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The Game Boy's Hidden Powers, Part 2: Eyes and Ears

Marcel Pflug
1 hour ago
4 min read

Welcome back to The Game Boy's Hidden Powers. In the first part we looked at how a plain grey handheld, built for nothing grander than playing games, kept quietly reinventing itself into something more. This time the theme is the senses. We are going to give the Game Boy eyes, and then we are going to give it ears.

The trick lives in the cartridge slot. From the outside, the Game Boy is sealed and stubbornly simple. There is no camera, no microphone and no sensor of any kind on the machine itself. So how did it ever take a photograph or listen to the bottom of a lake? The answer is that a Game Boy cartridge does not have to be a game at all. It can be a piece of hardware in its own right, and that little slot on the back is really a doorway.

More than a game on a chip

Most cartridges simply held a game on a chip. But because the slot fed power and data straight into the console, some carts could carry extra hardware too: rumble motors, tilt sensors, even little clocks that kept ticking after the power went off. The camera and the sonar took that idea to its logical extreme. Each packed a real sensor into the cartridge and let the Game Boy supply the rest: the screen, the brain and the batteries. It was a clever, thrifty way to build a gadget. Rather than design a whole new device, you could piggyback on the millions of handhelds already sitting in people's pockets.

Eyes: the Game Boy Camera

In 1998 Nintendo released the Game Boy Camera, a chunky cartridge with a golf-ball-shaped bulge poking out of the top. That bulge holds the lens. The camera takes greyscale photos in the Game Boy's famous four shades of grey, at a resolution of roughly 128 by 112 pixels. That is tiny by any standard, yet at launch it was small enough to earn a place in the Guinness World Records as the world's smallest digital camera.

That little ball is the lens. Yes, it spins right around so you can point it at your own face.

The best detail is that the lens ball rotates. Give it a twist and it swings a full 180 degrees to face back at you, so you could hold the Game Boy at arm's length and snap your own portrait. This was the selfie, arriving years before the word existed and long before any phone carried a front-facing camera. For a machine most people thought of purely as a toy, that was a quietly forward-thinking touch.

Each shot was saved onto the cartridge itself, around thirty at a time, and you could fuss over them in the camera's own software with stamps, frames and a handful of hidden mini-games. Better still, you could feed your pictures to the Game Boy Printer and watch them emerge as tiny stickers on a roll of thermal paper. Photos could also be carried across to compatible software such as Mario Artist on later Nintendo hardware, giving those humble greyscale snaps a second life.

Four shades of grey, thirty photos, and an afternoon that vanished before you noticed.

Japan met this gadget first, and under a different name. There it was the Pocket Camera, released the same year. Same swivelling eye, same four greys, just an earlier label for the machine the rest of the world would come to know as the Game Boy Camera.

Ears: the Bandai Pocket Sonar

If the camera is the charming one, the Bandai Pocket Sonar is the eccentric genius of the family. Released in Japan in 1998 and officially licensed by Nintendo, it is a real, working fish finder that slots into the back of a Game Boy. Yes, a genuine piece of angling equipment, driven by a handheld games console.

Somewhere between a toy and a tackle box: the Game Boy that goes looking for fish.

Here is how it works. The chunky, battery-powered cartridge has a sensor on the end of a long cable, kept afloat by a small float so you can drop it over the side of a boat or a jetty. The sensor sends ultrasonic pulses down into the water and listens for the echoes bouncing back. From those echoes the software draws a picture on the Game Boy screen: the depth of the water and any fish lurking in it. Bandai even included a dry bag to keep the handheld safe from splashes while you fished.

It was not all business, though. The software added a fish database to help you identify your catch, plus a fishing mini-game to pass the time when nothing was biting. Guinness World Records recognised the Pocket Sonar as the first sonar-enabled peripheral for a games console, which is exactly the kind of record you would expect it to hold. It works with the original Game Boy and the Game Boy Pocket, but not with the later models that followed.

Senses on a cartridge

A camera and a fish finder look nothing alike, but they share one lovely idea. Each treated the Game Boy as a body waiting for senses, a screen and a brain that only needed the right attachment to see or to hear. Eyes and ears, delivered on a cartridge. It is a neat reminder that console was always far too small a word for this little grey machine.

There are plenty more of these quiet talents waiting in the collection. Come and explore the whole cabinet of curiosities at gameboymuseum.com, and stay tuned for the next chapter of Hidden Powers.