You may be cool, but you’ll never be as cool as this certified badass driving an early Z31-generation Nissan 300ZX, blasting down the highway with an original Nintendo Game Boy on the dash reading out your speed in giant blocky green digital numerals. This is the height of Radwood-era cool, and you know it. Nothing could ever top this level of cool.
Today, following my little morning 5K, the Instagram Reels algorithm finally saw fit to serve me a video that was first posted a couple of weeks ago. I don’t pretend to know how these things work, but this video seems like it should have been a direct line drive to my feed. I didn’t even get the video from the original source, it was shared to a only-90s-kids-remember kind of content aggregator account.
I’m a giant dork who grew up playing a medical-equipment-grey Game Boy; thousands of hours and hundreds of AA batteries died in service of my entertainment. I’m also a giant car dork, consuming every piece of automotive media I can get my grubby little mitts on. Oh man, I used to play all the greats back then, and of course Pokemon was my favorite. I was a Charmander kid.
Anyway, this device merely uses the case of the Game Boy for period-correct aesthetics, but the guts have all been hollowed out and replaced with backlit screen solely for the purpose of showing number-go-up and making my smooth brain even smoother. Because the Z31 speedometer was still cable-driven, there is likely some kind of extra sensor added to the car, or perhaps it connects by Bluetooth to a phone in the car to get a GPS speed signal. Either way, it looks really cool, and I dig the hell out of it. I would absolutely use one of these in my 1997 Dodge Neon ACR, and I’d for sure stick my original 1996 Blue cartridge in the back.
Based on the rest of the content posted by zaku_mods, they rebuild and modify vintage tech, so this speedometer Game Boy is right up their alley. If you want one of your own, you can send them a DM on Instagram to put in an order. It looks pretty slick. I gotta get one.