YOU SAY THAT THIS WASN’T IN YOUR PLAN [486]

"You are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute."

Just because the 1993 film “Demolition Man” was intended as more of a crowd-pleasing blockbuster release than other dystopian science fiction films like “Blade Runner”, “Alien” and others not directed by Sir Ridley Scott aspired to be, it didn’t make it any less prescient. 

I had mistaken police sergeant John Spartan’s (Sylvester Stallone) not knowing about the “three seashells”, the mysterious bathroom tools that are never explained, as being no more than a running joke, even making for the final laugh as the credits roll. But if the effect is to make a dinosaur out of Spartan, thawed out of a cryogenic prison sentence to stop similarly old-school terrorist Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes), then viewing it over thirty years later makes dinosaurs of us all.

The film is always set in “the future”, beginning in a 1996 that depicts the Hollywood sign on fire amid rampant lawlessness, a suitably extreme situation whereby cryogenic, mind-rectifying sentences are a logical answer, leading to the repressed, peaceful future of 2032 - as confirmed by prison warden William Smithers, “Things don’t happen anymore. We’ve taken care of that.”

In this future, the hellscape of Los Angeles was supposedly levelled by a 2010 earthquake known as “The Big One”. The new city of “San Angeles” – linked with San Diego and Santa Barbara, and factoring no further into the plot – is layered over the remains, forcing people who don’t assimilate to the new regime underground. The soft and stilted nature of speech, with mentions of “joy-joy”, “be well” and the elimination of the nature of death – “I thought your life force had been prematurely terminated!” – could theoretically be in response to a great trauma that remade society. However, speech is also controlled automatically: even at home, but oddly not in your car, swearing incurs a one credit fine for violating the “Verbal Morality Statute”, although doing it under your breath is half the price.

Everyone is tracked, organic microchips in everyone’s hand, while facilitating a cashless society, also means the police “can zero in on anyone at any time”, although the ineffectual nature of the police, from having so little crime to deal with, means bad decisions are made – attempting to apprehend Phoenix, who has no microchip, relies on a video tutorial consulted at the scene, while using artificial intelligence to work out where he could have gone – find a drug laboratory, then start a crime syndicate – is repudiated by reasoning, like heading to an museum exhibit of firearms. Waiting for Phoenix to kill again wouldn’t be an option now, but human reasoning in 2032 makes it a good place to start.

Police officer Lenina Huxley (Sandra Bullock), someone fascinated by, and authoritative of, 20th century culture, is upbraided by her chief, George Earle (Bob Gunton): “I monitored your disheartening and distressing comments to the warden this morning. Do you really long for chaos and disharmony? Your fascination with the vulgar 20th century seems to be affecting your better judgement. You realize you're setting a bad example for other officers and sworn personnel.” Huxley’s response is rote: “Thank you for the attitude adjustment, Chief Earle. Info assimilated.” And yet, Earle sees no problem in calling Spartan an “animal”, “caveman” and “primate”, just as the city’s leader Raymond Cocteau (Nigel Hawthorne) calls the underground dwellers “scraps”. These slurs are acceptable, as it is only the presence of certain words that earn punishment – Spartan uses the word “dirtbag” in one scene, apparently free of charge.

Huxley is knocked out towards the end in order to have the final showdown between the two hard-bodied men, Spartan and Phoenix, which wouldn’t have happened if Huxley was being played in 1993 by Geena Davis – Bullock’s full action movie career did not start until “Speed” the following year. A separate film exists within this about Huxley rebelling against her dystopian present through her nostalgia for the old times, like an academic version of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” but with more butchered idioms – “He's finally matched his meet. You really licked his ass.” – and more analysis of how people used to behave before making physical contact became taboo: “If you'd read my study, you'd know this is how insecure heterosexual males used to bond.”

You can see where the present day would facilitate some of these elements. The ever-present wall units dispensing paper fines for swearing would be covered by text messages to your phone, acting as the microchip in your hand, its microphone having picked up the word while you reacted to a video tutorial. I am guessing social media, never mentioned, is banned, missing the opportunity to let the people police themselves. I am not sure about the enjoyment of “mini-tunes”, formerly advertising jingles, unless either advertising or capitalism is banned in San Angeles, leaving unironic nostalgic enjoyment – the clipped and abbreviated nature of social media videos, particularly those of TikTok, fit that niche now.

It is insinuated that Cocteau had the right plan at the right time, rebuilding the city, while making the “scraps”, particularly one Edgar Friendly (Denis Leary, playing Denis Leary), the enemy. “See, according to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy. Cause I like to think, I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech and freedom of choice... You wanna live on top, you gotta live Cocteau's way. What he wants, when he wants, how he wants. Your other choice: come down here, maybe starve to death.” He is not a Cocteau-like leader – “I'm no leader. I do what I have to do. Sometimes, people come with me” – but he is portrayed to us as the de facto anti-fascist leader. I expect elections followed later.

I was more impressed with “Demolition Man” in hindsight than I expected, but I still don’t buy Taco Bell winning the restaurant franchise wars. Did McDonald’s lose by changing the Filet-O-Fish again?

THEY SOLEMNLY COVENE TO MAKE THE SCENE [485]

I have only recently become aware of “Loungecore” as a term, because the musical genres of “lounge music” and “easy listening” already exist. “Loungecore” is used interchangeably with “easy listening”, but lounge music predates it, lasting through the 1950s and 60s, with easy listening following into the 1970s.

The suffix “-core”, banding together items with a similar aesthetic, appears here to band together common elements between genres as pop culture history elongates and flattens out, rather than grouping emerging connections before a name suggests itself.

However, I first encountered “Loungecore” in the late 1990s, as the title of a compilation CD of instrumental music by Mexican composer Juan García Esquivel. His style influenced the adjacent genres of “Space Age” and “exotica”, emphasising the music’s intention of taking you to a tranquil place – his piece “Mini Skirt” was being used as the theme tune for the BBC documentary series “Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends” at the time, just as Andy Williams’ “Music to Watch Girls By” was advertising the Fiat Punto supermini. 

Esquivel’s lounge music had interesting arrangements and choices of instruments, more intricate rhythms, and the recordings made full use of the then-new stereo technology. The combined effect, along with various vocalised exclamations of “zoom” and “wow!”, reminded me of Spike Jones and His City Slickers. 

Therefore, my reaction to this music was to sit up and listen, not lie back – it was so unlike pop music, it made itself curious and interesting in was unintended when it first appeared, and fitting with the combination of “lounge” and “hardcore” for I took the CD compilation’s title to mean.

I am not clear why there was a revival of lounge music and easy listening in the 1990s – it may have been general nostalgia and critical re-evaluation of the previous generation, which will have been planted in the 1960s, accompanied by replays of TV series like “Thunderbirds”, “The Avengers” and the original “Doctor Who” series. I am guessing that the success of the compilation album “Carpenters Gold” when released in 2000 was a result of nostalgia sliding along to the 1970s, and into easy listening, and endless plays of the Starland Vocal Band’s languid song “Afternoon Delight”.

Even the use of the words “easy” and “lounge” symbolise my difficulty with listening to these genres as intended. The lush instrumentation inherent in a song from bandleaders like Esquivel, Ray Conniff, Mantovani or James Last only leads me to pay attention to why it sounds the way it does. Like the programming inherent in Muzak and the “beautiful music” radio format that ran in the United States from the 1950s to the 80s, there are reasons behind the music sounding the way it does, or being arranged it does, and it is usually to be appropriated for a specific use, or to deliberately sound “easier” to listen. This is either because I need music to stimulate me, or I find it hard to relax.

The most prominent example of lounge music appearing in the UK charts, as far as I remember, was a result of the deliberately ironic use of the style. The Mike Flowers Pops, an existing covers band in an easy listening style, was engaged to cover the Oasis song “Wonderwall” for Kevin Greening, a BBC Radio 1 DJ whose weekend breakfast show was recounting songs released during. After it was replayed by weekday breakfast presenter Chris Evans as his “record” of the week, demand prompted an official release. The outcome was hilarious: Flowers had as big as hit with “Wonderwall” as Oasis had, with both versions reaching number 2 in the UK singles chart, and both receiving “silver” status for selling over 200,000 copies. The Mike Flowers Pops had two further top 40 hits, with covers recorded under their own steam, before the novelty caused by the irony died down.

IT’S THE GOOD ADVICE THAT YOU JUST DIDN’T TAKE [484]

January 1987

Perception changes everything, so long as you move first. To that end, I propose that Sod’s Law be abolished in 2025, as far as I can manage.

To illustrate, on the one day last week that I needed to start work earlier, my bus didn’t appear, making me late. This was because the bus company decided to start the bus I was expecting, which was in the wrong place, at a later point on its route, so it would still reach its destination on time. I don’t like being made late for anything, and seeing the map on the bus company’s app that tracks the location of each bus played everything out in real time.

This is a perfect example of Murphy’s Law, as coined in 1948-49 by Edward Murphy Jr, an American engineer on experimental aircraft: “If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way.” The further consequences of the decision also apply under Murphy’s Law: the bus I did catch had to pick up all the people that were also missed, slowing the bus down, while standing passengers made physically entering and leaving the bus more difficult, slowing things further. Seemingly more people also paid for their journey using cash over using their phone to hop on and off, and so on and so on.

The Oxford Dictionary may describe Sod’s Law as being the British name for Murphy’s Law - and there is no titular "sod" to speak of - but rather than my bus journey going wrong because anything can go wrong, the way it was exacerbated matches my understanding of Sod’s Law - if it goes wrong, it will happen at the worst possible time, and in the worst possible way.

As much as both Sod’s Law and Murphy’s Law can be delineated as laws of both probability and of expectation bias, I realised my perception was also being stretched by experience. After taking the same route hundreds of times, encountering all possible variations of that journey, I simply give myself the right amount of time to make that journey so I don’t have to expect, anticipate or consider anything at all - I will simply get to work on time, every time, and early enough to mean that I didn’t need to adjust my plans to start work earlier.

And yet, as my journey spiralled, I started bargaining with myself that, at least if nothing further happened, then at least I stood a chance of avoiding arriving late for work. I admitted defeat when I could see there was no way of avoiding the inevitable, and once I finally arrived at work, tired and sweating from the adrenaline of walking the last section of my journey as fast as I could, I turned on my computer and started work… three minutes late.

This is why I want to “abolish” Sod’s Law, at least for myself: not wanting to be late is one thing, and being unable to avoid that can still happen, but passively accommodating the possibility of the worst possible outcome turned out to be the same as fearing it. If something can go wrong, it will, but you can’t then hold yourself at fault for failing to adequately prepare - that creates a situation with no possible end point.

Adopting Murphy’s Law couldn’t come at a better time - in a couple of weeks’ time, the bus drivers will be on strike.

WITH THE SOUND ON THE GROUND [483]

Gatekeepers don’t remove gates until the opportunity for profit arises from selling off the gate.

The decision by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, announced on Tuesday 7th January, to remove much of the rules and moderation policies regarding content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, speaks both of an attempt to see off anticipated regulatory problems with an incoming US presidency that scorns any perceived impediment on “free speech”, and of a decision to save the cost of running the old system by letting end users police themselves through a “community notes” system, already used at Twitter/X for similar reasons.

Social media is a digital simulacrum of a town square that creates a Speaker’s Corner for each entrant, the unspoken price of admission being the intentional harvesting of the data created from any utterance or exchange for profit. I concluded this after having gone through Meta’s settings on both Facebook and Instagram to deny their ability to do anything with data created from my having used their services, or with data they have received from other websites that may have also interacted with me. Meta already cannot use my data to train artificial intelligence engines, because I had already been asked this, and I already said no – why let lazy people use my work to take a shortcut?

I couldn’t care less about any perception of Meta becoming anti-LGBTQ+ regarding what they are now allowing people to say, as people who feel the need to say certain things in the name of debate usually don’t have any trouble saying those things. Worst of all is having someone so identifiable in charge of a public “space”, like Zuckerberg. Perhaps decentralised social media, like Bluesky or Mastodon, is the nearest you can get to a real-life public space.

That’s one thing about rules: we wouldn’t think we’d need them unless we needed them, would we? Society has rules, and the Internet stopped being a “Wild West” when we integrated it into our normal lives. Social media will either need to rejoin society, or be subsumed by it – I have covered this subject too many times to say otherwise.

I wrote this in June 2020: “There will come a time when social media will end – sites will either be legislated out of existence, or people will get bored and wander off. Either extremism and fake news will be dealt with, or people will just have to learn how to speak to each other properly – which they have increasingly been doing via by video conferencing services, like Zoom, FaceTime and Microsoft Teams, instead of social media. This is much healthier than measuring your influence and wealth by how many followers you have. If you really need to let people know what you think about something, get a blog, or ask Google to resurrect GeoCities.”

I also wrote this in January 2022: “If everyone uses social media, we are essentially all in the media business and, therefore, we all should receive media training to fully understand the uses and effects of media, so that we can use it most effectively and mindfully. I think this would press home the importance of acting professionally in the public space created by a media that requires us to act intimately in order to receive the content required to run it. Organisations specialising in media training offer communication skills, interview technique, provide experience in dealing with PR and media relations, and provide “key message development” for the messages you want to get across.”

From May 2017: “In his essay ‘Politics and the English Language,’ published three years before ‘Nineteen Eight-Four,’ [George] Orwell admonished the overuse of flourishes and technical language in English writing, as if any step away from clarity will cloud your intentions straight away. However, when the same essay provides six rules for writers, Orwell was wise enough to use the last rule to say it is better to break the other five ‘than say something outright barbarous.’ These days, the point that makes is more like using social media to immediately say what you feel, without thinking what you are about to post – in other words, Big Brother bellyfeel Twitter.”

COME SAIL AWAY WITH ME [482]

Is it truly possible to “get away from it all”? Not by just going on holiday, but by disconnecting from routine, resisting the need to “check in” at anything other than an airport.

 

I am routinely guilty of checking what I will be coming back to after a week off from work, but I cannot bring myself to delete the app we use from my phone - we are not required to use it other than in the office, but the illusion of “advantage” means it remains on my home screen.

 

The allure of an ocean cruise constitutes the nearest I can physically remove myself from the networks that run everyday life, without the ability to travel into outer space. 

 

Transatlantic travel would be even more effective, removing all intermediary ports of call, and any opportunity for your phone to connect to a cellular network - Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, the only liner currently offering such a journey, is an opulent destination unto itself, and a more than adequate distraction. I clearly need a break if I am thinking about it this deeply.

 

Of course, you would then be subject to the temporary network created by the liner, something once solely constructed and run by a ship’s crew, now supplemented by the online purser’s office of a digital planner service available to passengers using the ship’s on-board wi-fi, booking meals and activities to distribute people around the ship. Cunard’s planner, “My Voyage”, is a web-based outlier in an industry that encourages the downloading of an extra app to access all services, but even while a printed daily programme is still provided to guest rooms, and most services on Cunard ships do not require booking, there is the implication that accessing a network will be easier and more convenient for the smooth running of the liner, and of your trip.

 

Or you could “stay in touch with friends and family with one of our on board internet packages, and discover our top tips for using your phone while at sea”. If you choose to add it to your voyage, Cunard charges $20-28 per day to access Elon Musk’s low-earth-orbit satellite network Starlink, charging the higher amount if you want video streaming in addition to what is titled the “Essential Internet Plan”, which is web browsing, e-mail and social media, like you never left port. 

 

Having paid £7.75 per day for five days to continue using my mobile phone in New York in 2023 strikes me as a different proposition because I was on dry land during that time. I could have used a printed map and guide, but it was crucial that I could react at the same speed as the city in which I was located. At sea, it is more possible to set your own pace, and to put a distance between yourself and that which demands attention now but could wait until later. 

 

Buying the sort of internet access you could find on land means you may as well have taken your holiday on land, because it means you are willing not to take a proper break - you remain on standby, in the middle of the ocean. I need to explore whether the lives we lead – the life I lead – is able to give us a proper break from them.

IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN [481]

Instead of always thinking about the next article, I have been persuaded to look back on my writing in the last year. Without going into all fifty-one of them, I have compiled lists of my ten most-read articles published in 2024 – fortunately, I am happy with the quality of all of them – followed by five that I think should get an extra mention.

I don’t see any deliberate connections between approach or subject matter between them, which is a good thing, as I don’t want to be tied down to a predictable formula. However, I do see that they are the products of reactions, either to personal experience or to the news. There is scope for more approaching subjects in a more creative fashion, and to go into greater depth on some subjects, so do expect some experimentation in 2025 – judging from what topped the most-read list below, I had better start exploring approaches to cybernetics, and the cyber-society in which we find ourselves.

I can see the articles listed below cover a lot of ground, which I hope is an indication of confidence. My five hundredth article will appear here during 2025, most definitely the result of perseverance from week to week. Oddly enough, it is only during this year that a couple of ground rules have made themselves known to me: aim to pass five hundred words, but hope to reach a thousand; and attempt to sum up the point you want to make in the first sentence, like how the below piece about Jaguar began: “Creativity doesn’t have to make sense to you personally, even in advertising.” I may have got that last idea from reading something about Stephen King.

Eight out of the ten most-read articles were been published in the last three months, which I have put down to my having ditched Twitter in favour of Bluesky – my handle is @leighspence.bluesky.social – which thankfully feels like the egalitarian Twitter of old. Having locked my “X” account in response to its owner’s twisting the site’s experience out of all recognition, the switch to Bluesky pretty much confirms that links to external sites from “X” were being throttled – once my local bus company stops using “X” for service updates I am deleting the app altogether. I hope to use social media more in 2025 to let people know what they can find here, now that the dust from the social media square-dance-stampede is settling.

And so, here is the list of my most-read articles published during 2024:

1. LIKE A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM (published 28/01/2024): nailing down a working definition of “cybernetics”, for when I eventually plan to write about cybernetics. With control and communication being key factors across the definitions I found of the word, I can only guess this is a subject that people found important, and not just entertaining to read about.

2. AND NOTHING TO GET HUNG ABOUT (24/03/2024): rediscovering “Seinfeld”, the sitcom that initially made no impact in the UK, having been relegated to midnight screening on BBC Two when Parliament was not in recess, and how it was my little secret before DVDs and streaming made it more accessible. Jerry Seinfeld made some controversial statements when promoting his new film “Unfrosted”, so I guess that added to the interest. 

3. YOU SAW THE WHOLE OF THE MOON (13/10/2024): why did ITV station Meridian Broadcasting use a half-sun, half-moon face to present television in the south of England? See under “things that lived rent-free in my head for years”.

4. BUT STILL THEY COME! (03/11/2024): being bombarded by “Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds” in a busy shop. I don’t think I made clear that I loved listening to the album in full, but that visceral experience in HMV in Oxford Street led me to leave the store empty-handed, hardly the outcome the staff wanted.

5. TOO BUSY DODGING BETWEEN THE FLAK (10/11/2024): Donald Trump is re-elected, but I already talked about him the last time around – unlike him, I didn’t feel like re-litigating the past so, like this list, I linked to what I’ve mentioned before.

6. WE FADE TO GREY (27/10/2024): Fiat won’t sell you a grey car, as it’s not “La Dolce Vita”. This was a case of “I beg your pardon?” upon finding out both that the favourite new car colour in the UK is grey, and that Fiat saw fit to respond.

7. LIKE SUGAR AND SPICE (20/10/2024): Coca-Cola Spiced, a short-lived drink where “spiced” meant “with raspberry”. I had bought the drink, was underwhelmed about it, and with its withdrawal being announced not long afterwards, I could understand why...

8. GONE FISHIN’  (17/11/2024): the nostalgic, Proustian delights of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish – this one literally wrote itself, including the snap back to reality about burgers being a “sometimes” food.

9. BOYS ALWAYS WORK IT OUT (06/10/2024): constructing an article using Brian Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” card set. This one became as much of an introspective work as this article was, and has many lessons for 2025, including: “Don’t give yourself enough time to decipher or question your methods. Ritual leads the way. Deadline is style. You are in there somewhere.”

10. I’LL CALL YOU JAGUAR IF I MAY BE SO BOLD (24/11/2024): the reinvention of Jaguar, after people stopped noticing their cars. I felt indignant about the lazy use of “woke” being used to describe a creative endeavour, regardless of it being one from a multi-billion pound company, and that made this article very easy to write.

...and here is my personal list of honourable mentions:

ON WITH THE SHOW, THIS IS IT (07/04/2024) and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG (14/04/2024): a work performance review leads into a two-part exploration of Bugs Bunny, the witty and fearless cartoon character and queer role model.

SAY HELLO, WAVE GOODBYE (31/03/2024): the death in March 2024 of Wave 105, a very popular radio station that served its local area until its owners realised the license could be fulfilled with less effort, reducing it to local news and ads on a national network. (Since then, two other stations in the same area, Nation Radio and BBC Radio Solent, took on nearly all of Wave 105’s on-air staff, with Nation Radio becoming a more local station in the process – where there’s a will...)

IF YOU’RE ALRIGHT, YOU CAN’T GO WRONG (18/02/2024): celebrating the career of Steve Wright, the immensely popular radio presenter, and discovering how he built the signature sound of his shows. “His public modesty about his own career is admirable, and while he never really got personal on air, you were always left with the impression that he was a thoroughly sincere and hard-working man.”

I'VE SEEN THAT MOVIE TOO (28/04/2024): although prompted by Jerry Seinfeld’s Pop-Tarts comedy biopic “Unfrosted”, the opening sentence, for a look at how Hollywood’s demise has been predicted many time, is definitely that of a film scholar: “To make your debut as a feature film director by declaring the death of the film industry is a trick that Jean-Luc Godard sadly missed.”

DID I TELL YOU EVERYTHING IS FINE (15/09/2024): defining “Pages from Ceefax” as a genre of music, taking in the nostalgia of watching, and listening, to teletext pages filling the gaps between TV programmes.

I WANNA KNOW THE NAME OF THE GAME [480]

Having owned a Game Boy for five years now I appreciate the reliable source of enjoyment and distraction it has been, and I want to keep that experience as long as I can without making any compromises.

My current console is a blue Nintendo Game Boy Pocket, made in around 1997-98. I love its robust build and frugal use of AAA batteries, but I am aware of its biggest limitation, an LCD display with no backlight that also slowly fades with age – playing the Breakout-like game “Alleyway”, I’ve often realised I can’t see where the bouncing ball is going, even when playing in a brightly lit room.

I cannot expect the console to keep working forever, so I decided to take advantage of the growing market in Game Boy clones, arising from the love of the machine, its game library, and the fact that Nintendo built it with largely off-the-shelf components – the Z80-derived processor found in the original Game Boy, Pocket, Light and Color is also found among 1980s computers like the Sega Master System, Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC range.

My first option was to buy another Nintendo console, but not their latest Switch – I already own the games I play, so I don’t need to buy them again from the Nintendo eShop. I bought a Game Boy Advance in 2021, which also plays the original cartridges, but its screen is also not backlit – the later folding Advance SP has both front- and blacklit versions, and accordingly sell at a premium, just like the Japan-only Game Boy Light. Admittedly, I had not done my research, but the Advance was later sold for more than I bought it for, a mark of increasing interest and appetite for these consoles.

My next consideration was a refurbished console. An enormous demand has grown for after-market Game Boy screens – backlit, of course, but only able to approximating screen resolutions – console shells and components. I have no aptitude for this kind of modification and assembly, especially more delicate tasks like connecting a new screen to the motherboard, but the ability to order one, encased in exactly the colour of case and buttons you wish, was very appealing. It is an ideal choice to extend the life of existing Game Boy hardware, if you can look past the age of the motherboards – the last Game Boy Colour was sold in 2003, and the last Advance SP in 2010 – but the rework usually with its own warranty.

I then decided to at all-new hardware. A company named Funny Playing makes the “FPGBC”, a Game Boy Color clone using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip to replicate exactly the original machine’s processors, largely guaranteeing compatibility with cartridges and peripherals. Like refurbishing an existing console, you can buy the FPGBC motherboard, pre-assembled with screen attached, and build your own case around it, or have one built for you. Aside from its using a rechargeable battery, this is the closest available console to the original Game Boy, the perfect choice if you simply want to play games using all-new hardware.

The only reason I didn’t go for the FPGBC myself was seeing the price tick up when I looked at assembly options for the case and button colours I wanted, followed by the cost and time of delivery, because it pushed my expected cost towards the Analogue Pocket, a console produced in limited numbers since 2021 that, while assuming a mostly similar shape and button layout to a Game Boy, uses its FPGA chip to replicate the Sega Game Gear, Atari Lynx, PC Engine and Neo Geo Pocket, although the extra cost of cartridge adaptors made this less desirable. Furthermore, its continued use of a plastic case and similar rechargeable battery like the FPGBC, while costing up to twice as much as one, soured me a bit, high-resolution screen or not – their shipping costs from the US to the UK didn’t help either.

My final option was announced in June 2024. The ModRetro Chromatic comes from Palmer Luckey, a former virtual reality headset designer who got into modifying Game Boys as a teenager, and now owns a company named Anduril, making armed drones – this fact might be a deal-breaker, but the Chromatic, advertised as a strictly limited “1st Edition”, is already sold out as of the time of publication, so it has already become moot. 

The console is built like a smartphone: a bespoke display matching the resolution and colour temperature of the Game Boy Color, rather than appropriating a screen made elsewhere, and encased by sapphire glass; durable clicky PBT plastic buttons, and a painted magnesium-aluminium alloy case seemingly doubling as its warranty, in the hope of making it indestructible. It is completely overbuilt for its purpose, and more expensive than a FPGBC that could do the same job just as well, and while you can connect a USB-C cable to capture or relay the video from the screen, do you really need that?

I pre-ordered the Chromatic four months after it was announced: I surmised that if Luckey wanted to make money from it, it wouldn’t have been made the way it had been, or would cost more than the $199 asking price – I expect future editions will be cost-reduced, and more in line with the FPGBC. 

However, the 1st Edition might be the best Game Boy not made by Nintendo themselves. I bought it in “bubblegum” (pink, with purple A and B buttons), and feels incredibly solid and well put together, although heavier than I was expecting – with cartridge and AA batteries installed, the Chromatic weights 270 grams, versus 160 for a similarly prepared Game Boy Pocket. The crisp, legible and colourful screen is a revelation – the backlight is so powerful that I have it at one level above “off”, so I expect it, and the console, to last a very long time, although my main concern is avoiding any chipping of the paintwork.

In short, buy the FPGBC to enter the world of Game Boy gaming to avoid using old hardware, and if you want a Game Boy Advance, buy a refurbished console if you can, or an Analogue Pocket. If you don’t want to compromise, learn to compromise.