I can’t think of many accessories for a console that actively shaped the way I explore the world around me in quite the same way as this dinky little camera did. I learned the basic principle of photography with it, and became obsessed with lighting, which persists to this day, because of how poorly this thing handles that aspect of physics.

These pages are a lot of things. They’ll teach you how to prepare and use this device, and they’ll teach you about aspects of it I never knew existed until sometimes decades later. But more than anything, these pages are a love letter to what I consider to be the greatest video game accessory of all time. If only because of the sheer audacity of it, in combination with the creativity it enables. Creativity is so absurdly important to children's development. To combine fledging technology and the mind of a child is to enable creation that few adults on Earth can imagine possible let alone recreate. You’re talking about giving the human equivalent of a blank slate something that can be used to do almost anything, and they’ll do it.

I would use my Game Boy Camera to make stop motion films with legos, I’d use it to create elaborate nonsense art, and I’d try in vain to use it to make music. All the while, I’d just randomly discover new features literally months and years into using it because the menu system is both the best and worst thing ever. You give a kid this thing, a Super Game Boy, and a VCR, they could easily use this thing to create an animated short. It would look like shit, but it could be done.

Not a bad impact considering it started with a silly commercial.