Ten Feet Tall and Still Playing, NickBuilds’ Working Giant Game Boy Color

Nick Alvarez, the electrical engineer and maker who posts as NickBuilds and Nickbuildstuff, decided a regular Game Boy Color was too small for what he had in mind. He built one that stands ten feet tall and still accepts button presses, volume twists, and game input the way the 1998 original did.

Alvarez didn’t actually stuff a real Game Boy Color into this behemoth; instead, it runs other hardware to play the games. Every control on the front works as it should, including the D-pad, A and B buttons, start, select, and that fancy volume wheel. And when he played the fan-made SNES recreation of Donkey Kong Land in the initial clips he shared, the gorilla moved when the huge buttons were touched. The combination of size and function transforms a prop into a working machine.

There was another clip that dropped late August where he gave props to his partner @ppow_creative who worked on the build. Alvarez asked for suggestions, and atomic purple was the early frontrunner, followed closely by the yellow of the Pokémon Special Edition one, then lime green, and even a crazy clear purple that would be just like the originals if the plastic wasn’t so tenacious, but no final color has been determined.

He’s previously stated that he wants matching giant cartridges to go with it, which would be the icing on the cake for the 1998 silhouette, but these days the cart would be the size of a small suitcase and the console would tower over virtually everyone standing next to it. Most of the comments suggest parking it in an arcade or at a convention, with one person on the d-pad and the other on the face buttons. That was never possible with the tiny handheld version.

This is part of a series of giant Nintendo replicas that keep getting taller and taller. Carlini went all out with a PC, emulator, a large screen, and an adaptable controller linked up to plywood buttons, and this one follows the same concept but goes much further in terms of height. The end result is essentially the handheld console that everyone used to carry in their backpacks, but it now takes up the size of a tiny statue while still booting up a game when you hit start.
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