6/3/2008 - The Game Boy Camera Webcam

For every hit product Nintendo releases there are as many forgettable products they would like to bury under the rug. Most of them are peripherals like R.O.B. the Robot, the Gameboy Card Reader, and the Super Scope 6. There was a product that got swept under the sand, but only because it did not live up to its true potential. The Gameboy Camera was a little camera that attached to the Gameboy and could take black and white stills whose quality left much to be desired. There was also a Gameboy Printer accessory that you could get if you wanted a printout of your photos.

All of it was fairly useless other than the aspect of providing a cheap way for kids to get into digital cameras (they were quite expensive back then). However, there was talk about a potential use of the camera that would have made it a must buy. It was sometime before the GoldenEye follow up Perfect Dark was released, and a magazine article said that you could somehow transfer headshots taken with the Gameboy camera and use them as face textures on the characters! Think about it... you could literally be in the game by taking a picture of yourself and transferring the image to the character somehow. This would have made the first-person shooter a whole lot more "first-person", don't you think? Imagine deathmatches where you are literally seeing the face of the person you are playing against and blowing them up with a rocket launcher!

Alas, they never released this feature. I'm not sure if there was an official reason given as to why not, but most believe that Nintendo did not want to get sued if you were putting an image of your school teacher on a character that would be used for target practice. And even though there are video camera peripherals for the XBox 360 and the PS3, they aren't being used for custom face textures of characters. One can only assume that they agree with Nintendo's reasoning for excluding such a feature. That really is a shame for us gamers though.

Even though the Gameboy camera is mostly useless, one creative techie was able to make a webcam out of it. Why? It's just another case of "because I can":