In the early 90s, Nintendo researched the Game Boy’s huge success and thought, what if you could work on that too? Enter the WorkBoy, an accessory that converted Nintendo’s portable system into a kind of old PDA. But despite much evidence of the WorkBoy’s existence, it disappeared before it even reached the hands of players concerned with productivity. Now, a prototype has been discovered, giving us a glimpse of all the address books they could have been.
On the weekend, Liam Robertson, a video game historian, posted a video telling his dive into the WorkBoy story and his search for the lost prototype. He found that despite persistent rumors in the old gaming community claiming that the WorkBoy was sold in limited quantities, it never made it to the market.
First registered in January 1992, the WorkBoy’s compact peripheral keyboard connected to a standard Game Boy with green screen. Users could access 12 applications that included a diary, currency converter and a calendar.
According to Robertson, a prototype was presented at CES’s electronics showcase in May 1992. After the fair, the device received some press coverage with GameZone’s writing: “Nintendo’s success was visible through its display at CES – she practically had an entire hangar for herself, filled with her own products and those of the developers. But there was little offer that was radically different – little, except WorkBoy. The Chicago Tribune was less kind and called the idiosyncratic accessory “ridiculous”.
G / O Media can receive a commission
In the course of his research, Robertson contacted Eddie Gill, the founder of Source Research and Development, the company that created the WorkBoy for Nintendo. Gill was able to solve some of the problems that prevented the WorkBoy from reaching the market and said that his product was sold for between $ 79 and $ 89. Gill did not have a unit in his possession, but he pointed Robertson to Frank Ballouz, founder of the device’s producer, Fabtek, and the owner of what is believed to be the only WorkBoy that isn’t locked in Nintendo’s coffers.
When Robertson finally got his hands on the device, it didn’t work because he needed the accompanying cartridge to access the software. Luckily, there was a big dump of obscure Nintendo files this summer that was dubbed Gigaleak, and Robertson was miraculously able to find the WorkBoy software hidden in the leak.
While the productivity peripheral may have been impressive at the time, limited memory and no Internet connectivity means its usefulness is quite limited. I must say that I love the phone book designed to allow the user to hold the Game Boy speaker next to the receiver of a landline to automatically dial the desired number.
Robertson has been on this WorkBoy mission since 2019, and he did a spectacular job retrieving the history of that lost device. Check out the full video below.