Do you remember when it could be seen inside a game console?

Soon It was discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen X-rays, gave a unique interview on the subject to an American journalist. The journalist’s first question: “Is the invisible visible?”

Many children around the world began asking a version of this question in 1998 Nintendo he released “atomic purple.” Game Boy coloring. Behind the translucent lilac-tinted plastic shell, the guts of the console were visible: button actuators, conductive membranes, a green daughter board lined with metal, a mist of multi-colored threads. Maintaining this Game Boy Color was like making an x-ray: a set of straight, curved lines, phalanges, and vertebrae — not everything, but enough to consider the space between knowing and the unknown, touch and forbidden. When the screen was turned on with little Pikachu surfing, all the things that weren’t turned on could be seen. The shell was permeable, almost porous; it seemed like an invitation to interactivity. Failure to remove it would invalidate the warranty in this case.

Being a player means owning things in the game, and especially identifying with them. Players are “fascinated by the technology and space they comfort in themselves,” says Taihei Oomori, art director of product design at Sony. When you reveal this space through foggy plastic, “you get even closer to the distance between the player and the game world”.

The Game Boy Color atomic purple was light, illuminated with the same light we saw inside, which satisfied the desire for closeness from the surface. But the core of the machine was never available. The translucent shell is like the magician who calls the birthday girl to the stage: he seems ready to let her into the secret, but all he gets is a different illusion.

Over the past 23 years, all major gaming hardware manufacturers have released translucent designs. From the blue PlayStation 2 glass with the night blue to the green grasshopper Xbox, the exterior of these objects offers an open window to the machinery, and what it means to be a modern game.

In 2001, Nintendo launched the Game Boy Advance with a $ 50 million marketing blitz. In the only TV commercial since then, school children have left a classroom and gone to the local parkour video game store, where their head turns into Mario. Slogan: “Who are you?”

“This advertising campaign basically linked personal identity to brand identity,” says Alex Custodio, a doctoral student at the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Social and Cultural Studies at Concordia University. His book Who are you?, Released in 2020, is about the Game Boy Advance and the subcultures that were created around it. “You were what you played,” Custodio says. You are the hardware you played with. You were the character you played. “

The breakthrough was a couple of translucent flavors, including “glacier” and pink. The visual shell made players feel technical and aesthetic control over their systems, Custodio says, as if they could deify how they rendered all these small nodes and transistors. The Golden Sun.a grassy or grassy town that fills the heart The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past & Four Swords. But that feeling, he adds, was superficial. “He doesn’t really give you anything he promises,” Custodio says. “It gives you the illusion of mastery, transparency and technical knowledge, without giving you more insight than if it were an archetypal black box.” Students in the ad schools did not become special versions of Nintendo. They became the monoculture of the brand’s pets.