北京東四環外，三十五歲的白領杜怡下班后正倒車入庫，他的倒車影像儀是跟了自己二十多年的Game Boy改的。

"Reversing is actually the same thing as playing Tetris, and every time I reverse now, it's like going back to the days when I was a kid poking a little bit on this Game Boy."

Meanwhile, twenty kilometers away, in the evening rush hour subway in Xierqi, Beijing, a tired Wang Xiaoxi pulls out her freshly collected CCD camera and tries to refocus her eyes to squeeze out a glimmer of light — the oily face of a day at work in the frame is all gone under the millennium-style noise.

When hundreds of millions of people in China are swiping 90K ultra-clear images in short videos every day, there is a group of people who are reversely salvaging the technological wreckage of the beginning of the century. Their obsession with modifying the Game Boy and indulging in the 0's glow in CCD camera lenses are becoming the new fashion.

For many post-90s and post-0s, the Game Boy is likely to be the first electronic product everyone owns.

In the era when Game Boy was popular, it was impossible to spend hundreds of dollars in a game that couldn't make a splash. At that time, the slogans of the children in the arcade hall were smashed on the game screen, and they held the Game Boy Advance bought from the front row of the shelves of the Xinhua bookstore and the small store at the school gate all night, stared at its backlit screen, and used No. 5 batteries to keep it alive, and sacrificed him with his declining eyesight.

從GB到GBA再到SP，從俄羅斯方塊、馬里奧賽車到口袋妖怪，皮卡丘的十萬伏特劈開了一個又一個夏天。大家攥著圖元地圖跑遍常青森林；打拳皇搓得手指起泡；用連線線和同桌換寶可夢，傳速慢、卡bug，但對方接收前拔線，雙方都能拿到寶可夢。這是一代人的青春記憶。

"Back then, I was fortunate to have one, and the game I played had a Japanese version of the Three Kingdoms, all of which were pseudonyms, and there were few kanji in addition to the name. But I was stunned to flip the version. And then there's the legendary Pokemon 1 generation. It's also a pseudonym.,It's also a remade version.。 I really admire my perseverance back then. If it is to be used in learning, Tsinghua University and Peking University will definitely be able to do it. Du Yi said.

The Game Boy was able to blow up the rest of the handheld consoles on the market around the turn of the millennium, and it became popular in the Chinese market, mainly relying on battery life - 6 new dry batteries can generally last 0 hours, compared to the Sega Game Gear, a competitor of the same generation, needs to install 0 batteries, and when you go out to play games for half an hour, you need to replace a new battery;

At the same time, the "N-in-one" Chinese pirated cassette is cheap, a loophole in the protection of intellectual property rights in the process of game globalization, making it affordable for the general public in China.

But in 3, Sony changed everything with its own PlayStation Protable gaming handheld, and the subsequent introduction of PSP completely changed handheld games from 0D to 0D. The era of Nintendo seems to have suddenly turned a page.

Despite this, the total sales of the Game Boy have exceeded 20 million units today, making it the best-selling console in history.

Nowadays, when many people are tired of playing the 3D game of chiken dinner in the shrinking world of the drug circle, the Game Boy in 2D has already become a piece of "electronic waste".

"Casio has been reproducing old watches, why can't the Game Boy recreate them?"

不過近年來，這個由十字鍵與像素畫面構成的時代印記，又頻繁開始在社交媒體刷屏——並不是Game Boy推出了什麼新產品，而是那一代“曾經的年輕人”正把閑置了二十年左右的Gameboy改成各種物件。

Reversing camera

I have to say that for a veteran Game Boy player, when the real image of the 1998D world flashes in the yellowed plastic shell, he who is middle-aged must be able to immediately experience the audio-visual synaesthesia when he hides in the bed to clear "Pokemon" during the summer vacation of 0 - at this time he is no longer reversing the car, but starting the lost youth again and again.

More attentive netizens even shared their transformation process on social media:

It simply made me, a liberal arts student, admire me so much

At the same time, cameras, speedometers, screen projection tools, and arcade controllers are also emerging.

It's worth mentioning that the quality of the photos taken by the Game Boy has long been in a class of its own.

The Canton Tower and street signs taken by Chinese netizens after renovating the Game Boy

The actual image of the photos taken by the Game Boy is 128X0, and only supports the fourth order of grayscale (black, dark gray, light gray, white). This is probably the "lo-fi" benchmark in the "history of digital photography". Because all the details are abstracted into a granular dot matrix, it makes people go back to the era of QQ chat rooms in seconds. In order to make the Game Boy take color photos, an American guy used three-color filter paper to shoot separately, and then used the Photoshop channel overlay function to color the photos. This is nothing short of a gentle mockery of "AI-generated pictures".

Nowadays, you can search for a picture in Baidu casually, click on AI repair, and you can complete cyber beauty; Even the dream AI can already instantly generate the perfect avatar of your dreams.

But there are still a lot of people taking pictures with Game Boy. They don't bother with appreciating what texture it produces, but rather with the fact that it can take pictures. In today's era when iPhones can be used to make movies, the quality of Game Boy's photos is indeed "miserable" from a technical point of view. If you use it to shoot a wedding, your mother won't recognize who the groom is, but couples can get a pixel-art wedding documentary.

Netizens show how to put a telephoto lens on the Gameboy

This is a kind of original romance of the Game boy under the limitations of technology, which gives us a unique film texture with a low-definition aesthetic, and to some extent forces us to start filling in those voids and gaps with imagination.

When it comes to recreating the beauty of outdated technology, if the Game Boy's Explosive Party is renewing youth with clumsy handwork, then fans of CCD cameras are looking for memories in retro filters.

作為另一種陪伴中國年輕人成長近三十年的老物件——CCD相機正在小紅書上不斷被曝光。這個擁有著千禧年初家庭相冊的視覺基因的物件，憑藉冷白皮書與噪點的“童年濾鏡”加持，在二手市場不斷溢價，有點正在實現電子永生那意思。

If the group of people who tun the BB machine in 1999 years were CCD, they would have developed by now

CCD (charge-coupled device) was the mainstream sensor of digital cameras in the early days, and it was basically replaced by CMOS after 2010 years. The imaging characteristics of CCD cameras are that the highlights are easy to overflow and the dark noise is grainy, forming a unique "retro lo-fi" effect. Like the Game Boy, it symbolizes the outdated technology of twenty years ago and is a veritable contemporary high-tech outcast.

But in recent months, Xiaohongshu bloggers are using it to shoot "Wong Kar-wai style dizzy light and shadow", and star-chasing girls are using it to "reproduce the backstage photos of idols playing the same song". They no longer use beauty filters to grind the skin on their faces until their pores disappear, but instead pursue a "sense of breath that captures the aura".

This is the truth in the corner of the Internet today - the "lo-fi" craze set off by two old objects has made young people become "garbage guys" again.

Ask those netizens who are keen to revamp Game Boy why they do this, and they will probably tell you that this is a very cost-effective thing.

因為，要玩老遊戲，市面上有各種模擬器與開源掌機；要拍照，NOMO也有Cam Boy濾鏡。自己動手改一台Game Boy，不是划算買賣——海鮮市場購置一台需要小三百元；繼而將經典的背光屏改高亮，換一套透明外殼與按鍵，再加三百。

Netizen "Tp" modified a Game Boy with nearly 600 yuan, specially used to take pictures

At the same time, it is becoming more and more difficult to buy a favorite CCD camera - the current price range of CCD cameras in the second-hand market is 1100-0 yuan, and some discontinued cameras with better quality have even reached tens of thousands of yuan. Take the most sought-after "Sony DSC-W0" as an example, the official new stock machine is priced at 0 yuan, and the price of Xianyu is as high as 0 yuan, and there will even be a "hard to find" situation, and it takes an average of one month to three months to buy a certain model.

So why are there still so many people who are breaking up Game Boy and snapping up CCD?

If you go to the Internet to collect information, you will find that since the beginning of the epidemic in 2020 years, CCD cameras have to become popular again every two years.

This explosion is mainly due to video social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu, which have amplified this wave - the CCD repair tutorials at your fingertips and the introduction of celebrity bloggers are too intuitive on video social media platforms, and the trend has come more suddenly and thoroughly. And this phenomenon also shows that the more iterative and accelerated the technology, the more obsolete equipment can become a trend symbol.

Because their popularity shows that in addition to the absolute meaning of "elimination" and "subversion", people are resisting the fast-forward technological development in a more humane way, and people need more and more "imperfections" to confirm their own existence.

This is the epitome of the contradictions in the development of human civilization - we are constantly pursuing more high-definition and more intelligent equipment; On the other hand, there is a search for emotional compensation in "outdated" technologies.

Behind the periodic explosion of retro trends is the anxiety of human modernity. When we put the Game Boy on the dashboard of our car in '2025, we weren't just rebuilding the equipment, we wanted to reimagine the way people and technology get along.

Because, every moment we need to betray the present with nostalgia and tamper with memories with modifications.

So we will change a Game Boy and buy a CCD, which are all trying to slow down the times in the process of technological frenzy.

Nowadays, cars can drive autonomously, and AI has long entered the field of painting. Human skills are being "taken over" by AI, soldering circuit boards, printing machine shells with 3D, and using different colors of filter paper to give black, white and gray photo colors. These seemingly clumsy "creations" are enough to give people a sense of tangible reality.

It is estimated that the families that install speakers for the Game Boy are all battery factories

This is the same reason that the noise of the CCD camera has been praised by netizens as an "atmosphere" artifact - whether it is the Game Boy or the CCD, the blurry pixels they create seem to be becoming a precious little territory of human imagination in the era of technological upheaval.

Whether you think you are still a young person or not, reminiscing about your childhood and reliving your old life is an important channel to achieve a sense of spiritual belonging, and the Game Boy and CCD have gone beyond simple "old objects" or "electronic waste" for people: we can use the CCD camera to pinch it in between overtime hours to briefly travel back to the student days without KPIs, or we can spend three days to change a Game Boy camera, just to make up for the regret of not having pocket money to buy it in childhood.

——In the ethereal and vast metaverse, holding a little "electronic waste" can always make people more down-to-earth, right?

目前我們正在改造和再利用三十年前的“電子垃圾”，可未來，電子垃圾只會越來越多。到那時，我們區區幾十億地球人類對電子垃圾的人性化改造行為，還會有如今這般的浪漫嗎？

聯合國去年發佈的《2024年全球電子廢物監測報告》顯示，電子垃圾正以每年 260萬公噸的速度增長。

E-waste: Discarded devices (such as phones, TVs, and laptops) with plugs or batteries, but excluding waste from electric vehicles

報告指出，2022 年產生的電子垃圾達 6200 萬噸，足以裝滿 155 萬輛載重 40 噸的卡車；報告預估到 2030 年，電子垃圾年產將達到 8200 萬噸。

尤其令人擔憂的是，在 2022 年產生的 6200 萬噸電子垃圾中，僅有 1380 萬噸（22.3%）被正式記錄、收集和適當回收，電子垃圾的產生速度是回收速度（使用有據可查的方法展開）的五倍。

This is the severity of the phenomenon, maybe one day, when humanity finally converts the original Game Boy in 1989 years into a solar-powered computer; After the Unitree Technology robot dog with one person was abandoned, it began to be changed into a feng shui master for fortune telling; Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus was changed to a cook; Boston Dynamics robot Atlas became a nightclub DJ.

But what about the endless amount of e-waste? At today's recycling rate, it would be better to turn them all into installations, but if you think about it, there aren't so many pavilions that you can put aside.

The exponential speed of technological development has forced human beings who rely on the five senses and six senses to sigh at the rapid change of the times while looking for poetry in the circuit boards of thirty years ago; Ruminating childhood in the noise of twenty years ago. All this is very similar to the mode of struggle in Camus's "The Myth of Sisyphus": knowing that the torrent of technology is irreversible, it is still necessary to give new meaning to obsolete equipment through modification and repurchase.

After all, we need "Breakdown Beauty" to confirm the uniqueness of our existence. This is the renaissance of retro technology in the trendy literary circle; It is also the tragic technological romanticism under the great wave of the changing times.

Finally, allow me to tamper with the plot of Robot Story:

In 2805 AD, human civilization was highly developed, but due to the large increase in electronic waste, the earth was no longer suitable for human habitation. Earthlings are forced to leave their homeland in a spaceship for a long and boundless journey into the universe. Before leaving, they commissioned a commission called WALL· E's robot cleans up e-waste.

WALL· In the process of cleaning up, E found a long-abandoned car, on the car, is a game boy used to display the speed of the car, WALL· E gave it a new battery, fiddled with it for a while, and saw an old pixel text preset by its owner: "We have loved this even more imperfect world with imperfect hardware." ”