We met with the WAGAMI Labs team, creators of Shinsei Galverse, to discuss their upcoming interactive art series, Gameboy Secrets 「シークレット」, launching exclusively on Highlight.

Gameboy Secrets 「シークレット」 is a mini collection of 32 unique interactive, game-like narrative artworks. Minting begins October 15th at 3:00 PM PST for 0.02 ETH. Explore the Gameboy Secrets 「シークレット」 collection here.

During our conversation, the team shared their inspiration behind this new project.

Q: We’re talking to Devin and Jack from WAGAMI Labs. Who are you and what do you do?

DEVIN: WAGAMI Labs is the team behind Shinsei Galverse, one of Japan’s most successful NFT projects that launched in 2022.

As a studio, we’re focused on pushing boundaries in creative tech, web3, and digital art —drawing on nostalgia for the 90s and exploring people’s relationships with the digital devices in their lives at that time.

JACK: Our team, which consists of Galverse artist and director Ayaka Ohira, Devin, and me, operate a bit like an indie game studio. It’s a very flat, creative team, and we have a few trusted confidants like Benoit, who helped us with this collection as well.

As Devin said, we love to experiment with tech and web3, and Secrets came about almost like a GameJam. It’s fun to reset creatively on smaller, focused project like this.

Q: Your work with Shinsei Galverse sounds fascinating. Can you tell us more about how that experience led to the creation of Gameboy Secrets, and what specifically inspired this new project?

DEVIN: We have been heads down in the studio on the production of the Galverse anime for almost 2 years now. I was getting itchy to explore a few new ideas, so this was a fun, artistic project for us to build together.

There’s been a surge of great digital art from artists this year exploring nostalgic retro gaming aesthetics. I’d often think: “I wonder if we could take this further and actually put real Gameboy game code directly into the NFT for people to play, essentially embedding an emulator.”

Don’t NFTs sometimes feel a bit like gameboy cartridges in a way? A small, square container with a whole world contained inside. There was something there to explore!

As we thought about early ‘90s internet culture and where it started to collide with gaming, we each had fond memories of looking up cheat codes and secrets on old PCs. That ‘search for secrets’ became a key theme we wanted to explore and ultimately became the kernel of this piece.

JACK: Yeah, our generation came of age in the modern wave of gaming, and during that mainstream transition of offline life to online life.

I have just as many core memories from playing games with friends on the couch and online as I have from being outside exploring and interacting with people.

The idea of drawing on those memories was fun, but secrets are a little more interesting and indulgent than pure memories. Reading people’s submissions on the backend was fun, but once they were wrapped in the form of a game they became a lot more compelling.

Q: It's interesting how you've connected NFTs to Gameboy cartridges. Could you elaborate on how you've turned each NFT into a playable game? What was the technical process like?

DEVIN: There are 32 artworks in this collection and each one is an embedded ROM featuring 1 secret for the owner to consume.

They’ll also be able to download a copy of their ROM so that they can enjoy it on their own Gameboy emulators if they like.

As part of the exploration phase, we actually flashed a few copies of the experience onto real gameboy cartridges and got it running on an original GameBoy DMG-01.

Q: The idea of creating physical artifacts sounds exciting. Have you considered producing tangible items for holders in the future? What might those look like?

DEVIN: Well, maybe! I’d love to design a little Gameboy box and booklet to go along with a custom cartridge!

Q: The curation of secrets seems like a delicate process. Could you walk us through how you approached this? Were there any unexpected challenges or surprises along the way?

JACK: We created a submission form that looked and felt like an 8-bit Gameboy game too.

It asked people to ‘let go of a secret’. We spent quite a lot of time thinking about exactly what we were asking people to do and what the tone of that page needed to be.

We knew we’d get responses because gaming seems to be a core part of crypto DNA. ETH was famously being inspired by Vitalik’s World of Warcraft items getting rugged. And every other degen seems to have got their start trading and PVPing in Runescape Classic.

They starting flowing in. Most of all the responses we got were relatable, some were funny. Some were quite sad.

DEVIN: Some are true and we’re sure a lot are a little made up, but they mostly still rung true.

JACK: Our ultimate criteria when we had to narrow it down was ‘does this make us feel something?’

Q: This project seems to blend nostalgia, technology, and personal storytelling in such a unique way. As we wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to share about Gameboy Secrets or your vision for future projects?

JACK: After the project wrapped up, Devin was sorting through some boxes of old gear at his parents’ house, things he hadn’t looked at for well over a decade.

He found his old Gameboys, and a Gameboy camera with the memory and old photos intact.

It seemed like some divine intervention from the gods of nostalgia and gaming.

DEVIN: All of a sudden we had a great way to create imagery for launching this project.

A lot of the media we created to promote the collection was inspired by those photos I uncovered — grainy gradient photos of little snippets of family and friends from 20+ years ago.

JACK: We had a lot of ideas that we’d like to bring into a companion collection sometime, maybe a “Gameboy Secrets Advanced.” Stay tuned.

DEVIN: We hope you all have fun with Gameboy Secrets 「シークレット」, thank you to everyone who supports us and collects this piece!