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GAME BOY JOURNAL
Welcome to the Game Boy Journal, the field n
otes 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
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
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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New Arrival: The Game Boy Organizer That Will Never Organise Anything
A 1991 cartridge that turned the Game Boy into a pocket organiser, sealed in acrylic so it can never organise anything again. The Wata-graded InfoGenius Personal Organizer joins the collection.
New Arrival: A CGC 9.0 Super Mario Land
Super Mario Land is already in the collection, so why add another copy? Because this one is a professionally graded CGC 9.0, complete in box, still wearing its original shop price sticker. A look at a reference-grade specimen.
LATEST ARTICLES
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
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.
Meet GBuddy: The Game Boy Museum's AI Curator
There is a little Game Boy with glasses and a bow tie waiting in the corner of every page. Meet GBuddy, the museum's AI curator, who knows this collection inside out and is happy to answer your questions.
ALL ARTICLES
New Arrival: The Game Boy Organizer That Will Never Organise Anything
A 1991 cartridge that turned the Game Boy into a pocket organiser, sealed in acrylic so it can never organise anything again. The Wata-graded InfoGenius Personal Organizer joins the collection.
New Arrival: A CGC 9.0 Super Mario Land
Super Mario Land is already in the collection, so why add another copy? Because this one is a professionally graded CGC 9.0, complete in box, still wearing its original shop price sticker. A look at a reference-grade specimen.
The Museum Racing to Save Worlds Before They Switch Off
Switch off a Game Boy and the game waits in the cartridge; switch off a virtual world and it can vanish for good. Meet the Virtual Worlds Museum, a kindred spirit in preservation.
Lemmings: Herding a Suicidal Crowd on a Two-Inch Screen
Some games seem physically impossible on the Game Boy, and Lemmings is one of them. It was built for a computer mouse and a big, detailed screen, and it asks you to manage dozens of tiny creatures at once. Then someone squeezed it onto a handheld with four buttons and a screen barely bigger than a matchbox. That it works at all is a small miracle. That it is genuinely good is a testament to the craft of porting. The march of the lemmingsLemmings began life in 1991, made by t
The Factory in the French Countryside Pressing New Game Boy Cartridges
In a workshop in rural France, Broke Studio presses brand-new Game Boy cartridges, and its Homebrew Factory lets any indie developer do the same.
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.
The Game Boy in Africa: Built to Survive
Long battery life, no need for a screen light and near-indestructible hardware made the Game Boy quietly ideal far from the official markets.
50 Years of Games, Preserved in Munich: Videospielkultur e.V.
In Munich, Videospielkultur e.V. preserves over 11,000 games and 50 years of history, and runs Germany's oldest video-game event series.
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.
The One-Man Game Boy Studio That Gives Its Games Away
Dr. Ludos builds new Game Boy games, sells them on real cartridges, and gives away the source code so the next person can make theirs.
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.
Level Up Your Snake, Part 1: Drawing Graphics the Game Boy Way
A new series that takes the Snake game from the beginner series further. Before we add a title screen and score, we learn how Game Boy graphics were really made, and design our own start screen and font.
Where Play Comes First: Gameorama, Lucerne's Interactive Game Museum
In Lucerne, Gameorama lets you play the whole breadth of gaming culture, and it is the perfect counterpart to the Game Boy Museum.
Meet GBuddy: The Game Boy Museum's AI Curator
There is a little Game Boy with glasses and a bow tie waiting in the corner of every page. Meet GBuddy, the museum's AI curator, who knows this collection inside out and is happy to answer your questions.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Three Game Boy Games at the Extremes
Every console library has its heights and its depths. Borrowing a title from the classic western, here are three Game Boy games that sit at the very extremes: one brilliant, one forgettable and one infamous.
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