Nintendo handheld Game Boy Color (GBC) was launched in 1998, that would be the Internet is still a new thing, there are no smartphones on the market, but the latest archives show that around the millennium, Nintendo once planned to launch a peripheral Page Boy that can make GBC Internet access, but was eventually cancelled for various reasons.
Liam Robertson, a veteran journalist in the gaming industry, recently revealed details and related images of the Internet peripheral called Page Boy. According to Kotaku, page Boy uses radio transmission technology that allows GC to do web searches, news browsing, magazine reading, checking the weather, sports scores, and even supporting watching live TV. Users with Page Boy can also communicate with each other, which is the technology of the pager (Pager), which was widely used at the time, and the origin of its name.
Robertson interviewed some of the people involved in the development of the Page Boy project to talk about how it was born and how it ended up in vain. It is understood that this device was developed by a third-party manufacturer, and after consultation with Nintendo North America in 1999, the two sides began a three-year research and development process.
Respondents revealed that at that time, the Page Boy prototype had been successfully developed to send images through the Game Boy's camera peripherals, and Nintendo could also send real-time video to all GBC users equipped with Page Boy. But the last key element led Nintendo executives to finally decide to abandon the development of the project.
That is, Page Boy has a fatal weakness: it must rely on existing radio networks that only exist in a few countries and regions in the world to use, which greatly limits the user base of the device. The key to the success of the Nintendo Game Boy is the versatility of its hardware, allowing users around the world to play games with the same features no matter where they are.
Because of this huge flaw, Nintendo finally officially abandoned the project in July 2002. Despite this, many of the avant-garde features in Page Boy were absorbed and adopted by Nintendo in the following years, such as using live video to announce game messages to users became a direct meeting of Nintendo, and having users send messages and cute pictures to each other also became a feature of WiiU and 3DS.
From this point of view, it is precisely because Page Boy's ideas are beyond the times of the time that it did not succeed and became a martyr. The failure of the Page Boy project was similar to the demise of another one at the time called WorkBoy, which could transform the Game Boy into a PDA.