Kickstarter is a place where Retro Gaming dreams and aspirations come to life, the projects made by you, the Retro Gaming community who keep the space alive through your genius ideas, exciting peripherals, and methods of preserving the glory days of Retro Gaming. One such project is POCA, an exciting and inspiring book about our favourite piece of camera equipment from our childhoods – the Game Boy Camera.
The project is the brainchild of Glasgow-based illustrator and comic artist Jonathan Traynor, a name that you might have spotted in our very own A Handheld History series as well as featuring in Switch Player, [lock-on], and many other fantastic books and publications in the space. This time, he’s turned his attention to his life in Scotland through the medium of, if not the best, then the most iconic camera Retro Gaming has ever known, showing us the world through the eyes of 90s kids everywhere.
POCA is a small pocketbook that gamers can take everywhere with them. At around 80 pages and A6 in size, it sounds like the perfect collectible for nerds like me to have tucked away for plane and train journeys. Jonathan tells us that it’s a photobook adventure about a pocket camera called POCA who has been asleep in a box for almost 30 years. When it wakes up in a new world, the little camera sets off on an adventure across the world to find out more about itself and to grow into the camera it always dreamed of being. Don’t worry, little camera – you’ll always be more exciting than a DSLR.
As the first edition of Jonathan’s ode to the Game Boy Camera is based in Glasgow, one can only assume that there will be a whole host of editions arriving as he traverses the globe with POCA in hand, bringing a sense of nostalgia back to pockets that are usually full of receipts, dog biscuits, and hankies for the children. It’s a chance for gamers like you and me to think about the good old days and, if nothing else, to reminisce about taking pictures of the cat with the Game Boy camera and maybe even taking it out for adventures again to capture a new generation in the same old grainy footage we know and love. You can support Jonathan on his official Kickstarter page!
Of course, this isn’t the only exciting development surrounding the Game Boy Camera of late; Epilogue, are currently creating a Game Boy Camera webcam to go alongside their GB Operator product line. It’ll certainly make Zoom calls much more interesting, though I’m not sure whether POCA will be as happy taking minutes of a financial meeting as it will exploring Glasgow!
