About Game Boy Crammer

I started Game Boy Crammer after I began collecting old Game Boy cartridges in Japan, back when they were still cheap and plentiful. The low prices made it easy to take chances on obscure games, and some of them had almost no useful information about them online. Eventually I thought: I own all these strange little cartridges, so why not turn the collection into a podcast?

Game Boy Crammer ran from February 15, 2013 to August 1, 2015. I recorded all 51 episodes solo in Nagoya, reviewing more than 200 Game Boy and Game Boy Color games along the way. Every game was played from an original cartridge, although I used an emulator to capture clean music and sound effects. Audio from old television commercials was generally lifted from YouTube with all the archival precision you would expect from one man making a Game Boy podcast at home.

The show also wandered into Game Boy hardware, repairs, modifications, history and whatever else seemed interesting at the time. I composed the opening and section music with a step sequencer on an iPad. For one wah-wah effect, I isolated an instrument, put the iPad speaker in my mouth and went “wowowowow.” This was apparently easier than using an actual effects processor.

I could probably have kept the show going a little longer, but I was beginning to run out of games I genuinely wanted to cover. There were still some good cartridges left, but an advancing wall of Pokémon clones, rudimentary RPGs, board games and miserable movie licences was coming into view. Then I played Judge Dredd. It was so hard and stupid that it made me reevaluate not only the podcast, but possibly the medium of interactive entertainment itself.

This archive also includes Future Jerks, a comedy podcast I recorded with Scott Future from 2012 to 2013. Scott was in Ottawa and I was in Nagoya, so each episode was a trans-Pacific conversation containing occasional insight and a much more dependable supply of inane banter between old men. It ended after Scott had kids and work became busier, making regular recording increasingly difficult. We both wish we had managed to keep it going.

Both shows now survive here in their entirety: 51 episodes of Game Boy Crammer, 19 episodes of Future Jerks, and an alarming amount of evidence showing what we thought was worth discussing in the early 2010s.

If you want to contact me, send an email to typodermic@gmail.com.

Happy Gameboying!

Ray Larabie