RETRO REVIEW: The Game Boy Light Boy (1990) “You Can’t Stay in the Dark Forever.”
When it came to useless peripherals, the original NES and Game Boy were never in short supply. There were all kinds of third party products attempting to hop aboard Nintendo’s money train at the time, selling themselves as clever new methods of enhancing the gameplay experience with very few of them actually even y’know working properly. Still, a lot of the concepts were cool enough to spark the imagination of even the most cynical grade schooler. Typically they would revolve around some “awesome” new method of control that promised nothing short of stepping into a future world once plugged in. The U-Force had kids waving their hands sans controller into a refurbished battleship folder. Konami’s Laser Scope was an early attempt at manipulating your game’s actions via voice command. And of course there was the immortal Power Glove which if you’re not familiar with, I’ll probably yap at length about somewhere down the line. These are all still cool in theory yet ended up being nowhere near practical which brings me to today’s topic: The Light Boy for Nintendo’s original pea green portable system.
Like every important invention throughout man’s history the basic idea here is a simple one: Let’s make a giant ass magnifying glass with a built-in light bulb that you can latch onto the top of a Game Boy to help provide, y’know vision. Boom. And for the most part the end result worked really well! The muddy, blurred out graphics were now slightly larger and brighter thus “easier” to see and playing under the covers late at night was no longer a pipe dream. Just look at this brilliant piece of advertising below. Pretty much any kid can relate to staying up past their bedtime under the covers with a flashlight reading a comic book or scary story. But the kid here is playing Nintendo with his parent standing there in the bedroom doorway like some kind of 80’s slasher villain. Beautiful stuff.
The first game I remember playing once I got my hands on one of these things was Operation C and what a shocker! The clear visibility vital to a pleasurable gaming experience had finally been introduced. It was obvious nothing would ever be the same. I even started using it in broad daylight after a while, no longer viewing it as just any old “attachment.” In my mind this Light Boy had become a full on extension of the original design. It was a simple, sleek contraption that didn’t look cheap and felt nice and sturdy. In fact that was probably one of the more impressive aspects of it. That you could play a game while walking to catch the bus, realize it had taken off without you, run like a flailing idiot and that little piece of plastic stayed perfectly in place. I was in love.
But of course every rose has its thorn:
Oh, battery life you sure were one harsh and cruel, unforgiving ordeal back in those days. Now I know what you might be thinking by looking at the photo above: “Two AA batteries don’t seem like such a big issue.” Well, the problem is that those are two AA batteries on top of the four necessary to keep the actual system running. That’s six total which in 1990 dollars amounted to like…a lot of money to have hand out on a semi-regular basis. You could only sneak the Duracells out of the TV controller and that weird flashlight in your Mom’s closet so often before it was time to cough up some allowance cash. And woo boy, as a kid I couldn’t imagine a fate more terrible than having to cough up allowance cash for something you actually “needed.”
But outside of that one (largely inconvenient) quibble, there really is a lot to love about this thing. Look at it sitting there plugged in, basking in the beautiful glow of a warm, sunny afternoon. The design is actually kinda cute and it makes the Game Boy look pretty awesome right? The highest praise I can offer here is that the Light Boy is one of the very few non-game Nintendo purchases that I’ll never regret. So what if when in use it made me look like a kid concerned that I wasn’t getting my ass kicked enough during recess? When I walked around with this thing plugged in I didn’t care what anyone thought of me. I was far too cool to be bothered by something so juvenile while stomping on evil mushroom guys and saving entire galaxies.
Even though I guess I probably looked more like this:
