A YouTuber crammed 'Tenet' onto Game Boy Advance cartridges out of spite
Imagine trying to decipher the already-muffled dialogue through a GBA speaker.
The ideal way to watch Tenet, according to director Christopher Nolan (and many others), is in a cinema. "This is a film whose image and sound really needs to be enjoyed in your theaters on the big screen," he said last year amid the throes of a pandemic. That inspired YouTuber Bob Wulff, who runs the WulffDen channel, to stuff the time-bending blockbuster onto Game Boy Advance Video cartridges.
Wulff freely admits this is "quite possibly the worst way to view Tenet." He split the movie across five cartridges because it's two and a half hours long. According to Wulff, "30 minutes is the maximum time you can have for a Game Boy Advance Video [cartridge] and still have it in somewhat of a watchable state." He even made custom labels.
There are tradeoffs, of course. Wullf had to crush the video down to six frames per second with a resolution of 192x128 and a whopping 8 KB/s bitrate. The software Wulff used also speeds up video by a third by default. The result is not exactly the pristine IMAX cinema experience Nolan would have hoped for. Many viewers already found it hard to hear much of the dialogue in Tenet due to the questionable sound mix, so can you imagine trying to watch the film with a GBA speaker?
Most Game Boy Advance Video cartridges had a few episodes of a show like Pokémon or SpongeBob SquarePants, but there were a few full-length movies such as Shrek and Shark Tale. With the 20th anniversary of the GBA fast approaching, it seems like the perfect time to order some GBA Video cartridges, a device to flash them with and ruin your favorite movie by watching it in a terrible format.
