One of the strangest games in the Game Boy was a Pokemon clone with infrared trading

Many years ago, before AirDrop and Bluetooth, before widespread Wi-Fi and even a very fast remote Internet access, there was the Game Boy Link cable. That's how you got the three entries on your copy of Red Pokémonand that was, at least in my opinion, the only way to bring peer-to-peer connectivity to Nintendo's handheld. I remember having carefully traded pokemon with friends after school, making sure to fill Pokédex entries with each other before we could trade our precious virtual creatures using the Nintendo cable accessory, a device. Pokémon The creator Satoshi Tajiri attributes as inspiration to the virtual worlds between which creatures resembling insects could sneak, like tunnels.

But the connecting cable was only the beginning of the wild and strange experimentation of the Game Boy. In the late '90s, the Japanese video game company Hudson Soft finally came up with a more radical idea of ​​bringing wireless connectivity to the handheld. It would use infrared – integrated directly into the game cartridges. In this way, you can transfer data between two games, or even download data from the Internet, directly to the game. And for some inexplicable reason, I'll I convinced my parents to buy the one and only Game Boy Color game sold in North America to offer this technology.

The system itself was called GB Kiss, named after the delicate physical dance that two players would have to perform to bring the cartridges close enough to allow infrared data transfer. For Hudson Soft, it was an idea with remarkable ambitions. It was still an attempt after nearly a decade to break into the home console market through its partnership with NEC Home Electronics on the TurboGrafX-16, a device that failed to gain ground, but has a vertiginous number of accessories and wild mods.

The goal this time was to create a whole ecosystem of games based on both the infrared transfer game to play and an integrated modem to connect your Game Boy to the Internet, where Hudson Soft has created mini – downloadable games. Yes, there was DLC … for the Game Boy in 1998. What is even more remarkable is that the system was compatible with older hardware, which means that you could connect the original Game Boy , released nine years ago in 1989, until the Internet. There was even a rudimentary form of text messaging in GB Kiss for managing an inbox and sending abbreviated virtual letters.

I have never owned the modem, but I owned the only GB Kiss game to visit the United States. It was calling Robopon, and it was a downright Pokémon scam featuring not cute animals, but animated versions of robots. The cartridge, a rare jet black, was lengthened to fit both the infrared sensor located on the top and the battery of the CR2025 coin cell that was powering it, which component unlike most other Game Boy cartridges, was replaceable by the user on Robopon. In an interesting twist, this allows Robopon games to survive old Pokémon cartridges of the same period.

Robopon was released in North America at the time by the venerable role-playing creator Atlus, who is now best known for making famous Character series and the widest Shin Megami Tensei universe to which it belongs. In Japan, the "Sun" version of Robopon, the only one to travel to North America, was joined by the "Moon" and "Star" versions, a curious prediction of where the Pokémon naming scheme would end nearly 20 years later.

But make no mistake: the game was as close to a Pokémon clone as you like, inspired by the classic SNES RPG Robotrek thrown in as well. Your character, a look-alike for Ash Ketchum called Cody's cannon, even started in his childhood room, and the sprite and menu designs were almost identical to those in Nintendo's captivating series. After the brief introduction, you meet your grandfather, a Professor Oak character who not only offers Cody his very first robopon, a rabbit-like fighter, Sunny, but also entrusts him with a business to manage.

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As the game progresses, you encounter even more borrowed concepts, including the capture of robots in the wild, evolutions and a possible similar to the Elite Four called, no kidding, the Elite Eight. You fought by installing software on your robots to give them special attacks, and you fed them by providing them with new mechanical equipment. There was a sequel eventually developed for the Game Boy Advance that was still moving away from the Pokémon formula but the initial game was very much straddling the coattails of Pokémon developer Game Freak and Tajiri, who became the CEO.

All this makes a lot more sense when you remember that Hudson Soft was simultaneously developing its own Pokémon title for the Game Boy released in Japan the same year that Robopon, in 1998. (The two arrived in North America in 2000.) This title was a version of the card game of the franchise rightly called Pokémon Trading Card Game and modeled almost identical titles from the base series.

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This Robopon was a fearless Pokémon the clone mattered little to me. I was fascinated by the fact that Robopon let me exchange without connecting cables. I somehow convinced one of my friends to also buy the game so we could exchange at school using the GB Kiss system. I remember being amazed that it actually worked, even though it took several minutes of DIY and careful placement of the infrared panels to remove it. The GB Kiss feature not only allows infrared trading, but you can even point your TV remote to the cartridge to unlock special chests in the game and improve your robopons stats.

Unfortunately, the GB Kiss system was short-lived. Apparently, selling video game fans a rudimentary modem for a portable gaming console did not translate into successful sales. Hudson Soft's infrared experience was based on the incorporation of an infrared sensor integrated into the Game Boy Color, released in October 1998, about seven months after the launch of GB Kiss by Hudson Soft and two months before the Japanese release. of Robopon on this same system.

Of course, the infrared came and went on the Game Boy range as well, having only been supported by a handful of titles and gone with the launch of the Game Boy Advance. Infrared will again appear in Nintendo's handheld range just a few years later as an accessory port for the Nintendo 3DS, which used Wi-Fi for almost all forms of data transfer.

But to this day, Robopon and its infrared sensor are linked to good memories of my childhood. It was a time when every year in the video game field was like a huge and exponential jump in what was possible, both in the graphics and the gameplay of the software as in the ambitions of the hardware, which so much was so experimental and so strange that it looked as if it could have been a conceptual work of art from a sci-fi film. GB Kiss may never have taken off, but it's fascinating to know that more than 20 years ago, video game developers were about to consider the situation and were trying to create a future that the industry information technology was barely able to deliver.