The time I was experimenting with retrowave art was shortly after I had been experimenting with pixel art. The obvious thing to do was combine both concpets — Pixel art of retro entertainment.
One of the ideas I had was to do pixel art of various gaming consoles, but make it just off-brand enough that I wouldn’t get into any sort of legal trouble with Nintendo or Sega or whomever. “RetroJoy” was going to be the brand, and I’d come up with other names for the projects, starting with the Nintendo Game Boy, calling it the “GameJoy.” And that’s where these came from:
I’m sure most of you recognize the original Game Boy on the top-left. The rest of the top row is inspired by:
The wireframe Game Boy on its original US Packaging, and the 1995 Game Boy “Play It Loud” series of colors: High-tech Transparent, Vibrant Yellow, Cool Blue, Deep Black, Radiant Red, Gorgeous Green, and Traditional White. I think the pink/magenta one is the 1998 Game Boy Color “Berry” color, and I confused that range of shell colors with those released in the “Play It Loud” release.
The second row is all handhelds modeled after Nintendo’s proper consol controllers: Nintendo Entertainment System, the Japanese Famicom, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Nintendo 64, and the Nintendo GameCube.
I eventually decided that this was all way too similar to the original Game Boy, and scrapped whatever I was going to do with these. But I still like the way these turned out. Especially the high-tech transparent — I actually studied the circuitboard on that particular Game Boy and made a simplified version of what it looked like for this.
Nintendo, Game Boy, and all related consoles and concepts are owned by Nintendo Corporation.