Most photographers chase megapixels. Alasdair Watson went the other way — about 50 million pixels the other way.

The Glasgow-based photographer has been capturing the city using an original 1990s Game Boy Camera, the chunky Nintendo cartridge that shoots in just four shades of grey at a resolution so tiny it would fit inside your phone's camera icon. The result is Game Boy Glasgow — a project that transforms the Clyde, the tenements, and the city's streets into something that looks like a half-remembered dream rendered in 8-bit.

A lockdown project that stuck

Watson, a self-taught photographer who has been working professionally for fifteen years from his studio in the Hidden Lane, started the Game Boy Glasgow project during lockdown in 2020. With the city emptied out and time to experiment, he picked up the vintage Nintendo peripheral and started wandering.

The images he produced were striking. On his website, Watson describes them as "like a fossil of the city, frozen in high contrast low resolution amber" — and that's exactly right. Stripped of colour, detail, and distraction, the familiar landmarks of Glasgow are reduced to something elemental. A tenement becomes a jagged pattern of light and shadow. The Clyde is a shimmering band of white against dark geometry.

Watson went on to produce a printed collection of the images, which sold out. The BBC recently featured his work in a video segment, introducing a wider audience to his pixelated vision of Glasgow.

Why a Game Boy?

It's a fair question. The Game Boy Camera, released by Nintendo in 1998, was never designed for serious photography. Its sensor captures images at roughly 128 pixels square — a tiny fraction of what even the cheapest modern phone can manage. It records in greyscale only, with heavy dithering that gives every image a distinctive dotted texture.

But for Watson, those limitations are the point. His broader artistic practice explores themes of nostalgia, impermanence, and connection. In an interview with Six Foot Gallery, he described his recent work as "a kind of speculative archaeology" — photographing Scotland as if trying to picture it "long after the people are gone."

The Game Boy Camera fits that philosophy perfectly. Its crude, high-contrast rendering strips a scene down to its bones, making the familiar feel ancient and strange. A photograph of a Glasgow close looks less like a snapshot and more like a cave painting — a record left behind by some earlier civilisation.

"I hope that by offering unusual perspectives on the familiar or nostalgic, I can induce a sense of shared history and connection," Watson has said.

The lo-fi photography revival

Watson isn't alone in reaching for older, simpler tools. Lo-fi photography is experiencing a genuine revival, driven by photographers who feel that the pursuit of ever-sharper, ever-cleaner digital images has squeezed the soul out of the medium.

The Pixless, a new camera currently on Kickstarter, deliberately captures images at just 0.03 megapixels and renders them in a pixelated, Game Boy-inspired style. Photographer and filmmaker Mathieu Stern, reviewing the device for PetaPixel, put it simply: "It doesn't pretend to be anything more than a toy camera, but it can actually teach you a lot about photography."

Meanwhile, Riley Testut, creator of the popular Delta game emulator, has built the Delta Camera app, which applies the Game Boy Camera aesthetic to iPhone photos, bringing the format to a new generation.

As Amateur Photographer magazine notes, the appeal of lo-fi photography lies in accepting imperfection: "Not being overly concerned about technical perfection — accepting flare, vignetting, soft edges — and working within the limitations imposed by low-tech gear, can actually stimulate the creative juices."

8-bit Glasgow

What makes Watson's project particularly lovely is how well the Game Boy Camera suits Glasgow. This is a city of strong contrasts — sandstone against grey sky, bright shopfronts against dark closes, the sharp geometry of tenements and cranes. The Game Boy's brutal simplification captures that graphic quality in a way that a 108-megapixel smartphone image, paradoxically, might miss.

There's warmth in these tiny, grainy frames too. They feel handmade, personal, slightly mysterious — like finding an old photograph at the back of a drawer and trying to work out where it was taken.

Watson, who describes himself as a "big softie/punk/artist," continues to experiment with analogue and digital processes alongside his professional work shooting events, families, and communities. His wider project, Scotland's Future Past, uses medium-format film to document the remains of past communities across the country.

But it's the Game Boy work that has captured imaginations — proof that sometimes the best way to see your city differently is to look at it through the smallest possible window.