Nintendo almost PC?
Could Nintendo change the future with the WorkBoy keyboard?
When the Game Boy hit the market in the late 1980s and early 1990s, soon things were no longer the same. With Tetris, Super Mario and more, the mini-console captivated a whole generation of young people (and less young people) and became one of the most popular portable entertainment until it was supplanted by smartphones.
The Game Boy's popularity naturally led to others wanting a piece of the pie as well. In addition to the games, a bunch of hardware accessories were created for the handheld console, everything from radios and cameras and even a fish sonar. Some of these sold fairly well, but many did not. And as is usually the case, it is the latter that have become popular among collectors, and for some they are ready to shell out serious sums of money. One of the most sought-after accessories is the Work Boy keyboard, which was much talked about in the early 1990s. It was a small keyboard that connected to the Game Boy and gave the user "serious work". With it, the console could display the world clock, convert between currencies, have a built-in alarm clock, a calculator, a dictionary of common terms and phrases in various languages, and much more. The American company Fabtec, which developed the product in cooperation with Nintendo, saw the target audience in parents who wanted their child to realize that electronic devices are useful for more than just playing.
A lot of professional media wrote about Work Boy at the time, it was also presented at the CES fair and it looked like it was only one step away from the release. But all of a sudden everything fell silent and both Fabtec and Nintendo fell silent. What happened? The answer to the question was sought by the authors of the YouTube channel DidYouKnowGaming. In the almost half-hour video, you will see what one of the two surviving prototypes looks like, how it works, why it was discontinued and also that the successor to the Work Boy was the idea behind the famous Nokia 9000 series of phones.
Source: DidYouKnowGaming?/YouTube
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