Beyond my obvious interest in all things photography, I do have a couple personal hobbies that I try to keep alive from time to time. One of them that I don’t often discuss is my deep love for collecting and playing vintage video games. I grew up when playing video games was an act associated with immaturity and antisocial behavior, and the fact that not much has changed since the early 90s… well, I tend to keep this one hidden well into my adult years. Generally, people are fairly shocked to find out that I own approximately 40 different consoles with over 900 games between them.  Each fall, I make a trek down to Portland, Oregon to attend the Retro Gaming Expo with my son, getting a chance to hang out with many Alaskan ex-pats that share my passion.

So, of course, I’d jump at the opportunity to fuse my two favorite hobbies: photographic art and vintage video games.

A couple years ago at PRGE, I picked up a 1999 Gameboy Camera for my original brick Gameboy from 1989. I dinked around with it for a while, but quickly lost interest because there wasn’t a practical way of moving the files over to a computer. Sure, I did my Google / YouTube research and found that a third-party MadCatz adapter existed from back at the turn of the century that allowed you to move files from the cartridge to a Windows 2000-only computer with the aid of a serial connection. There were also complex ways of dumping the files from the saved game files through other adapters that required scripting. No – I wanted simple if I was going to use my Gameboy Camera as a legitimate camera.

Through a friend, I heard about BitBoy, a product that connects directly to your Gameboy and allows you to utilize the “print” function to output files to a SD card. After a couple of years were spent debating the purchase due to the relatively steep cost ($100), but I finally purchased it. Now, don’t get me wrong – it’s a niche product that demands a high price due to the size of that market – but I needed to be certain I wouldn’t let it collect dust if I bought it, like so many other crazy ideas from my past (currently considering how much money I spent on that Minox Spy Camera…).

At this point, I’ve only had it in my possession for less than 24 hours and I’m already hooked, looking forward to a trip next month to the Southwest where I’ll have ample opportunity to create with it. The camera is one of the first affordable, commercially viable digital cameras, and so its technical specs can be pretty underwhelming. But therein lies the charm: the Gameboy Camera is capable of a stunning 0.014 Megapixel files, 2-bit color (allowing for four “colors”), a picture size of 128×112 pixels and a wide angle lens with nearly zero adjustable elements. Focus is automatic and the only adjustable elements are a contrast and brightness slider. That all strangely sounds like music to my ears because it matches up so well with my love of alternative and historical photographic processes – using technologies that have been far outpaced by today’s advancements yet finding the beauty in those impressionistic elements.

The gears are moving on this already. I know I’m going to have a blast with this. The challenge of finding subject matter that still works at such a diminutive size and blocky rendering – now that sounds like a pretty tall order!

So, what I’ve got here is a small sample of the first couple shots with my Gameboy Camera – some from the last Photography Untapped meeting but most from a walk around the UAF Quad this afternoon. I’m by no means an expert and these have a long ways to go until I’ll feel comfortable creating with this camera – but it’s got a lot of potential. Thanks to an amazing YouTube video I was able to convert the black and white bitmap images dumped on the SD Card to colors that approximate the green screen of the original gameboy using a gradient map. In the end, when I do print images (oh and I will – likely in Cyanotype and wall-sized!) I don’t know if I’ll try to carry on the color aesthetic or go for a more neutral black and white. I’m also likely to eventually drop the external frame and just print the image.

Thoughts/Comments? Share below!