I got mine at launch back in '98. Never played Pokemon. I’ll never forgive it for ending the middle school yoyo trend that I was really good at.
You could play multiplayer Tetris that way. I think I saw it once in my life.
Me and my brother did it on road trips in the family van. It was awesome.
There‘s also an excellent Gameboy Color romhack of Dr Mario that supports multiplayer. Recently tried that out with my girlfriend and it was a lot of fun.
Edit: this is it for anyone interested. Looks like even the original version for the Gameboy supports multiplayer.
In 99 we had a sleepover and we’d all trade our best pokemon to one another and pulled the plug out before completion to clone the pokemon.
I have a real job now and do real business deals. Nothing I’ve done professionally has ever felt as official and business like as that one sleepover.
Maybe the real business deals would feel more official and business like if you could employ the pull out method with them too?
Were there other uses? Yes.
Were they common? Well, just look at the GameBoy pocket. At the time it was designed (it released 7 years after the original GameBoy) there were a lot of people at Nintendo who wanted to get rid of the port entirely because it was barely ever used. They ended up compromising by using a different, smaller, cheaper port that needed an adapter to work with the regular ones.
Which was kind of a pain for some people because the GB Pocket and Pokemon both came out in Japan in 1996 lol.
We had even one to connect 4 Gameboys and played “super rc pro am”, oh the nostalgia
