New web app lets you take Game Boy Camera-style pics and pretend it’s 1998

The internet just got a bit more wonderful. 

On Saturday a coder, animator, and electronic musician by the name of maple “mavica” syrup published a free web app that lets anyone take Game Boy Camera-style photos with just their browser and a webcam. It’s super fun. 

Over Twitter direct message, mavica, who prefers it/it pronouns and a lowercase styling, explained that a 2014 app made by Christine Love led it to create an updated version of the late nineties classic camera toy. mavica recalled how Love’s app, “Interstellar Selfie Station,” helped it at an important moment in its life. 

“[She’d] made the app back in 2014 but after a few months it got pulled off app stores,” wrote mavica. “i found the original app when i was just starting my transition and the low-res pictures helped a lot with my dysphoria, so it meant a lot to me and i’ve wanted to recreate it in some form ever since then.”

The web app is super easy to use, and lets you adjust the brightness, contrast, and color pallet of your photos. 

mavica built the entire thing over the weekend, and confirmed over direct message that the camera app doesn’t store any of the photos people snap. 

“[The] app is entirely client-sided, there’s no storage anywhere in your device or the server, it’s all only a single page with some basic javascript,” mavica explained. 

“[My] favorite part that people have shared with me so far have been other trans people who also noted that the filter helps their dysphoria and i’m so glad to have spread the same feeling i had 6 years ago,” wrote mavica.  

In other words, mavica’s web app is not just fun — it’s providing real value to people (though, of course, fun by itself is also plenty valuable). 

SEE ALSO: Take a Pixelated Look at NYC Through a Game Boy Camera

So go take some rad pixelated photos, update your profile pic, and feel a little better about the world — even if only for a brief moment.