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GAME BOY JOURNAL
Welcome to the Game Boy Journal, the field
notes of a lifelong DMG-01 collector.
This is where the little grey box that fit in a
pocket and quietly changed gaming gets the
attention it deserves: the stories behind the hardware, the games that defined it, the strange accessories and the rare variants most people never knew existed.
Expect well-researched articles, surprising facts and the occasional look behind the scenes of the collection itself. Whether you are a serious collector, a curious newcomer or simply nostalgic for that pea-green screen, there is a story here waiting to pull you in. Pick an article and start exploring.
CATEGORIES
DEEP DIVES - SPECIAL ARTICLE SERIES
The Paper Trail: The Game Boy in Print
The Game Boy did not just live on shelves and in pockets. It left a paper trail: comics, guides, catalogues, fan magazines and books. Here is the map to all of it.
Marcel Pflug
2 min read
Great Game Stories: 12 Game Boy Tales, from Once Upon a Time to The End
The Game Boy's little grey cartridges held real stories. Great Game Stories retells twelve of them from the museum's collection like fairy tales, from once upon a time to the end.
Marcel Pflug
3 min read
Write Your Own Game Boy Games: A Beginner's Journey in Two Series
You do not need to be a programmer to make a real Game Boy game. Two hands-on series take you from an empty folder to a polished, cartridge-ready game, explained in plain English. Here is where to start.
Marcel Pflug
3 min read
Third-Party Game Boy Hardware, Part 1: The Big Names
Nintendo built the console; a whole industry built everything else. Part one of a series on the third-party makers, with a dedicated look at Nuby, Joyplus, ASCII, Naki, Beeshu, Saitek, Datel and InterAct.
Marcel Pflug
3 min read
The Game Boy Around the World: One Console, Eleven Stories
The same grey box lived a different life on every continent. Our series traces the Game Boy from Tokyo to Lagos to Switzerland, market by market.
Marcel Pflug
3 min read
Build Your Own Game Boy Game, Part 1: Setting Up Your Workshop
The start of a hands-on series. By the end you will have written Snake for the Game Boy in C and run it on a real DMG-01. Today, we set up the tools.
Marcel Pflug
5 min read
Great Games, Tiny Screen: The Game Boy's Finest Hours
The Game Boy had no business hosting great games. Even in 1989 it was modest hardware: no colour, a screen that smeared during fast motion, and sound from a single tinny speaker. Rival handhelds were flashier and more powerful. Nintendo made a different bet, that a game people wanted to keep playing mattered more than raw horsepower, and a decade of brilliant, strange and stubborn cartridges proved the bet right. Great Games, Tiny Screen is a tour through some of the finest,
Marcel Pflug
2 min read
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EverDrive and Beyond: The Game Boy Flash Cartridges in the Collection
Imagine every Game Boy game ever made, loaded onto a single cartridge you slot into a real DMG-01. That is the promise of the flash cartridge, the unofficial hardware that quietly rewired how people play.
The Game Boy in Asia: Clones, Multicarts and the Grey Market
Beyond Japan, much of Asia met the Game Boy through the back door: bootleg handhelds, hundreds-in-one cartridges and a vast grey market.
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Game Boy on the Big Screen: Playing Handheld Games on Your TV
The Game Boy was built to be portable, yet players kept finding ways to put it on the television. From the Super Game Boy to a PlayStation adapter and the GameCube Game Boy Player, here is how handheld games made the jump to the big screen.
The Tetris Story: From Moscow to the Game Boy
It was born behind the Iron Curtain, fought over in courtrooms, and became the game that sold the Game Boy. The full story of Tetris, its tangled rights, its trivia and its Game Boy successors.
Third-Party Game Boy Hardware, Part 1: The Big Names
Nintendo built the console; a whole industry built everything else. Part one of a series on the third-party makers, with a dedicated look at Nuby, Joyplus, ASCII, Naki, Beeshu, Saitek, Datel and InterAct.
ALL ARTICLES
Fresh Find: The Second German Game Boy Player's Guide (1994)
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.
The Paper Trail, Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books
In 1990 the Game Boy earned its own comic book, and Valiant Comics printed exactly four issues. Here is the story of the run, and the collector's game of telling a 1990 first print from its 1991 reprint.
Third-Party Game Boy Hardware, Part 3: Cases, Screens and the Modern Makers
The final part of the series on the Game Boy's third-party makers: the cases, screens and controllers from A.L.S., Pelican, nYko, Recoton and Hori, and the modern maker keeping the console alive.
The Paper Trail: The Game Boy in Print
The Game Boy did not just live on shelves and in pockets. It left a paper trail: comics, guides, catalogues, fan magazines and books. Here is the map to all of it.
Great Game Stories, No. 12: Three Days Until the End of the World (Deadeus)
A boy dreams a god will destroy his village in three days. Deadeus, the homebrew Game Boy horror with eleven endings, told as a dark Grimm fairy tale.
Great Game Stories, No. 11: The Summer Camp with No Way Home (Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly)
Bart and Lisa are trapped at Camp Deadly, run by Mr. Burns's rotten nephew Ironfist. A fairy-tale retelling of the 1991 Game Boy game.
Great Game Stories, No. 10: The Knight Who Gathered a Shattered Star (Dragon's Lair)
The 1992 Game Boy Dragon's Lair is nothing like the arcade cartoon: a sword-less knight, 194 scattered Life Stones and an ending that refuses to end.
Great Game Stories, No. 9: A Farm Boy, a Falcon, and a Faraway Star (Star Wars)
A galaxy far, far away in four shades of grey: how Capcom's 1992 Game Boy Star Wars retells A New Hope, from Tatooine to the Death Star, told as a fairy tale.
Great Game Stories, No. 8: The Boy, the Blob and the Tower (The Rescue of Princess Blobette)
A fairy tale retelling of The Rescue of Princess Blobette on the Game Boy: a boy and his shape-shifting blob climb a castle of traps on planet Blobolonia to free the imprisoned princess.
Great Game Stories, No. 7: A Trainer's Journey Across Kanto (Pokemon)
A fairy tale retelling of the Kanto journey across Pokemon Red, Green, Blue and Yellow: a young trainer from Pallet Town, eight Gym Badges, Team Rocket, and the climb to become Champion.
Great Game Stories, No. 6: The Wager of Cranky Kong (Donkey Kong Land)
A fairy tale retelling of Donkey Kong Land (1995): a grumpy old ape’s wager sends Donkey and Diddy Kong chasing King K. Rool across a whole Game Boy world to win back the banana hoard.
Great Game Stories, No. 5: The Ape, the Lady and the Longest Chase (Donkey Kong)
A fairy tale retelling of Donkey Kong (1994) on the Game Boy: Mario chases a lovelorn ape across nine lands and a hundred puzzle rooms to rescue Pauline.
Great Game Stories, No. 4: The Hero Who Could Not Die (Wario Land 2)
A fairy-tale retelling of Wario Land 2 (1998): the adventure where Wario simply cannot die, where enemies can only change his shape, and where hidden doors branch the story into many different endings.
Third-Party Game Boy Hardware, Part 2: Power and Connection
Part two of the series on the Game Boy's third-party makers turns to power and connectivity: the battery packs, chargers and link cables from Mad Catz, LMP, Innovation, Joytech and more.
Great Game Stories, No. 3: The Scoundrel Who Wanted a Castle (Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3)
A fairy-tale retelling of Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 (1994): how the greedy Wario raided the pirates of Kitchen Island for enough treasure to build a castle of his own, and how his reward grew with his greed.
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