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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 nine-part series on every hidden power that little slot unlocked.
Marcel Pflug
4 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
Pick Up and Play: The Game Boy Games Made for a Spare Minute
Not every game wants your whole evening. Some are built for the bus, the queue, the five minutes before dinner. This is the hub for Pick Up and Play, a series about the Game Boy games you can start anywhere, stop anytime, and never feel you left unfinished.
Marcel Pflug
2 min read
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Pick Up and Play, Part 6: Qix
An abstract arcade classic with no story and no ending, just a blank rectangle to claim and a restless line to dodge. Qix is pure score-chasing tension in short bursts, and part six of our pick-up-and-play series.
Pick Up and Play, Part 8: Game & Watch Gallery 2
More tiny classics, more Classic-and-Modern remakes, and a collector's twist: on the original Game Boy this sequel never left Japan. Part eight of our pick-up-and-play series, an import worth hunting down.
Pick Up and Play, Part 5: Mario's Picross
One grid, a handful of numbers, a hidden picture: the nonogram puzzle is made of bite-size brainteasers, one perfect snack each. Mario's Picross is part five of our pick-up-and-play series, and a cult classic the West nearly missed.
Pick Up and Play, Part 7: Game & Watch Gallery
Before the Game Boy there was Game & Watch, the pocket handheld that basically invented pick-up-and-play. This cartridge brings those tiny classics back home, in both faithful and Mario-flavoured forms. Part seven of our pick-up-and-play series.
Pick Up and Play, Part 4: Alleyway
A bat, a ball, a wall of bricks: the oldest arcade idea in the book, launched right alongside the Game Boy in 1989. Alleyway is pure reflex fun for a spare minute, and part four of our pick-up-and-play series.
LATEST ARTICLES
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
A Cartridge That Tests the Machine It Sits In
A diagnostic cartridge for the DMG-01 that measures button bounce, memory, the cartridge slot and more, and admits what software cannot measure.
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
Born on the Game Boy, Part 4: Link's Awakening, Marin and the Wind Fish
The Game Boy Zelda was not a smaller Hyrule. It was a wholly original dream, set on an island that exists nowhere else, with characters found nowhere else: Marin, Tarin and the sleeping Wind Fish. Part four of Born on the Game Boy.
Pick Up and Play, Part 6: Qix
An abstract arcade classic with no story and no ending, just a blank rectangle to claim and a restless line to dodge. Qix is pure score-chasing tension in short bursts, and part six of our pick-up-and-play series.
Born on the Game Boy, Part 5: Pokemon Changes Everything
The biggest example of all. An entire generation of 151 creatures, Pikachu among them, plus Professor Oak, Team Rocket and Mewtwo, all debuted on the Game Boy in 1996. One of the largest franchises on earth began as a handheld experiment. The finale of Born on the Game Boy.
The World's Largest Room for Play: The Strong and ICHEG
Most collections in this field are one person, a shelf, and a lot of stubbornness. The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, is what happens when that same instinct is given a building the size of a city block and half a century to grow. It is the largest museum of play in the world, and inside it sits the single most important home video games have anywhere: the International Center for the History of Electronic Games. The world's most comprehensive game co
Born on the Game Boy, Part 3: The Birth of Wario
A handheld villain almost never becomes a star. Wario did. He first appeared as the greedy antagonist of Super Mario Land 2, then took over a franchise of his own. Part three of Born on the Game Boy.
Born on the Game Boy, Part 1: Super Mario Land, Daisy and Tatanga
Super Mario Land did not just shrink Mario, it sent him to a strange new kingdom called Sarasaland and introduced two characters who had never existed before: Princess Daisy and the alien warlord Tatanga. Part one of Born on the Game Boy.
A Cartridge That Tests the Machine It Sits In
A diagnostic cartridge for the DMG-01 that measures button bounce, memory, the cartridge slot and more, and admits what software cannot measure.
The Wireless Game Boy Controller: Turning the Handheld Into a Gamepad for Everything
A cartridge that flips the Game Boy on its head: slot it in and the handheld stops being a console and becomes a wireless controller. With the right receiver it can drive a PC, a NES, a SNES, an N64, a GameCube or a Wii. A look at the insideGadgets transmitter and the family of receivers around it.
The Game Boy Museum and the EFGAMP: Why One Little Machine Belongs Among the Archives
As of today, the Game Boy Museum is a supporting member of EFGAMP, the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects. Here is what that federation is, why preserving games is harder than it sounds, and the honest reason a single-device collection wanted a seat at that table.
The Flash Boy: How to Dump, Back Up and Flash a Game Boy Cartridge
A small USB box that reads an old Game Boy cartridge like a book: it copies the game, rescues the save before the battery dies, and can flash the right kind of blank cart. Here is exactly what the Flash Boy does, which software it needs, and which cartridges it works with.
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.
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