GBUDDY’S ESCAPE: WATCH A GAME BOY TEACH ITSELF A MAZE
GBuddy, the museum’s friendly but somehow clumsy museum curator, walks into a wall. He tries again, bumps into it a second time, then trots down a corridor he has already visited twice and, slightly to his own surprise, finds the exit. What looks like a clumsy little robot is a learning experiment, and all of it happens inside a ROM for the original Game Boy.
It hands the screen to a cute little robot that knows nothing about the maze it has been dropped into, and lets it work the way out for itself, one bump at a time. Press START below and watch him learn.
How to use
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Arrow keys move, and page through text
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A confirm
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B back
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Enter pause
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Space change settings
The keys are named after the buttons on the console, so A is the A button and B is B.
BROWSER OR REAL GAME BOY
The ROM runs exactly the same in this browser emulator as on a real Game Boy. Nevertheless, the intention for the experiment is to demonstrate the capabilities of the Game Boy hardware. It can be downloaded free of charge and run on original hardware with a compatible flash cartridge, which is where the experiment feels most at home. A flash cartridge with battery-backed memory is worth looking for: with it, GBuddy keeps what he has learned after the power goes off, so his maze and his hard-won ratings are still there when you switch back on. Testing for this page was done on an EverDrive X7 Pro.