The Game Boy Color, a classic handheld of the Nintendo generation, was released in 1998, a few years before the earliest smartphones hit the market. At the time, the internet was still fairly new, and the idea of making a portable device that could send emails, search the web, send photos, and view videos had been around for many years.
At the time, Nintendo also planned to release the networking accessory PageBoy on the Game Boy Color, allowing players to work with Mario through this add-on.
Page Boy was unearthed by video game historian, researcher and journalist Liam Robertson. In the video he released, Robertson revealed for the first time a lot of details and images of the device.
The strange device plans to use radio transmission technology to give the Game Boy Color the ability to search for information and read international news, game magazines, weather reports, sports scores, and even watch live TV.
The technology also allows users to connect to other PageBoy owners and send them messages. This radio transmission technology was heavily used by pagers at the time, which is actually the origin of PageBoy's name.
Robertson talked to Nintendo's people involved in the PageBoy project about the device, how it was born, and why it was canceled before it came out. After meeting with Nintendo in 1999, the company was excited about PageBoy's potential, according to people involved.
Over the next three years, Nintendo worked with Wizard, a team that helps manage the device, to see if the add-on would work and if it would be profitable.
While Nintendo was impressed with PageBoy's many features, including the ability to send images using a Game Boy camera, and even the potential for Nintendo to send live video to PageBoy users via radio transmission technology.
But it also ran into a major problem, and the device relies on radio networks in a handful of regions of the world, greatly limiting the device's customer base. According to Robertson, Nintendo believes that the key to the Game Boy's success lies in the versatility of the hardware, which requires users around the world to play games with the same features.
As a result, Nintendo canceled the project in July 2002. However, as Robertson points out, many of the ideas Wizard came up with for PageBoy will eventually become a reality in the years that follow. The idea of using live video to release the game to its fan base was implemented in Nintendo Directs.
And the idea of people sending messages and cute pictures to each other became a feature of Wii U and 3DS consoles. In a way, PageBoy is ahead of its time, too far ahead of its time to see the light of day.
Last year, Liam Robertson shed light on a similar add-on, WorkBoy, detailing the demise of that type of hardware.