@ A long time ago in the 90s, Nintendo launched the N64 with translucent color shells.

Growing up in the 90s, I have a vivid imagination of technology popping out at you, with life awaiting on the inside. A whole world accessible to you, it was like we were finally on the cusp on the future. Cue the release of Ocarina of Time in 1998. A stack of brand new n64 consoles sat there awaiting at Sam's Club, for a new bunch of owners to have their first jump into 3D gaming! Besides my was my mom, who was wanting to play the new Zelda game that has just come out. Little did I know, I became victim of the Ocarina of Time curse! : O

Tacky Colors

In that pile of n64s were different consoles of various colors, all styled with a neat translucent look. I remember how cool it was to be able to see partially inside of the console. Nintendo were fuckin proud of what they were doing. You also seen other companies such as Apple with the iMac, or Sega with the Dreamcast, try their hand at translucency.

Just look at these N64s! So pretty and bold, Nintendo was definitely proud of this son of a bitch! After all of these years, I couldn't help but wonder. Where did this all come from? And where did it go?

If you couldn't tell, the N64 is very dear and special to me. On that note. I'd like to take the opportunity to thank my Mom, my cousin Brandi,and others for playing Zelda with me when I was younger. It sure was a lot of fun and you all got me hooked on Zelda! Mwahaha We sat together for hours, working through Peach's Castle in Mario 64, scaling Ganon's Tower and overcoming his evil. Even my brother and I playing through Majora's Mask not long after! So many great memories!!!

Anyways. The colors. Why were the colors always so... tacky?

Translucency into another world

A lot of the aesthetics of 3D games these days seem to be associated with this feeling of "another world". And in my opinion, translucent and "friendly" technology designs that were more skeuomorphic.

People in the 90s weren't hooked on the internet yet, let alone computers. It was a different world back then. So product deisgners had to bring a familiarity to things they were working on. Another thing I would like to point out was that there was a hyper focus on "going green", "saving the planet" - or at least as a kid from that time, I remember being pushed on protecting the environment in a dogmatic kind of way. So I'd like to think some of the aesthetics of the futurism in the 90s sense were very optimistic and hopeful.

One would say that they were trying to sell us an extension of our very own selves. "Jump into the world wide web", these are far dated ways of referring to the Internet, but notice how the terminology emphasizes connectivity as an individual. This was freedom. And as tacky as the colors were, I would say the vibe that I remember of the 90s matched that. Though, I'm sure some of my memory is clouded by my adolescence. Speaking of...

Game Boy Color

For my 6th birthday, I got the Berry-colored Game Boy Color. Honestly, what an interesting choice for a color name. Berry, I never thought it matched. But anyways - imagine a hot summer day, chip tunes filling the void, with my brother and I playing Pokemon Red and Blue respectively. He happened to pick up a newspaper route(this was the late 90s, so it was still a thing) and bought himself an adapter for that lit up the screen. It has a not transparent type of plastic that made it look like a water droplet, but not at the same time. That summer my brother had gotten Pokemon Red, then for my birthday later that year, I had gotten Blue! It was cool connecting our GBC's together and dueling, rather than beating each other up over the computer.

You know another thing - each device you had was personal. It was yours. That was part of the emphasis of picking a different color! Imagine if on Switch 2 launch day, we had a choice of different colors/variations (the pikachu N64/GBC come to mind)!

We could then play a game where we guess our friends Nintendo Switch color! : D But yeah - it sure is interesting how we live in a world where the world is in our pocket, yet unlike the Game Boy Color, there's a lack of connection that seems to persist. Conspiracy theory - could the lack of system link(or street pass for that matter) by the reason why we're all so anti social these days? Ah, who nose. The nose knows, though.

Things felt more optimistic

Colors that were used were often brighter shades of white, tacky saturated oranges, reds, blues, etc. Everything felt as though we were supposed to be happy and excited about technology. That it was going to connect the whole world closer together and save the planet from pollution! Heck, I remember a Tomadchi I had that was see through. It eventually stopped working and I took it apart because I've never touched a circuit board with my bare hands before. So clearly there was something to the design language that inspired myself and many others!

So what happened?

Some say technological evolution happened. The original motive for see through casing was to show off the technology and give a futuristic aesthetic. But as technology improved, we began combining everything onto a single chip that does just about everything. And also, with the miniaturization it became more important to make maximum use of space, which rules out the idea of translucency.

See, by the y2k era, people were already getting used to the idea of the Internet. Then, smartphones came and their requirements more or less wouldn't work with what a translucent design would excel best at. Durability, heat conduction, material, all of those factors suddenly become top priority and aesthetics go out the window. And in some cases, its not just all aesthetics, but a specific subset of it. Think about the cultural world we live in - with skeumorphism no longer being a thing. We joke about how the younger generation of the 2020s don't know what a save icon is, or why its a floppy disk. But that is just a sign that we as a society moved away from needing skeumorphism to convey meaning. In my opinion, we've moved away from a human aspect of our tech in this process.

So with that, circuit boards gradually got less and less interesting, and as a result most of what is inside of our pieces of plastic are just flat circuit boards with not a whole lot going on. Now, that isn't completely true, but I do see their point.

Prison Tech

So after the y2k era, the only place one would see translucent style tech was in prisons. I must say, its pretty fascinating how we went from a something that gave a sense of freedom fall to obscurity in jail cells.

As you can see - pretty low tech and intentionally designed to be as viisble as possible. In prisons, I suppose one of their concerns with technology in a prison setting is that one could easily potentially hide something inside the tech. Honestly, I feel like there are 100 better other places to do that. So, I don't really know what to think about these obscure things. Not only are they hard to find, but if you buy a laptop and happen to share online about how to unlock its BIOS , you may just make the tech vendor change their default BIOS password.

Securebook is a notorious maker of these kinds of laptops for incarcerated students, among other things. They began life in 2018 and exploded in popularity in the 202s after the jailbreaking incident I referenced earlier. Which strikes me as funny, because to do the jailbreak you would need to have acecess to things that just aren't easily accessible in prisons. For example, taking apart the laptop as the first initial step you need to do. I believe you have to jump two solder points for the BIOS flash to even work, so you would also need to have a working soldering iron and solder. There's just no easy substitude for those so I feel their concerns are blown out of proportion. Having smartphones in prison are more of an issue in that regard than these laptops, let alone jailbreaking them. I wonder how much these devices cost to produce vs. how much they're sold for. But anyways, I'm going on a tangent.

Is that really all there is to it?

Well. Sort of? There are other considerations to make, such as economics, and also design language. As we've all noticed, a lot of the web has turned into a samey type of aesthetic where everyone and everything looks the same! Remember when YouTube on iPhone was an actual tube TV? Pepridge farm remembers. : )

Looking Forward

There has been a resurgence of translucent technology. Take for example - the Sony Inzone Buds in translucent purple goodness. They clearly knew what they were doing here haha!

With the rise of Raspberry Pi, Single Board Computers, you also started to see more of an ergonomic, skeumorphic type of design language start returning to some of the devices that are coming out now. Analogue recently also had come out with an FPGA clone of the Nintendo 64 with translucent color shell. So, we're definitely seeing some companies experiment with the idea. The world right now, as filled with negativity as it is today, I feel could use a bit more color. I see this as a good development.

I think out of everyone who is experimenting with this, Sony is the most interesting. In addition to the near ear buds, they brought back a concept Sony Walkman that has a fully transparent shell. For a cassette player, that's a great choice - a lot of analogue moving parts there!

Will we see more translucent/transparent case designs with an ecopunk type of aesthetic? Perhaps - with the rise of fascism in the United States and the recent Artemis II mission to the moon, I can only imagine that we have the planet's good health in mind.

This was a short blog, but a random rant where I wanted to talk about something that I wish would come back. Until next time, gm112 waz here until he wasn't!