A Perfectly Functional Cheeseburger

The Game Boy Advance had one of the best software libraries any handheld ever shipped: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, Advance Wars, Metroid Fusion, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, the Pokémon generation that gave us Ruby and Sapphire and Emerald—games sitting in the precise sweet spot between Super Nintendo ambition and early PlayStation production, pixel art that knew exactly what it was doing. I played that machine into the ground. More than once.

The SP variant—the clamshell redesign—fixed the one complaint anyone had about the original form factor and became one of the cleanest pieces of handheld hardware Nintendo ever made. Small, durable, backlit. Most of them are dead now: batteries swollen, hinges cracked, screens dimmed from years of being carried in pockets they didn’t quite fit. The plastic wasn’t built for the abuse it received, and it received a lot of abuse.

Swedish artist Love Hultén has been running the opposite operation for years. His work at lovehulten.com is full of vintage hardware given new life through meticulous restoration and redesign—consoles and computers dressed in wood and lacquer and custom molding, functional objects that have crossed over into something closer to sculpture. His latest is the Game Burger: a Game Boy Advance SP rebuilt inside a custom shell shaped and hand-painted to look exactly like a cheeseburger. Sesame seed bun, layers, the whole fantasy. Fully playable. Mario Kart: Super Circuit, Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, Golden Sun—anything the GBA library has to offer, now delivered in burger form.

There’s a specific pleasure in looking at it that I find difficult to articulate cleanly. Two objects with no business sharing the same space, sharing the same space, executed with complete conviction. It shouldn’t work. It absolutely works. Resurrection through irreverence—honestly one of the better approaches to nostalgia I’ve encountered.