top of page
GAME BOY JOURNAL
Welcome to the Game Boy Journal, the field
notes of a lifelong DMG-01 collector.
ā
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.
ā
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
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE (or when one article isn't enough)
Game Boy in Disguise: When a Handheld Became a Lifestyle Object
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.
Marcel Pflug
3 min read
Ā
The Collector's Handbook: How to Collect, Grade and Care for the Game Boy
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.
Marcel Pflug
3 min read
Ā
Bootlegs and Flashcarts: Preservation, Piracy and the Homebrew Revival
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.
Marcel Pflug
3 min read
Ā
The Sound of the Game Boy
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.
Marcel Pflug
2 min read
Ā
The Collector's Handbook, Part 1: What a Grade Really Means
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.
Marcel Pflug
5 min read
Ā
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
Ā
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
Ā
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
Ā
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
Ā
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
Ā
Retro Game Museums in Switzerland: A Tour of Kindred Spirits
The Game Boy Museum lives online, but Switzerland has three wonderful places where you can actually play gaming history. Meet our kindred spirits in Lucerne, Lausanne, and Zurich.
Marcel Pflug
3 min read
Ā
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
Ā
The Game Boy's Hidden Powers
The Game Boy's cartridge slot was never just for games. It was a secret expansion port, and this hub gathers the eight-part series on every hidden power that little slot unlocked.
Marcel Pflug
3 min read
Ā
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
Ā
Search
Bootlegs and Flashcarts, Part 3: New Games for an Old Machine
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.
Bootlegs and Flashcarts, Part 2: The Do-It-Yourself Game Boy
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.
Bootlegs and Flashcarts: Preservation, Piracy and the Homebrew Revival
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.
Bootlegs and Flashcarts, Part 1: Every Game on One Cartridge
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.
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.
LATEST ARTICLES
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
The GB Museum on a Cartridge: A Reference Work That Runs on a Game Boy
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.
Play It Loud: When the Grey Brick Got Colour
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.
The Game Boy That Learned to Google: Sebastian Staacks and There Oughta Be
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
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 GB Museum on a Cartridge: A Reference Work That Runs on a Game Boy
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.
Play It Loud: When the Grey Brick Got Colour
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.
Sports on the Game Boy: The Early Nintendo Line, and the Plumber Hiding In It
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.
The Game Boy That Learned to Google: Sebastian Staacks and There Oughta Be
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
Gotta Collect 'Em All: The Pokemon Corner of the Collection
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.
How to Play the Original Game Boy in 2026
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's Hidden Powers, Part 5: Cheat Modules
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.
Behind the GB Museum
Iām 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
The World's First: Inside the Computerspielemuseum Berlin
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 Refused to Die: Inside the New-Cartridge Renaissance
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.
The Game Boy's Hidden Powers, Part 4: A Bigger Memory
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.
The Game Boy's Hidden Powers, Part 3: Talking Cartridges
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.
Game Boy in Disguise: When a Handheld Became a Lifestyle Object
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.
Game Boy in Disguise, Part 4: Cards, Stickers and Sweets
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.
bottom of page