Nostalgia: Game Boy Camera

The 8-bit Digital Camera

       If you've played around with the 3DS, you probably have noticed the different kinds of apps that come with it. Some of these apps include a camera, a music and image editor, and a game that puts faces taken with the camera onto the bodies of the enemies. Some of these cool little features showed up in the DSi, but did you know that Nintendo had these features for the original Game Boy?

          Back in 1998, Nintendo released the Game Boy Camera, which was a Game Boy game with an adjustable digital camera on top. The camera shot in monochrome and allowed the user to doodle and decorate the picture with whatever they wanted. The game also included a neat little feature that allowed the player to link the Game Boy Camera to the Game Boy Printer to print out pictures.

        Despite the main draw of the Game Boy Camera being taking pictures, I usually found myself playing the games that came with it. The games menu was actually a game itself named Space Fever II. The game was a side-scrolling shooter that started off by giving the player the option to shoot an enemy that would then transition them to another game. One game was called DJ which was a music creating tool, and the other was the classic Game & Watch juggling game, Ball. If two-thousand points were reached in Space Fever II, another game would be unlocked named Run, which was a race against a bird and a mole. 

        The Game Boy Camera was fun, but also kind of strange. The developers thought it would be funny to add some bizarre Easter eggs and screens. The error screens and menus all had weird pictures and animations that either made people laugh or scream in fear. Take a look at some examples below.

 Print Error #2

      

The "Credits" Screen

One of the photo editing menu screens

        This strange, little art project may not have made waves in the video game industry, but Nintendo seemed to have liked the ideas enough to put them on the 3DS. One might think that Nintendo is just following the trend of putting a camera on every piece of technology, but they did it before it was cool. You could say that Nintendo is just a bunch of awesome hipsters.