Polaroid × Nintendo

Announced June 1, 1991, at the Summer Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, the Instant Boy was the result of eighteen months of quiet meetings between Polaroid's camera division in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Nintendo Research and Development 1 in Kyoto. Gunpei Yokoi's team supplied the enclosure and controls; Polaroid supplied the film path, shutter and a fixed-focus 116mm lens adapted from the Sun 660 range. The brief from Kyoto was one line long: a child who owns a Game Boy should be able to use it without reading anything.

The designers kept the DMG-01 proportions and simply scaled them up by roughly forty per cent to fit a 600 film pack. The screen became an optical viewfinder behind the familiar grey-green window, still framed by the dark grey bezel, but the magenta and navy pinstripes were replaced with Polaroid's six-colour rainbow stripe. The D-pad set exposure, left for lighter and right for darker, with up and down toggling the flash. A was the shutter. Start and Select, the two rubber pills, became self-timer and flash override. The cartridge slot at the top was widened into the print exit.

Because every 600 film pack contains its own flat battery, the camera needed none, which left Nintendo's engineers with an empty rear compartment. They turned it into a sliding drawer that holds exactly one spare pack, marked in the same embossed lettering used on the Game Boy's battery cover. The ejection motor was tuned by Satoru Okada so that its whirr ends on a short two-tone chime, close to the start-up sound of the handheld.

Reviewers were fond of it. Popular Photography called it 'the least intimidating camera ever sold', while Famitsu complained that it could not play Tetris. Sales were strongest in the United States, where it was bundled at Toys R Us with a two-pack of film and a clip-on strap in Nintendo grey.