Minecraft shown running on Game Boy Color and Game Boy in 3D with textures — developer coaxed 3D look out of barely-there hardware

Tobias Friedly, also known as Game of Tobi on YouTube, is quite the wizard when it comes to making the seemingly impossible happen on early Nintendo hardware. His latest venture is getting a limited version of Minecraft running on the Game Boy Color (GBC)… but in 3D. As an added bonus, he even got the game working on the original Game Boy in limited fashion, thanks to both machines’ interoperability.

Friedly demonstrated his work in a short YouTube video, where it’s plainly visible that he managed to coax the GBC’s 8×8 sprites into something visually resembling Minecraft in a three-dimensional projection. Although there are no enemies, inventory, or game logic, the feat is exceedingly impressive given that the hardware was never meant to have 3D games.

This is a significant departure from existing Minecraft demakes for old Nintendo gear, seemingly all of which tried implementing the original game’s mechanics in a flat two-dimensional space. Friedly’s project appears to be an offshoot of his existing Minecraft 3D for the Gameboy Advance.

Even with the limited GBC hardware, he even went as far as adding a map generator that can create flat or bumpy maps. Blocks of various types (including portals) can be placed and removed, and he even added the Nether area of the game. Game saving and loading is included, and there’s an option to enable block textures. Predictably the results are a bit iffy given the limited resolution of the display and the inherent difficulty in faking texture mapping with 8×8 tiles.

Despite running at different speeds and color levels, the Game Boy Color and original Game Boy are for the most part compatible, and Friendly even showed that his clone does run on the original black-and-green Game Boy. It’s hard to distinguish blocks on that screen — but it works. If you’re interested in trying it out yourself, download the cart files that Friedly published.