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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)
The Game Boy Printer: Nintendo's Sticker Machine of 1998
In 1998 Nintendo gave the Game Boy a printer. It used no ink, printed on sticker paper as wide as a thumb, and came in a Pikachu edition that most of the world never saw.
Marcel Pflug
4 min read
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
3 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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Pokemon and the Game Boy: The Whole Story in One Place
How two 1996 cartridges about catching creatures saved a dying handheld, and a guide to every Pokemon game, accessory and fan piece in the collection.
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.
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.
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.
The Paper Trail, Part 2: Player's Guides and Strategy Books
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.
LATEST ARTICLES
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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
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.
ALL ARTICLES
Great Game Stories, No. 13: The Island That Was Only a Dream (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening)
A young hero is shipwrecked on Koholint, an island of singing girls and sleeping whales that hides a heartbreaking secret. Great Game Stories No. 13 retells The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening as the fairy tale it always was.
Pokemon and the Game Boy: The Whole Story in One Place
How two 1996 cartridges about catching creatures saved a dying handheld, and a guide to every Pokemon game, accessory and fan piece in the collection.
After 37 Years, the Game Boy Finally Got Its Own Printer Software
The Game Boy Printer could print photos and Pokédex entries, but never anything its owner typed. LABEL BOY, the third cartridge built here, turns it into a label maker, 28 years late and fully aware of it.
The Game Boy's Hidden Powers, Part 9: Getting Online
Years before a phone in every pocket, a cheat-device company gave the Game Boy its own email address at the end of a telephone cord. Meet the Shark MX, a monochrome cartridge that quietly worked on the original 1989 Game Boy too, and that can never come online again.
Where Every Game Is Kept: The Swiss Museum of Games
In a castle on the shore of Lake Geneva, between Vevey and Montreux, there is a museum devoted to the one thing almost every human culture has in common: play. The Swiss Museum of Games is the oldest institution of its kind, unique in Europe, and its collection runs from ancient board games to the screens of today. For a Game Boy archive in the same small country, it is both a neighbour and an inspiration. Ten thousand games under one roof The Musee Suisse du Jeu sits inside
Where Games Stay Switched On: A guide to the Video Game Museums Worth Visiting
I run a very small and insignificant museum that does not have a building. The Game Boy Museum lives online, which lets me show you an item from every angle and never once let you hold it. That is the one thing a website cannot give you, and it is exactly the thing video game muesums do better than anyone. So I keep an eye out for new ones and check in on the ones I already know, because those are the places where gaming history is not sealed behind glass but switched on, war
Where Games Are Kept Alive: The National Videogame Museum
Most museums ask you to keep your hands off the exhibits. The National Videogame Museum in Sheffield asks the opposite. Its collection is meant to be switched on and played, more than a hundred games across the decades, from Space Invaders to Monument Valley, all there to be picked up rather than admired through glass. For a place devoted to a medium you experience by doing, that is exactly right, and it is a large part of why the NVM is one of the most important homes games
The Game Boy Printer: Nintendo's Sticker Machine of 1998
In 1998 Nintendo gave the Game Boy a printer. It used no ink, printed on sticker paper as wide as a thumb, and came in a Pikachu edition that most of the world never saw.
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.
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.
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