Fan Uses Phone Lens to Shrink Down the Game Boy Camera

The Game Boy Camera is a quirky official attachment for the Game Boy Color that turns Nintendo’s pocket gaming machine into a portable camera. It produces photographs with a distinctive, grainy style that fans of lo-fi photography love. The only problem is that it’s big and ugly. So, modder Christopher Graves set out to fix that.

As reported by Gizmodo, Graves created a custom board to pair the original Game Boy Camera’s sensor with the lens from an iPhone XR. This allowed him to shave down the size of the Game Boy Camera to that of a regular Game Boy cartridge. Graves calls the device the Game Boy Mini Camera, and it works just like your regular Game Boy Camera — plug it into the cartridge slot of your Game Boy Color and start taking shots.

And don’t worry about the mod affecting the quality of the pictures taken. Since the Game Boy Mini Camera is in essence a simple lens swap, the photos it captures are still in the low-resolution, black-and-white look that you know and love.

Christopher Graves is a super-modder and a major fan of the Game Boy Camera. He previously brought us the Camera M, a mirrorless version of the Game Boy Camera made by cramming the internals of a Game Boy and Game Boy Camera into the chassis of a Fujifilm X-E4.