Feature: 'POCA!' Is A Game Boy Camera Photobook Adventure & A Heartfelt Homage To 'Hip' Tanaka

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Sitting down to speak with Jonathan Traynor, a Glasgow-based artist and writer, about his newly-released book, POCA!, we were expecting a few things. Y'know the sort of stuff: how the Kickstarter went; where the idea for the book came from; hopes for the future; picks for the Top of the Pops Xmas #1; and so on.

However, in spending an hour with this huge fan of all things Game Boy Camera, we find ourselves enthralled and engaged in ways we just didn't see coming. Why? Well, because at the time we'd been drinking eggnog all morning. But also, because Jonathan's passion for one of the Game Boy's coolest peripherals is infectious. You can't not find out something you didn't know about this technological marvel whilst spending an hour in this man's company.

But what exactly is POCA? Well, before we got our hands on a copy of the book, we assumed it was a dinky little pocket comic about a talking Game Boy Camera (or Pocket Camera as it's known in Japan) who goes on a big day out snapping photos in Glasgow. Which would have been enough to warrant a serious investigation, let's face it.

The intriguing thing here, though, is that it turns out to be more. Rather than make something that appeals only to gamers, or fans of the Game Boy specifically, this is a celebration of the love and care that went into the creation of the Pocket Camera that's welcoming to any reader. It's a heartfelt tip of the hat to composer Hirokazu "Hip" (or indeed "Chip") Tanaka that melds its gaming origins with a cool story, plus some genuinely useful tourist pointers about Glasgow. What a mix! It may also be just the beginning of a worldwide adventure for Poca himself.

We hopped over to Glasgow's majestic Kelvingrove Museum — where some of the book takes place — to speak with Jonathan.

Nintendo Life: Hello there, Jonathan. Let's start off by talking about where the initial idea for POCA! came from. It immediately feels like it's something quite personal to you, so what was the initial spark?

Jonathan Traynor: Around this time last year, I got an Analogue Pocket, just as a curiosity and it's the best thing I've ever bought. I instantly knew it was such a good purchase, because I obviously owned a Game Boy when I was young. And the fact that you can plug Game Boy games into this and play them straight away has been such a marvel.

So, I got this, and I've recently also been taking up photography as a hobby. A couple of years back, I got my first proper, dedicated camera. Prior to that, I was just taking photographs from my phone, like anyone, but I wanted to make a more deliberate effort to take photographs of things and carry a camera around to new places that I went to.

When I picked up this Analogue Pocket, one of the first things I did was find my old Game Boy Camera, and I popped it into the Analogue and it still had photographs from when I was, like, nine years old on it. Immediately I knew I had to do something with that. It has a personal aspect, absolutely, but it also takes such unique images.

Then from the realisation you wanted to do something, the book was the first thought? Or were there other ideas first?

Initially, what I wanted to do was maybe make a photography zine or something like that. But I was also looking into the history of the development of the Game Boy Camera, and it's such a unique device when it comes to its development as well. It almost never got made, and the developers had to really try hard to pitch [and] make it. But when it came out, it also held the record as the world's smallest digital camera.

I also realised that there were quite a lot of differences between the Game Boy Camera as they came out in the West, and the Pocket Camera as it was known in Japan. And one of the big differences was the branding and packaging. It's almost like a little buddy character kind of thing there, like a Tamagotchi. I just had this idea of, 'Oh, it's like this own little standalone guy with this eyeball.' And it becomes this whole other thing when you put it into a Game Boy.

It was around that time I started brainstorming this idea, I could turn this into a small adventure book about a little Game Boy Camera-style character, who travels around taking photographs of places. Glasgow, as a starting point.

And then you came up with the name Poca, which is obvious in a way, but is there more to it?

I called him Poca, after Pocket Camera, and also to avoid any legal troubles. [laughs] It works pretty well as a name, doesn't it? And, you know, Pokémon was a huge thing for me, and so Pokémon and Tamagotchis and Digimon and things like that, this idea of having a little companion who grew alongside you and levelled up and gained new skills and abilities. And I thought I could bring that into Poca as a character.

So that's part of the concept of this book - Poca is this little camera from the '90s. He's a little outdated and he was developed and designed to be like just like for the kids in the '90s, maybe the Game Boy Camera was the first camera they ever had. Right?

Yeah, the levelling up of the character was one of our favourite parts of the book - from a gamer perspective, how he grows and gains new skills along the way. The question marks over the skills of Poca as he first boots up and comes back to life, had us excited to see how he would develop.

Yeah, that was one of the aspects of it that I really wanted to drill into, how he could learn all these skills that maybe modern cameras use, things like geolocation or time and dates, or maybe eventually colour photography or something like that. As Poca levelled up and grew alongside you, he'd get better and develop.

Let's talk about the Kickstarter a little bit. When did you decide to jump into Kickstarter? Was that terrifying and how did it go?

It was extremely terrifying! It was the most work...I didn't realise how much work a Kickstarter is. Last year I made my very first little comic book. It was a small passion project. I made this little 60-page comic and I paid for the printing costs of that upfront, which was quite a lot, because it's not cheap to print books, as it turns out! And it was like a little black-and-white book so the costs were a bit more reasonable.

But I knew going into this that the costs were going to be higher because it's a full-colour book featuring a lot of photographs and things. It has to be of a certain quality for photographs to work.

It's a risk, but if you have a good idea, it can work, right? And because the book is such a good mix of things, in that it brings together the travel aspect, the tourism, the Game Boy, there's something there for people who aren't necessarily into games. You could give this to a kid as a way to enjoy sightseeing around the city, for example?

Yeah, that was definitely one of the pitches for the book. That was what was important to me - I'm a massive Nintendo fan, and I'm a huge games enthusiast, but I didn't want to just make the book for gaming people. And especially the Game Boy, it's already a niche kind of subject and the fact that it's a '90s thing, who is my audience? Am I targeting 30-year-olds like myself? Or am I targeting kids?

How do I take this subject and make it a bit more all-around appealing to people? I thought the fact that it's centred and based around Glasgow, the city I've spent most of my life in, was a big draw as well because I loved developing this interest in taking photographs of the places I like. But also, I want to try and take these things and do something with them. So this was taking a lot of things that I've been interested in over the years, and trying to put them together into one big kind of book.

We want to touch on the end-of-chapter summaries that we've already touched on a bit, but to go back to them, it's a very nice idea, with the collected characters from the current chapter, Poca's thoughts, and so on, all presented on a final round-up page. Was this always part of the plan?

It was actually something that came in the latter half of development of the book, these end-of-chapter reports. I call it the Pocadex, which is obviously inspired by Pokémon. There's a lot of influences in there.

I was creating chapters, and I had all these ideas for the characters that appear in each one, and what I wanted Poca to say and go through. I was finding that I was at risk of making the chapters way too long. So I thought, influenced by Pikmin and how the character Olimar writes a little end-of-day report and talks about certain things - maybe it's something that happened that day, maybe he found this item or something, or he's just talking about Pikmin in general. And I was like, 'Oh that'd be quite a cool idea like at the end of a chapter. Maybe Poca could write a little end-of-day report along those lines.

I've also got him signing off at the end and he's got a level, like "Poca, Level 1." You know when you were a kid and you would maybe draw a picture or something, you'd always sign it "Jonathan, age 5," I thought that'd be a cute wee thing to do.

And with the chapter titles, there's something going on there, too. We recognise them. We had initially guessed Super Mario Galaxy, but we were wrong! It's Pikmin 4, right? How could we not know that after guiding the game? [laughs]

Well, I'm a huge Pikmin fan. Pikmin is probably my all-time favourite Nintendo franchise. I don't know if you know this, but I'm almost single-handedly responsible for bringing Pikmin back into the mainstream.

[laughs]

For about two years solid, every week on a Wednesday at 1pm, I would post a tweet saying that Shigeru Miyamoto had confirmed Pikmin 4 was in development. And this was in that period after Pikmin 3, where it just went silent for like about eight years. And I was, as a Pikmin fan, just like, where is it? So I just hammered it on Twitter until the day it was actually officially announced, and I was like, 'Okay, I'm done!'

There are some shots of drawn characters here that got us thinking, had you planned that shot beforehand, had you got the photos in advance and then came up with a story to fit what you had? Or did figure the story out first?

Yeah, 90% of the photographs were taken before the book was in development, before I'd planned out the story or the characters and stuff. A lot of the characters and story were made to fit around what I could do with the photographs. I had all these photographs around the River Clyde because I walk down there quite a lot, I'm nearby and it's a nice walk on a nice day.

And this is where we got a surprise at first from the book, we learned something new (!) about the River Clyde after living here for 20 years. There's a story running through the book that involves it, right?

I was trying to think of a little chapter-length story that I could put Poca through as he travels around, and I got this idea of, well, why is it called the River Clyde? I didn't really know. And I looked into it and what I discovered was that the River Clyde is named after a Celtic goddess called Clota. And as it turns out, there's not a lot known about this goddess. There are two references in historical text, or on a wall in some Roman place, referring to this goddess, and it's just carried on since then.

And so I developed this idea of creating Clota as a character in the book, she could pop up and speak to Poca. I wanted this fantastical layer to the book, almost in a Spirited Away, Ghibli kind of way.

One thing we've got to ask you about is the pictures of real people dotted through the book here and there. Are they friends, Kickstarter backers?

There is a picture here at the beginning of Phantom Donuts, of two people. So I'm in Phantom Donuts all the time. And, then, at the end of the book, the very final chapter is set in a sushi shop called Sushi Riot. And I knew at this point what I wanted to do with the story and I knew that, not to spoil things, but Poca's story is eventually going to lead to Japan. And I thought it would be nice if the final chapter of the book had that kind of tie or that lead-in to Japan.

Ok, let's get into that, so the plan is there for the next book to be in Japan? We weren't sure whether it was to be continued or not.

Initially, at the beginning of the year, the idea started out as a little story about Glasgow. This summer I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to travel. Me and my partner went to Hawaii, and there was an opportunity there. At this time I was just really into taking photographs with a Game Boy Camera and stuff. I was like, 'You know what, I'm going to do it. I'm going to take my Game Boy Camera to Hawaii as well.' As we were planning this trip to Hawaii, I also tacked on a trip to Japan at the end. I had a sabbatical from work and it allowed me to do this.

And before I went, I [thought], 'You know what, I could take a bunch of photographs in Hawaii, I could take a bunch of photographs in Japan, and I could make three books. I could make a Glasgow, Hawaii, and a Japan book.' And at this time, the books were still very ... I was still thinking they were just going to be short, 30-page books or something.

So, when you were in Japan as well, you bought some more Pocket Cameras and you made a bit of a discovery.

I knew that when I went over I was going to be looking for more. So I ended up coming back with four Game Boy cameras, including one boxed one. And this is maybe a little bit interesting, but the Game Boy had photographs on them already from other people who had owned them previously. And I felt really bad about deleting them. I didn't want to delete other people's memories and photographs.

So, perhaps a little controversially, I did decide to use a few of these photographs in the book and incorporate them into the story in some way. I asked around and I put out feelers and I was like, 'Is this okay?' I don't know, is using other people's images without their permission okay? I don't even know how I would ever find these people, right? I don't know if this photograph was taken in the 1990s or 2015.

I asked around and I put out feelers and I was like, 'Is this okay?'...You can go down to the market and buy photobooks of people's photographs down there. You can buy postcards people sent a hundred years ago, and I always find that quite interesting, and a little bit sad.

So I thought, there's a certain level of anonymity when it comes to Game Boy Camera photographs, right? Because they're so low-resolution and black and white and stuff. You can go down to the market and buy photobooks of people's photographs down there. You can buy postcards people sent a hundred years ago, and I always find that quite interesting, and a little bit sad. I think that even if it transpired that they saw the book, they'd only be happy about it and I would love nothing more than to try and find them.

You have another book here, a very cool-looking Japanese guide to the Pocket Camera, from all the way back in the day and it's full of stuff that the camera could do.

This Pocket Camera guide is something I didn't really know existed until six months ago or something. Somebody on Twitter posted a picture of their very impressive Nintendo collection including all these like Game Boy cameras and stuff, and this book, and I was like, 'Oh my god, what's this book? I need to see it, I need to find it.' I ended up hunting down a copy. I was like blown away by the book. It's obviously all in Japanese.

It's mostly just quite dense 'Here's what you can do with the Game Boy Camera' and all this fun stuff. You can make limited animations, you can do this, you can do that. But one of the things I did realise is that the development team for the Game Boy Camera was this very interesting group of people that came together and had a lot of passion for this project.

In particular, the project was led by Hirokazu Tanaka, who's a music composer primarily, and he made a lot of Nintendo tunes that you would recognise instantly from the Game Boy era (Tetris, Super Mario Land) and the NES era (Balloon Fight, Metroid). He was the project lead on this and he ended up going on to work for Creatures Inc. [as president].

So here's this big guy and he retired from all that recently, and he's now a chiptune artist. He goes around performing sets in Japan with all these stage shows. He's just an incredibly, incredibly cool guy. You can listen to his music on Spotify, it goes under the pseudonym Chip Tanaka. I was looking into it and I can tell he's still very passionate about the Game Boy Camera and the work that was put into it.

We feel as though we really need to make some sort of an effort for Mr Tanaka to see this book now. You were considering this guy as you worked on it?

You can see towards the end of the book, or in certain bits, there's all these little tidbits that he's written about the Game Boy Camera and then at the very end there's all these comic strips, and this was after I was developing Poca's idea, and I was looking at this, and I was thinking, 'There's something here, there's a connective tissue.'

What I found out, something maybe not a lot of people know, but the Game Boy Camera has this hidden staff credits screen. It's full of secrets and easter eggs in the software, but there are games that you can play, and one of them is a button-mashing runner, and if you beat [it] under a certain amount of time, you unlock secret staff credits.

And the secret staff credits have music that Hirokazu Tanaka wrote, and it's like the most — I don't know — I was listening to it for the first time this summer, and I was almost tearing up. I just thought it was the most beautiful music I'd ever heard and it felt like it really...it was instantly like the theme tune to Poca for me.

I was thinking, "This is everything I wanted from this project." And it's such an interesting thing. If this book reignites someone's interest in the Game Boy Camera or in Tanaka, I feel like that would make me very happy. I mean, if I could find a way to get a copy of this to him, it would definitely be like a dream come true. I feel like I made the book almost for him.

Oh wow. Imagine if we could somehow make a Christmas miracle happen and get a copy of this in Mr Tanaka's hands.

Right, you know that would be kind of perfect.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Thanks to Jonathan Traynor for his time, and to the staff at Kelvingrove Museum, for the lovely coffee. "Poca! Vol.1 Glasgow" is now available to buy over on Kickstarter and you can follow Jonathan (@Jofamo) and Chip Tanaka (@tanac2e) on Twitter.