Someone Uploaded ‘Tenet’ Onto Game Boy Advance Cartridges
YouTuber Bob Wulff, who runs the channel Wulff Den, has figured out the worst possible way to watch Christopher Nolan’s 2020 blockbuster Tenet. The graphic artist crammed the entire two and a half-hour long film onto a series of Game Boy Advance cartridges. Why, you might ask? According to his video's title, he did it “out of spite.”
Game Boy Advance Video cartridges were intended to fit a couple episodes of SpongeBob Squarepants on them, not an ambitious psychological thriller. It took five separate cartridges to upload the film, because “30 minutes is the maximum time you can have for a Game Boy Advance Video and still have it in somewhat of a watchable state.” For extra accuracy points, Wulff even created custom Tenet Game Boy Advance cartridge stickers.
Watch the absolutely insane video below, which details the intricate process of compressing Tenet from its original form to Game Boy Advance Video:
As explained by Engaget, Wullf had to “crush the video down to six frames per second with a resolution of 192x128 and a whopping 8 KB/s bitrate.” For those who don’t understand what that means, basically the entirety of Tenet was condensed into a much lower-quality video. Wulff’s software also sped up the video a third by default. Fans had already complained about having difficulty hearing the characters’ dense dialogue over the loud background noise. Good luck trying to make out their lines coming from a GBA speaker.
Last year, Nolan advised audiences to see Tenet in a theater setting, where he believed it would best be experienced. “This is a film whose image and sound really needs to be enjoyed in your theaters on the big screen,” he told participants of CineEurope. However, the fact that Tenet was made available on HBO Max resulted in a large amount of viewers watching form the comfort of their flat-screen TVs. But what would Nolan think of a 25-year-old in New York who viewed the entire thing from a tiny LCD screen?
By the way, if you want to watch Tenet on a GBA emulator, you can do so here. Here’s hoping we get to see Denis Villeneuve’s Dune on a Game Boy Advance next.
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