Tenet, the latest film by director Christopher Nolan, arrived on Blu-ray in December 2020, but now it has been released in another physical format: Game Boy Advance cartridges. Via Engadget, YouTuber Bob Wulff managed to fit the two-hour, 30-minute time-bending film with a nearly incomprehensible plot on five cartridges, compressed down to a 192 x 128 resolution that looks blurry even on the GBA’s 240 x 160 display. The worst (best) part of the experience might be that it runs at six frames per second. They even made bespoke labels for each cartridge that are, actually, very well done.
Now, before you ask aloud “why?” just say “thank you, Bob Wulff!” instead. This obviously doesn’t need to exist, but the promise of these little displays of technical prowess applied in strange, delightful ways is what gets me out of bed each morning. Plus, it’s fun to imagine Christopher Nolan realizing that there’s a fate far worse than streaming services for his IMAX films to end up.
You can watch the video above to see how they did this. But, you know what? Why watch YouTube videos on YouTube? That’s passé. Wulff turned the video above into a ROM download that you can load into a GBA emulator, like mGBA, to name one of many examples you can get on a Windows PC. Come on, you know you want to.
