Do you ever wish that everything looked like the Game Boy DMG? Anything that takes us back to the good old days of handheld gaming is a plus in our book, and if you’re going to make a product that can take an absolute hammering, then a handheld with buttons that withstood hours of stomping on Goombas and battling Pokémon should definitely be used as a starting point. Check out the Key Boy designed by a creator on YouTube called ‘The Lesser The Better’, a keyboard that looks like if Kirby ate a Game Boy and a Keyboard and then just forgot to change back.
My immediate thought is that while this looks amazingly nostalgic and would definitely fit the nerdvana vibe of my office, I would struggle to write many words on this thing. Hitting a rounded A button when typing A would be cool for a while and it would definitely sound great, but I’m not sure how typing out 5,000 words would feel. Still, if The Lesser The Better wants to put that to the test, I’m here for it!
Now I know what you’re thinking – ‘how does this thing work, and what’s inside it making it run?’ Well, this is actually a 3D printed outer shell that sits on top of a normal Logitech keyboard, the idea being that by pressing one of the purple action buttons, using the rubber Select/Start buttons, or hitting the D-pad-esque arrow buttons, you hit the corresponding key on the keyboard underneath. For all intents and purposes, it’s similar to the way the GAMEBABY works with Delta on your phone. The keyboard was printed in the same colours as the original Game Boy too, so everything looks like you’re holding a mutant Game Boy.
The Key Baby is currently a one-off prototype made as a concept, but I know a company that could definitely take this idea and run with it. 8BitDo have a great line of mechanical keyboards based on gaming systems, and while we’ve reviewed many such as their C64 Keyboard and their Sega saturn-inspired edition, they have yet to add the Game Boy to the collection. Could this be a potential collaboration that we might see in the coming months?
Check out Key Boy on The Lesser The Better’s channel below!
