Game Boy

The scarcer of Nintendo's two German Game Boy guides. This 1994 second volume joins the collection, a harder-to-find companion to the 1992 original.

Nobody was waiting for a Game Boy cartridge you cannot play. I built one anyway: the whole museum, a wiki and a search, running on a real Game Boy. The story of turning a museum object into a museum, and losing a few arguments with a machine from 1989.

For years the Game Boy came in any colour you liked, as long as it was grey. Then Nintendo let it shout. The story of the Play It Loud line and the coloured and transparent consoles in the collection.

From its very first summer the Game Boy was a sports machine: tennis, baseball, golf and four-player racing. And in some of those cartridges Nintendo hid a familiar face. A tour of the sports games in the collection, and the Mario cameos tucked inside them.

In December 2021 a short video started making the rounds among retro tinkerers. It showed an original 1989 Game Boy, pea-soup screen and all, slowly pulling up a Wikipedia article. Not an emulator, not a mock-up. A real grey brick, reading live text off the internet through a cartridge that someone had built by hand. That someone was Sebastian Staacks, a physicist in Aachen who runs a gloriously nerdy blog called There Oughta Be, and his little cartridge is one of the most de

Pokemon did not just revive the Game Boy, it spun off a whole world of Pikachu-branded hardware. A tour of the Pokemon games, the yellow-and-black accessories and the fan pieces gathered in the collection.

From original hardware to flash carts, FPGA clones and emulators, here is every way to play the original Game Boy in 2026, and where to find brand-new games.

The Game Boy cartridge slot was a doorway. Part 5 of Hidden Powers looks at the cheat and memory modules that plugged in and rewrote the rules, from the Game Genie and Action Replay to the Mega Memory Card.

I’m Marcel, the collector and curator behind the Game Boy Museum in Zurich, Switzerland. What began as a childhood fascination has stayed with me for more than 25 years. The Game Boy has accompanied me through very different stages of life, while the collection has grown slowly and deliberately along the way. For me, the museum is the natural continuation of that journey: a way to share what I have collected, learned and discovered with others who are equally curious about

Opened in 1997, the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin was the world's first games museum, and the perfect broad counterpart to our single-device archive.

The Game Boy was discontinued in 2003, yet in 2026 people are still making, pressing and boxing brand-new games for it. Meet the studios keeping the grey brick alive.

A cartridge you could rewrite at a convenience store, and a battery-powered bank for your saves: how a few Japanese accessories gave the Game Boy something very like cloud saves, decades early.

Two Japan-only oddities show the Game Boy reaching past its own screen: Hudson's GB KISS infrared, hidden inside cartridges like Pocket Family GB and Pocket Bomberman, and the Namcot Barcode Boy, which scanned real barcodes straight into your games.

The Game Boy's silhouette escaped the games aisle and ended up on radios, clocks, mugs, building bricks and bubble gum. This is the hub for our four-part tour of the Game Boy in disguise.

Gum, stickers, cards, a toy egg, promotional tissues, an eraser and a mini Game Boy that plays music. A rummage through the sweet, papery and disposable tie-ins that prove the Game Boy sold absolutely everything.

The finishing touches. In the final part we give the game a voice with simple sound effects, add a pause function, and hand you the whole leveled-up Snake to download.

Every game deserves a good ending. In part five we replace the frozen screen with a real GAME OVER screen that shows the final score and invites another go.

Film franchises, cartoon stars and ported arcade classics all found their way onto the Game Boy. A look at the licensed and pop-culture games that turned the handheld into a piece of nineties popular culture.

One mistake should not end everything. In part four we give the snake three lives, lose one on each crash, and keep the game going until the last life is gone.

A warm roundup of the Game Boy in disguise: officially licensed clocks, mugs, coasters, watches and even shower foam that hide the DMG-01 silhouette all around the house.

A radio, a clock, a wristwatch, a calculator and a pair of walkie talkies, all shaped exactly like a Game Boy, and not one of them a games console. Meet Mani's family of fake Game Boys, from the 1993 Radio Boy to the 1997 Calculator Boy.

A gentle, safety-first guide to cleaning and lightly caring for a Game Boy: the right tools, isopropyl alcohol for contacts, mild soap for the shell, and the pieces you should never, ever touch.

A calm, practical guide to keeping a Game Boy collection safe for decades: evicting batteries before they leak, controlling light and damp, caring for boxes and paper, and the honest truth about whitening yellowed plastic.

A practical, friendly handbook for anyone who collects the Game Boy: how to grade it, store it, clean it, spot a fake and understand what it is really worth, all gathered into one place.

More than thirty-five years on, small studios are still designing and pressing brand-new physical cartridges for the Game Boy. Three of them, from Greenboy Games, Incube8 and Broke Studio, prove the grey brick is still a living platform.

Three DIY and hacked Game Boys from the collection: the GBinterceptor that taps the console to capture its screen, the Raspberry Pi-powered Zeroboy, and a USB-C power pack. A look at the hobbyist maker culture that keeps rebuilding the Game Boy.

The Game Boy shipped with no camera and no microphone, yet the right cartridge could give it eyes or ears. Meet the Game Boy Camera and the Bandai Pocket Sonar.

Preservation, piracy and a thriving homebrew scene all meet on the same little grey cartridge. This is the hub for our Bootlegs and Flashcarts series, an honest tour of the Game Boy's grey edge, from flash carts and DIY builds to brand-new games for a machine that refuses to retire.

One cartridge can now hold a whole library. We walk the museum's shelf of Game Boy flash carts and bootlegs, from the respected krikzz EverDrive to the classic 100-in-1 pirate cards, and stay honest about where preservation ends and piracy begins.

Mario did not just visit the Game Boy, he colonised it. From platformers to puzzlers to a starring role on merchandise, here is how one plumber turned up across the whole handheld library.

A game should greet you before it begins. In part two we turn the start-screen design from part one into a real, interactive title screen that waits for the player to press START.

A game is more fun when it counts. In part three we reserve a status line at the top of the screen and draw a live score that climbs with every piece of food the snake eats.

The Game Boy's four little sound channels did not stay inside the handheld: they climbed the UK charts, powered novelty hits and mini players, and still turn up on fresh chiptune vinyl today.

A few tram stops from the Game Boy Museum, GamePlaza lets you actually play gaming history. Meet Zurich's interactive video game museum.

A translator, an organizer, a reference tool: a few cartridges quietly sent the Game Boy to work. Part 7 of our series on the hidden powers of the cartridge slot.

The Game Boy could not sense which way you held it, or push back against your hands. So Nintendo hid those powers inside the cartridges. Part one of a new series looks at two from the collection that gave the handheld a real sense of movement.

Most Game Boy music tools race through notes. Droneboy holds them: a drone-music cartridge that turns the console's four channels into endless ambient pads, now MIDI-enabled for the Arduinoboy.

Years before the smartphone, GameTek's InfoGenius line earnestly tried to turn the Game Boy into a pocket organizer, translator and travel guide. It flopped, and that is exactly why it is such a joy to collect now.

A brand-new Game Boy cartridge from Broke Studio sends you after the Treasure of Lima. The twist: the treasure is real, it vanished in 1820, and no one has ever found it.

A hard-boiled cat detective, a city called Cat Town, and a case to crack, all running on an original 1989 Game Boy. Meet Broke Studio's Inspector Waffles: Early Days.

Flash cartridges hold a whole library on one card, and backup tools rescue fading saves. Part 8 of our series on the hidden powers of the Game Boy's cartridge slot.

Two features, two directions of travel. This is the hub for the whole story of the Game Boy and music: the instrument it became on stage, and the muse it became on the charts.

A rare German-only 1994 bundle with three games in the box. The Game Boy Super 3 Set joins the collection.

A plain-language guide to how video-game grading works, from slabs and seal ratings to WATA, CGC and VGA, using two graded pieces in the museum as real examples. Educational, not financial advice.

A Game Boy for the bathroom, complete with a Yoshi skill game. This 1997 Takara shower foam joins the collection's oddities.

An art student's 1998 exam project turned the Game Boy into an instrument, and it is still made and played today. The story of nanoloop and Oliver Wittchow.

The coffee-table books, reference guides and logbooks that treated the Game Boy as history and art, decades after it launched as a toy.

From a UK newsstand to a Tokyo bookshop, the independent magazines, Famicom Tsushin supplements and sticker album the Game Boy inspired.

The Game Boy was sold on paper first: Nintendo's own catalogues, Nintendo Power and Club Nintendo. Follow the marketing paper trail from Japan to Germany, the UK and France.

The official Player's Guides and per-game strategy books on the shelf, from Nintendo's 1991 US guide to the Game Boy-shaped Victory Book, and the games they helped you finish.