Singaporean student builds a Game Boy out of a watermelon, plays Pokemon Emerald on it in public

Imagine, if you will, that you’re on the MRT train home and a young man toting a hefty plastic bag sits next to you. He casually takes out a watermelon — but a very weird one that has a lot of red buttons sticking out of it. 

It’s some kind of bomb, you might think, considering the contraption’s shape and electronic components. But that brief thought goes away once you see the screen in the middle of the fruit turning on. The young man’s just playing Pokemon Emerald on the world’s first watermelon Game Boy. 

But why would anyone do this? The correct question you should be asking is why not. Singapore Management University student Cedrick Tan is all about having random fun with tech that he can build by himself, judging from his YouTube channel.

While juggling a double major in Business Analytics and Marketing, the 24-year-old full-time student is also helping out at his friend’s early-childhood enrichment centre and crafting projects on YouTube. So far, Tan has turned a card into a blank canvas for augmented reality and found a way to use Microsoft Excel to send messages to Telegram. 

In his latest experiment, Tan basically housed a playable Game Boy Advance inside a hollowed-out (but still fresh) watermelon. 

“It started off as a joke that I was telling friends and family — it just seemed like something really funny to bring about in public and the icing on the cake would be that its green!” Tan told AsiaOne. 

“When it came down to actually making the Melonboy, it happened to be really convenient seeing as the melon was very spacious on the inside allowing me to wire everything up with ease.”

[embed]https://www.instagram.com/p/CENC7smFw3i/[/embed]

It’s pretty simple once you figure out how it works. Using a Raspberry Pi 3 programmable computing board, he ran a Game Boy emulator and loaded it up with a read-only memory (ROM) file of the 2004 Pokemon title. With a power bank, physical buttons, a spare 1.8-inch screen, loudspeakers and a whole mess of wires, Tan fitted it all inside a watermelon with all its flesh scooped out.

According to Tan, the build took him about a month to complete.

“As an Information systems student, I have no background on electrical engineering so learning that from scratch took some time,” he said, adding that it would have been a faster process if the first Raspberry Pi 3 unit he purchased hadn’t turned out to be faulty. When he finally got it replaced, the watermelon-based console was done in less than a week.

The result is an awkward, semi-portable, and most importantly, functioning game console. The best portions of Tan’s video, however, consist of reactions to the watermelon Game Boy in public. A trip to the market saw him playing with the garden-fresh game console among real watermelons, eliciting some weird looks from passersby who could have initially thought he was taking the habit of prodding fruits to the next level. 

As for his off-camera hijinks, Tan told us that he faced a minor hiccup bringing his contraption into the train station — someone had lodged a complaint that he was carrying a watermelon bomb.

“I was greeted by a distressed lady staff who raced down the escalator,” he recounted, remembering how the SMRT employee questioned him on the device. 

After she realised that it was running Pokemon, she asked Tan to accompany her back to the control station to show it to her colleagues. 

“I complied and followed her to the control station. There, the SMRT staff were elated to see the MelonBoy, I showed them the insides and pictures were taken,” he laughed.

Tan also posted about his awkward apparatus on Reddit, where he received a lot of praise and upvotes. Some have already suggested that he build different versions too, including avocados, rockmelons and coconuts.

So..... I made and played with my Watermelon Gameboy around town the other day from r/singapore

Typically, DIY gaming console makers would usually fit Raspberry Pi boards into things like retro arcade cabinets and Game Boy replicas. The downside of using a fruit as the chassis? Decay.

"Sadly the original has kicked the bucket, it rotted four days after I posted my Youtube video," Tan mentioned. But he went out and made another one, which he has been bringing it around just for laughs until MelonBoy rots once again. 

The next project might see Tan tackling on the thorny issue of turning a durian into a gaming console, which could be dubbed "StinkyBoy" or "No Pain No Game". Whatever it'll be, we imagine it won’t exactly be a comfortable handheld experience. 

ilyas@asiaone.com