In 99 we had a sleepover and we’d all trade our best pokemon to one another and pulled the plug out before completion to clone the pokemon.
I have a real job now and do real business deals. Nothing I’ve done professionally has ever felt as official and business like as that one sleepover.
back in the late 00’s there was (maybe still is, who knows) an online service called “gamefly” where you could rent games. At the time the DS pokemon games would allow you to plug in a pokemon GBA cart and copy the pokemon from the GBA to your DS. So I would constantly rent GBA Pokemon games in hopes of finding something good on them to copy to my DS Pokemon game. I had it all scheduled out and everything. You could also wondertrade hacked pokemon or like really good pokemon online. I don’t remember exactly HOW you did it but I do remembering doing it.
Maybe the real business deals would feel more official and business like if you could employ the pull out method with them too?
If only money transfers worked this way…
I send you money, cancel mid way, and now both of us have the money!
I’ve actually heard that’s why overdraft fees are a thing. The money transfer system gets confused if you’re around zero and ends up creating money that doesn’t exist.
I had the green Gameboy, but this makes me wish I had chosen yellow. Yellow looks sharp.
Shout out to all my transparent purple homies.
TETRIS.
I’m sure there were other uses.
Choking your little brother when he beats you at Pokemon?
(I have no idea if that’s how it worked, I didn’t have Pokemon for my Gameboy.)
It was the only two-player game everyone definitely had.
Were there other uses? Yes.
Were they common? Well, just look at the GameBoy pocket. At the time it was designed (it released 7 years after the original GameBoy) there were a lot of people at Nintendo who wanted to get rid of the port entirely because it was barely ever used. They ended up compromising by using a different, smaller, cheaper port that needed an adapter to work with the regular ones.
Which was kind of a pain for some people because the GB Pocket and Pokemon both came out in Japan in 1996 lol.
Oh I remember these. It was hard to get to a seat on the school bus because there were cables connected all across the aisles.
The GBA had a multiplayer Zelda game, and every GBA Mario game came with a multiplayer version of the og Mario Bros. Arcade game.
An even less common connector could be used to connect a GBA to a GameCube. The uses of that one (as far as I’m aware):
- using Pokemon XD to battle two GBA Pokemon games using the GameCube 3D graphics
- a multiplayer Zelda game entirely based around the gimmick of using the GBA as a controller
- using a GBA Metroid to unlock bonus power ups in the GameCube Metroid
Phantasy Star Online and Sonic Adventure 2: Battle used the link cable to GBA for mini games and a portable Chao garden
I think local multiplayer absolutely peaked with the Nintendo DS. The download games where you could play with one cartridge, multiplayer without wifi, pictochat. Today you have to subscribe to shitty online services or at least play through wifi, which completely annihilates the possibility to play in a car, bus or train without a router.
The sweet spot of not needing an adapter for multiplayer, but also only needing one cartridge, and no internet or subscription.
Nintendo fully panicked over the prospect of child predators and put a ton of barriers up for player interaction.
I think it was more about making money with subscriptions by incentivizing getting Nintendo Online to play against your friends. I bet they profited massively during corona from this business model.
Killing Pictochat, Street Pass, and in-game voice chat has nothing to do with subscriptions.
- Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, a multiplayer RPG where each player can control their inventory etc. using the GBA.
- Traveling to an island in Animal Crossing, where you could bury random items and get sacks of Bells in return, up to 10k for a single item.
That’s how I paid off my house.
the link cable is also pretty nice for midi synching
Yeah PVP Street Fighter!
I used that cable for my Gameboy printer more than anything.
I got mine at launch back in '98. Never played Pokemon. I’ll never forgive it for ending the middle school yoyo trend that I was really good at.
Only if you had friends.
I think there was a Bomberman game on the GBA that used the link cable for multiplayer too that I remember playing
Got one for my birthday once and managed to leave on the steps in the breezeway. It was gone inside of ten minutes :(
