Nintendo Game Boy Color

von Kerim Doğruel

The Nintendo Game Boy Color is a popular video game handheld first sold in 1998. This particular device is decorated with stickers picturing different kinds of hearts that point to the object's biography as a beloved toy and part of a youth culture between the late 1990s and early 2000s. Two stickers override the factory sticker which is the only indicator in which region the device was distributed. Usually, the same hardware is labeled differently depending on the prevailing legal norms of the country or region of distribution. Like other battery powered devices, the Game Boy is stored without batteries to prevent leakage that might hurt users or damage the device through the mildly toxic fluids.

Kerim Doğruel wrote this object text in June 2023 for a pop-up exhibition within the conference "Sticky Films". He co-organised the conference with members of the PhD program Configurations of Film, which took Sara Ahmed's notion of 'stickiness' as a point of departure to discuss histories, theories and technologies of film-making.