In the early 90’s, Nintendo surveyed Game Boy’s huge success and thought, what if you could work on this thing too? Enter WorkBoy, an accessory that converts Nintendo’s handheld system into an early PDA type. But despite much evidence of the workboy’s existence, it disappeared before it could fall into the hands of productive-minded gamers. Now, a prototype has been found by giving it to us A glimpse of all the address books that may be.
On weekends, Liam Robertson, Video game historian, posted a Video We are reincarnating his dive into the history of the workboy and his search for a lost prototype. He saw that despite constant rumors in the vintage gaming community claiming that Workboy had sold a limited amount, it never came to market.
First trademarked in January 1992, Workboy’s compact keyboard is peripheral, paired with a standard green-screen Game Boy. Users were able to access 12 applications, including a debug, currency converter and calendar.
According to Robertson, a prototype was featured in the CES Electronics showcase in May 1992. After the trade show, the device received some press coverage with Gamezone writing, “Nintendo’s success was evident from the show at CES – it had a virtually complete hangar. By itself, full of its own products and developers’ products. But there was a little on the little fur that was radically different – a little apart from the workboy. The Chicago Tribune was less kind and called the idiosyncratic assistant “ridiculous.”
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During his research, Robertson approached Eddie Gill, founder of Source Research and Development, a company that makes workboys for Nintendo. Gill was able to consider some of the issues that prevented Workboy from bringing it to market and said his goal was to retail somewhere between 79 79 and $ 89. Gill did not have a unit in his possession, But he turned his attention to Frank Balouz, believing Robertson to be the founder of the device maker FabTech, and the only workboy not to be missed in Nintendo’s wallet.
When Robertson finally got his hands on the device, it didn’t work because he needed a cartridge with him to access the software. As luck would have it, there was a huge dump of obscure Nintendo files this summer that was dubbed Gigalek, And Robertson miraculously discovered Workboy software by pulling the leak.
While productivity peripherals can be impressive for its time, limited memory and internet connectivity does not mean that its usefulness is very limited. That is to say, I like the phone book which is designed to allow the user to hold the game boy’s speaker on the receiver of the landline phone to auto-dial the desired number.
Robertson has been on this Workboy Quest since 2019, And he has done a wonderful job of retrieving the story of this lost device. Check out the full video below.
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