Usually, if you want to try your hand at automotive photography, you’ll go out and purchase an expensive DSLR camera and some even more expensive lenses before heading to a shoot. However, one man tried something a bit different. Conor Merrigan went to a drift event with a modified Game Boy Camera, and it had some quite impressive results.
The Game Boy Camera was first released in 1998 and slid into the handheld’s cartridge slot. That being said, it was not a high-definition camera by any means. The camera took four-color greyscale images at a resolution of just 128x112 pixels. Along with the camera, you could purchase the Game Boy Printer — which is pretty much a receipt printer. Despite the meager specs, the camera gained a bit of a cult following with people who enjoy that retro/vaporwave aesthetic.
So, while Merrigan was going for a certain type of look with his photos, the original specs of the Game Boy Camera weren’t going to cut it. Instead, he used a 3D-printed adapter to fit a Canon DSLR lens to the Game Boy. It provided him with a lot more zoom for better long-range shots, especially when compared to the stock, single-distance wide-angle lens. He also used a special adapter to get the photos off the Game Boy and onto a computer.
Merrigan posted the results on his Instagram page, and well, they are just awesome. Absolute primo aesthetics.
You can see some shots from a drift event in Australia with cars like the S14 Nissan Silvia as the main focal point. It also happens to be about the same age as the Game Boy — a happy coincidence. It’s just delightfully retro in all the best ways — even if this isn’t a past that ever really existed. The wrestling photos do actually look like something out of an early Game Boy video game.
As for specs of the pictures? Well, don’t expect any 3000x2000 pixel photos from this rig. According to Jason Torchinsky, our resident writer who knows everything about ancient technology, the images are 2-bit with four levels of gray. Each photo takes up about 28K uncompressed — so they’re tiny little things.
Here’s hoping we get more rigs and photos like these, because they just fill me up with a warm fuzziness for a past that never really existed in the first place.
You can check out Merrigan’s whole build process here: