For Halloween 2022, I wanted to bring you the best retro technology, something to see into the other side. The Game Boy Camera was released in 1998 and let anyone with a Game Boy use the funky device as a super portable digital camera. The Game Boy Camera came with a few mini-games, as well as camera modes, stamps and even a drawing tool to doodle on your photos. What Nintendo didn’t want you to know however, is how powerful this camera could be with the right attachments.
The Game Boy Camera
When first released in 1998, the Game Boy Camera was the smallest digital camera available. Plugging directly into the cartridge slot, it let anyone with a Game Boy take some very grainy, low-resolution photos. Its save feature allows you to build an album of 30 photos.
For all its limitations, the Game Boy Camera was cheap at its time of release, portable and made it easy for anyone with access to a Game Boy to start taking photos of their own. The camera system has a resolution of 0.014-megapixels, capturing images in four shades of grey. The camera can swivel allowing you to photograph yourself, which was handy with the included software.
Even with such a unique camera, the included software stands out as being upbeat, quirky and full of off-beat humour. The cartridge allows you to play a variety of mini-games (one is hidden) and explore a variety of shooting modes like timelapse and panorama. With your images saved you can draw and place stamps on them.
The hardware has a lot of limitations, but the camera is still in use by fans today who have developed camera attachments, ways to transfer the photos to a computer and really push the limits of the device. You can read more about it here.
The Ecto Cam
Traded for a weeks worth of amazing lunches, the Ecto Cam is a completely unique device. The attachment is able to amplify the existing infrared capability of the Game Boy Colour. This signal is sent to an advanced image processor attached to the existing Game Boy Camera.
The Ecto Cam features three different lenses. Each one is designed to specifically identify and amplify a different levels of spectral light allowing the camera array to capture images beyond our visual spectrum. The Ecto Cam also sends a pulse of infrared light. The pulse appears on the camera output but is highly effective at honing in on supernatural activity, even in pitch darkness.
