The Game Boy had a lot of weird attachments developed for it throughout its life, though not all of them made it on the shelf. Most of them were meant to deal with the handheld’s shortcomings…lights, magnifiers, sound speakers, etc. But one peculiar attachment promised to turn the Game Boy into some kind of early PDA….the WorkBoy, a mini keyboard that plugged into the Link Cable.
The WorkBoy was developed by Source Research and Development, who saw dollar signs in the prospect of expanding the Game Boy’s usefulness. Typical handheld work devices in the early 90s cost a king’s ransom, but a Game Boy and a WorkBoy attachment would take far less out of the wallet while performing the same tasks. The product was shown off at CES that summer, was shown off in multiple gaming magazines including Nintendo Power, and was planned for launch around late 1992 to early 1993. But it never showed up.
Liam Robertson, game historian and host of the YouTube series Game History Secrets (a spinoff of...
