Many schools already require students to walk through metal detectors to enter schools. Some have to check their cell phones into the office during school hours and leave their hats in their lockers. But it looks like more and more schools are going to add the good old GameBoy to the list of no-nos in the school, even during free time.

Several instances in March of 2011 have led officials to scrutinize the geriatric handheld gaming device. At over twenty years old, what harm could it do to have a GameBoy? Well, it depends what the student chooses to do with it.

In a continuing trend of incidents, the GameBoy has been seen as a threat because it has been either used as or disguised as a bomb.

In May of 2010, eighteen-year-old Pensacola Florida student Lars O’Mara taped a GameBoy underneath the sink in the school’s bathroom, combined it with an old cellular phone and put some stray wires on it to make it appear to be a detonator and explosive device. Another student saw the suspicious device and alerted authorities. O’Mara said he intended to gain popularity with his peers by getting them out of school for the bomb scare. The school was evacuated for an hour.

In a similar incident, on March 16, 2011 an eleven-year-old boy in Milton Wisconsin brought a similar device to his bus stop. When police were alerted to the bomb and pulled the bus over, they found that the device was actually another GameBoy system, similarly trussed up with wires to appear to be an explosive. The boy is currently in custody.

It all started in 2004 when a Linvingston Texas junior high student was caught with an explosive device, also made from the GameBoy. This initial device, however, may have had far more malicious intent than the more recent instances. In this instance, the handheld game was hollowed out and filled with gunpowder. He was arrested on a school bus en route to a track meet when he bragged about his device to his peers, who subsequently alerted the authorities.

The old GameBoy is the bomb...literally, 4.3 out of 5 based on 4 ratings

Tags: Nintendo GameBoy

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 14th, 2011 at 08:00 and is filed under Retrogames Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.