Nintendo’s early history as a purveyor of gizmos and gadgets looms large over its modern video game creations. Where competitors present themselves as serious technology and entertainment businesses, Nintendo prefers to blur the line between games and toys. The NES got its entrée into the U.S. market by masquerading as a toy, and Duck Hunt was based on a ’70s light-projection toy. More recently, Nintendo has produced amiibo (toys that unlock bonus features in video games) and Nintendo Labo (toys that control and can be controlled by video games).

But in the company’s 40-plus years of selling and designing video games, perhaps no single product has straddled the division between these two markets quite so brilliantly as the Game Boy Camera, which made its debut in America 20 years ago this month.

At once a practical peripheral and a whimsical time-waster, the Game Boy Camera embodied the Nintendo philosophy of paring down cutting-edge technology to its absolute minimum as a means to foster player creativity. It remains beloved among gaming and photo enthusiasts even now, despite being grossly outstripped in power and capabilities today by the cameras built into even the cheapest disposable cellphone. Indeed, the Game Boy Camera’s appeal comes largely from its stark limitations.

The Game Boy Camera was by no means a first. For one thing, the concept of marrying digital cameras to video games had been around since at least the early ’80s. Williams’ Journey, an arcade title based around the eponymous band, featured digitized likenesses of its namesake rock stars. The original vision for that coin-op cabinet had been to snap low-resolution photos of players (by way of a camera invented by none other than Ralph Baer) to let them place their faces next to their names on the high-score table ... a plan that had been scuttled when test audiences immediately began photographing parts of themselves that definitely weren’t their faces.

The Game Boy Camera didn’t have any built-in safeguards against such abuse, of course, but by 1998, digital cameras had simply become a matter of fact. Consumer-level digital cameras had already been available for several years by the time Game Boy Camera debuted. Among others, Apple and Kodak had been selling a line of cameras under the QuickTake name. With its 640x480 resolution and 8-bit color capabilities, the QuickTake family didn’t exactly threaten contemporary film cameras (especially not with an asking price of $600-800), but it pointed the way to an inevitable future. The multi-megapixel digital SLR cameras that sold for tens of thousands of dollars in the ’90s would eventually become mainstream and affordable, and these pricey cameras defined the future.

In the meantime, though, there was the Game Boy Camera. Priced below $100, Nintendo’s peripheral crammed a simple digital camera into a bulbous variant of the standard Game Boy cartridge. Players could plug the camera into any version of a Game Boy — including the soon-to-be-released Game Boy Color — and use the handheld’s screen to compose and capture photos. Even on a color-capable Game Boy, the Camera worked within the limitations of the original Game Boy’s visuals: Its resolution maxed out at a paltry 160x144 pixels, and it recorded images in 2-bit fidelity (which is to say, four shades of gray). If the QuickTake’s visual capabilities seemed underwhelming compared to cheap 110 film cameras, the Game Boy Camera was laughable next to the QuickTake.

Somehow, though, that worked in the peripheral’s favor. The capabilities of Nintendo’s camera had been stripped down so severely that they went beyond scraping the bottom of the barrel and burst through the other side to be ... kind of cool? Its low pixel resolution and meager grayscale definition gave everything an abstract quality, and the real-time display on the Game Boy screen captured the experience of watching a remote video feed in some gritty sci-fi movie. Photography fans could tweak the brightness and contrast of their images in real time to bring out optimal detail. Despite the severe constraints of the Game Boy Camera, it could be used to create good compositions with a bit of talent and a lot of patience.

The Game Boy Camera’s appeal also resided in the user experience it offered beyond simple photography. Designed by Metroid and EarthBound composer Hirokazu Tanaka, the Camera reflected his avant-garde sensibilities. The built-in software opened with a strange, slightly dissonant musical theme as a digitized photo of a person in a Mario costume (captured with the Camera, one assumes) performed a simple two-frame dance. The photography menu resembled the command interface of a role-playing game, and players could even kill time with a simplistic shooter that had been built into the software. Bizarre photos and audio snippets appeared throughout the Camera’s various functions, lending the whole experience a sense of surreality that complemented the low-fidelity abstraction of its window on the world.

Photo enthusiasts were invited to participate in the Camera’s unconventional worldview by means of the peripheral’s built-in editing software. It was a far cry from Photoshop, of course, but Game Boy photographers could modify their compositions with a variety of simple tools reminiscent of Mario Paint for the Super NES. From dewy anime eyes to fake mustaches, the Camera allowed everyone to add wildly unflattering features and “enhancements” to photos of their friends and family for a laugh. The Camera’s interface proved to be surprisingly sophisticated for those who took time to explore its various features, even allowing for slideshows and batch actions.

To truly complete the Game Boy Camera experience, though, Nintendo wanted you to buy its companion device: the Game Boy Printer. A compact, battery-powered device, the Game Boy Printer used a thermal transfer process to “print” Camera images onto inexpensive strips of paper. The effect was somewhat like printing onto a cash register receipt, but the printer’s paper had an adhesive quality that allowed you to turn your compositions into stickers. In other words, Nintendo sold a pair of peripherals that turned the Game Boy into a portable Print Club station — that is, an equivalent to the digital photo booths that had yet to catch on in the West as of 1998, but which had already exploded into popularity in Japan.

It’s no coincidence that the Game Boy Printer connected to the handheld by way of the system’s Link Cable. The Link Cable interface and communication protocol had been designed by Tanaka as well, back during the Game Boy’s development phase. The Link Cable had just given Game Boy a second lease on life through Pokémon, whose multiplayer battles and trading became a global addiction — one designed specifically around the concept of linking systems. And, bringing things full circle, Tanaka would eventually leave Nintendo to become president of Creatures, Inc., a company that works as Pokémon’s brand manager.

The timing of Game Boy Camera and its printer companion were practically laughable. The Game Boy hardware was 9 years old by that point, and its successor — the Game Boy Color — was only a few months away. Meanwhile, Sega would be launching the Dreamcast in Japan by the end of 1998, effectively kicking off the modern age of console hardware. And here was Nintendo, peddling a grainy camera with storage for a mere two dozen images, powered by a piece of hardware built on ’70s tech. Yet the timing honestly couldn’t have been better. Not only did seemingly everyone and their sibling own a Game Boy in 1998, but those systems were about to come out of retirement for the first wave of Pokémon fanaticism.

The Game Boy Camera made for a perfect complement to Pokémon. It was primitive beyond belief, yes, but in a way that seemed wholly appropriate to the platform. For kids just discovering — or rediscovering — the Game Boy, the Camera gave the system reason to exist beyond dated games and monster collecting. It didn’t hurt that several of Nintendo’s biggest portable releases over the next few years featured Game Boy Printer support, creating a back door through which to lure fans into the add-on ecosystem in which the Camera sat at the apex.

It also didn’t hurt that the Game Boy family’s backward compatibility meant the Camera worked just fine on the Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and even Game Boy Advance SP (albeit upside-down). In fact, Nintendo sold Camera-compatible hardware for a decade beyond the peripheral’s debut.

The Camera has developed quite a devoted posthumous following, too. Ladykiller in a Bind creator Christine Love created a web app called Interstellar Selfie Station, which replicated the lo-fi look of the Game Boy Camera in browsers. Enterprising fans have even designed and sold peripherals to give new life to the Camera. These range from reverse connectors that allow users to shoot right side up on Game Boy Advance SP hardware to SD card-based storage devices that translate the Game Boy Camera’s printer commands into bitmap files.

Despite the nostalgic love that exists for the Game Boy Camera, it’s hard to imagine Nintendo ever revisiting the device in any real way. The Camera’s cool quality emerged from practical, technical limitations defined by the Game Boy hardware and the need to keep the Camera’s costs down. Those restrictions no longer exist, of course, and there’s no reason to imitate them. Anyone can fake the Game Boy Camera look. What made the whole thing so appealing came down to the authenticity of its bare-bones nature: a brave effort to push a creaking piece of hardware to the absolute limit of its capabilities. It’s all well and good to mimic the Game Boy Camera, but only using the original device on actual hardware gives you the sense that you’re getting away with something that should be impossible, rather than slumming it for aesthetic effect.

There’s little doubt Nintendo will come up with a successor to Game Boy Camera someday, but it won’t be anything so literal as a “Game Boy Camera 2.” Rather, it’ll be a gadget that, like the Game Boy Camera, gives players a new and unexpected use for hardware that should seemingly be impossible.