Got one for my birthday once and managed to leave on the steps in the breezeway. It was gone inside of ten minutes :(
Wasn’t there a way to link with the IR blasters on the GBCs too? I never tried it but I’ve heard it was possible
I remember it for Pokemon, but also for those Zelda games that were a pair - Oracle of Ages/Seasons? But I don’t think it let you do much, just continue a game save when you finished one of the two games.
The Oracle games didn’t actually use the link cable, they had a password system.
It had both! You could use either a link cable or a password to continue your game in the opposite title, and to bring over the rings you had from the original save. At the jeweler’s shop, the red snake was for password transfers and the blue snake was for link cable transfers!
Four Swords came with Link to the Past too. Never played it, but it’s exclusively multiplayer, as far as I know
Four Swords is the most competitive co-op game I have ever played. It’s brutally fun, but you’re going to want to punch your friends in the throat after about 30 minutes.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/06/11/the-gang#
This comic is an accurate description of the experience.
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.
I think there was a Bomberman game on the GBA that used the link cable for multiplayer too that I remember playing
