Video game historian Liam Robertson discovers the prototype of an unpublished peripheral of the famous Nintendo laptop that was never put on sale.
After almost 30 years, a curious peripheral for the original Game Boy called WorkBoy comes to light, a kind of complement that turned the popular Nintendo laptop into a kind of mini-computer with functionalities close to the first mobile phones on the market, such as the possibility to save addresses, numbers, contacts and other tools such as a calculator, a word processor or an alarm clock, among others. This is how video game historian Liam Robertson has brought it to light through the YouTube channel specialized in curiosities of the video game industry DidYouKnowGaming?
A whole keyboard for Game Boy
Thus, Liam Robertson has shared an interesting video in which he discovers such a peculiar peripheral through a fully functional prototype that he got from the founder of the company responsible for its design, Frank Ballouz. Baptized as WorkBoy, it was a fairly advanced device for the time in the form of a keyboard that was linked to the console through the Link cable.
Ballouz sent one of the few existing units of the WorkBoy to Robertson to investigate and tinker with the peripheral; Unfortunately, the original cartridge that made this curious device work was missing. Although due to those coincidences of the destination, a few weeks later a leak of Nintendo data was published on the internet that contained files of the WorkBoy software. With the help of the community, Robertson managed to bring the peripheral back to life, as can be seen in the video accompanying the news.
As a curiosity, the peripheral was to be designed by the Source Research and Development company and produced by Fabtek Inc. in collaboration with Nintendo. The patent was registered by Nintendo of America in 1992 and presented to the public at CES that same year; Apparently, it went completely unnoticed, so the project was scrapped without even being commercialized. Its price should be between 79 and 89 dollars.
