Colour Reached the Shell Four Years Before the Screen

Colour Reached the Shell Four Years Before the Screen

Two colours reach my bench more than any others: red, and the clear one you can see through. Both were launch colours in October 1998, so there are simply more of them out there. What they need is almost always the same. The screen has to come out first. On a Game Boy Color the display ribbon is not soldered to the board — it is glued. After twenty-odd years the adhesive lets go, and a column of the picture goes with it. You can heat it back down. It does not hold. So I fit a new screen.

Then I open the battery compartment, and that is where I find out whether the machine has a future. Two AA cells, sitting inside since the day someone stopped playing. If the leak stayed on the terminals, I can clean it. If it reached the board, there is often nothing I can do. The leak is the price of this machine's best idea: Nintendo used a reflective Sharp panel with no backlight, and two AA batteries ran it for about twenty hours. You never had to think about power. So nobody ever took the batteries out.

The colours that arrive most are not the colours that leave fastest. Limited shells move at a completely different speed — the store exclusives, the anniversary runs. On 21 November 1994, four years before any Game Boy screen showed colour, Nintendo had already sold the machine in six shells: white, black, green, red, yellow, transparent. Same monochrome screen inside. Even the standard purple of the Game Boy Color was chosen from an American market survey.

A plain red one takes the same hours on my bench as a rare one, and then it waits. I do the same work on it anyway. Someone out there is looking for exactly that red.