Item — HN Reader

Very cool. Another piece of "massively multiplayer" Game Boy trivia that might be of interest:

There is a Game Boy game published in 1991 called Faceball 2000. It's a first person shooter that supports up to 16 players with a homebrew hardware connector. This was even before Nintendo's own 4-player adapter was available for any games. The connector was not Nintendo-endorsed so it could not be shipped with the game but the code is still there in the ROM. Disclosure: I was a programmer at the small company responsible but not the genius himself. You can read a short interview with him here.[1]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100509163809/http://fb2k.retro...

6 comments

The fact that people like you are here makes HN still worthwhile while all other social media networks seem to fall flat.

I’d love to think John Carmack is here among us; cleverly disguised under some cute u/n we’d never get unless it was explained to us.

He is actually here, undisguised and even joins discussions sometimes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=JohnCarmack

Welp; meeting him briefly by accident once was the reason I decided to go straight into the field of development instead of going to school for it around 2008.

I took a moment and read some of his contributions - very fascinating to read his comments on the whole Oculus thing, especially!

Thank you so kindly for sharing that.

The 16-player multiplayer is advertised on the box, but its unclear whether the 16-player Faceball match happened. "Punching Weight" looked into it a while back, apparently some crazy retro nerds managed get a 9-player game running on real hardware quite a while back:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyK-2LWB734&t=42s

Damn, that's like Quake Arena for the GB!

Ahh I loved faceball 2000! I played the shit out of that game when I was a kid! Never got a chance to try the multiplayer, none of my friends had it and that cord was not in the price range of a 3rd grader

Awesome, that was such a strange game.

Hopefully someone forks the Tetris multiplayer to work with this.

16 players on gameboy is incredible, massive props!