Most people picture the Game Boy as a sealed little world: a grey brick, a green screen, and a link cable if you were lucky enough to have a friend sitting next to you. Yet a handful of cartridges and accessories quietly gave the handheld senses it was never designed to have. In this third part of Hidden Powers we look at two of the strangest, both released only in Japan: a game that could beam data through the air by infrared, and a scanner that let the Game Boy read barcodes off the physical world. They could hardly be more different, one a gentle life simulation and the other an unlicensed gadget with a scanner head, but they answer the same question. How do you get a tiny handheld from the late 1980s and early 1990s to talk to something beyond its own screen? Let us start with the one that asks two Game Boys to get very, very close. A kiss in the dark: infrared without a cable The star of this trick is Pocket Family GB, a Japan-only life simulation that Hudson released in 1998. On the surface it is gentle stuff. You look after a small household, furnish rooms, earn and spend money, and care for the family living there. It runs in monochrome on the original DMG-01 and is Super Game Boy enhanced, so it looks perfectly ordinary sitting next to any other cartridge of its era. Pocket Family GB: looks like a quiet life sim, secretly beaming data through the air. Look closer at the box, though, and you will spot a logo that most Game Boy owners never encountered: GB KISS. This was Hudson's own infrared system, and it worked in a way that still catches people off guard. Instead of building the infrared hardware into the console, Hudson put it inside the cartridge, through a special chip that carried infrared diodes right on the board. In Pocket Family's case that chip is Hudson's HuC-3, the more capable successor to the HuC-1 inside Pocket Bomberman. The payoff was clever. Because the transmitter lived in the cartridge rather than the machine, two players could exchange data with no link cable at all. You simply held two Game Boys close together and let the games whisper to one another. Hudson leaned happily into how intimate that looked, naming the feature after the awkward little dance of bringing two handhelds nose to nose. The range was tiny, usually no more than a couple of centimetres, so a transfer really did feel like a private moment between devices. The most striking part is when this was possible. The Game Boy Color, with its famous built-in infrared port, would not arrive until late 1998, yet a GB KISS cartridge could beam data on the original 1989 DMG-01, because the console itself was never part of the equation. Hudson later extended the idea with an accessory called the GB KISS LINK, an infrared modem that let a supported cartridge trade files with a Windows PC, pushing the idea of talking to the outside world about as far as it could go on this hardware. A sequel, Pocket Family GB2, followed later on the Game Boy Color. For a cosy game about furnishing rooms and looking after a household, Pocket Family GB was hiding some genuinely forward-looking technology behind its calm little screen. Pocket Family GB is not the only GB KISS cartridge in the collection. Pocket Bomberman, the Japanese 1997 entry that reinvents the series as a side-scrolling platformer, carries the same infrared trick. Hold two carts close together and players could swap and share their own custom-built maps through the air, a feature that exists only on the Japanese Game Boy release. It is a good reminder that GB KISS was not reserved for novelties; it sat quietly inside ordinary retail games too, waiting for two owners to bring their handhelds nose to nose. Read more on the infrared trick Hudson hid inside the cartridge and on Pocket Bomberman's secret kiss. Both of these cartridges hide a second trick that this part does not cover: a real-time clock, and in Pocket Family's case an alarm. That side of the story has its own entry in Part 10: Keeping Time, and the full hardware comparison, from the HuC-1 to the HuC-3, is in a separate piece on the three cartridges. Scanning the real world: the Namcot Barcode Boy If infrared let the Game Boy reach out to another Game Boy, the Namcot Barcode Boy let it reach out to the physical world. Developed by Sofel and released by Namcot in 1992, and again sold only in Japan, it is a peripheral that clips onto the console through the link port and gives the Game Boy the ability to scan barcodes. Before QR codes were cool, the Game Boy was already reading barcodes The concept was ahead of its time. Games such as Monster Maker: Barcode Saga used scanned cards to customise characters and battle opponents, and extra merchandise carried further barcodes that unlocked features. In practice that meant a simple strip of black-and-white lines, whether printed on an official card or hiding on everyday store packaging, could turn into a character or an item inside the game. Arriving in 1992, it was among the earliest card-scanning devices for a handheld, following in the footsteps of the standalone Barcode Battler. There is a catch that has shaped how the Barcode Boy survives today. The hardware cannot do anything on its own, so it was almost always sold bundled with a game. The museum keeps all three variants together, which tells the whole story of how it was meant to be bought. The first of these is Barcode Boy 1, the classic 1992 boxed set that paired the scanner with its game. Alongside it sits Barcode Boy 2, a second bundle that packaged the same peripheral with another title. And then there is the odd one out: the standalone Barcode Boy, the scanner sold with no game at all. Because the hardware is useless without software, very few were ever produced this way, which makes the plain box the rarest of the three and the hardest to track down. Barcode Boy Bundles - No Barcode Fun Without Compatible Games Seen from today, when a phone reads a QR code without a second thought, the Barcode Boy looks almost prophetic. In 1992, though, teaching a battery-powered handheld to look at a barcode and turn it into a monster was a small marvel of lateral thinking. The device has such a colourful history that it has earned its own dedicated feature elsewhere in the museum, for anyone who wants to dig into the games, the cards and the quirks in detail. Two little machines, reaching out Infrared and barcodes, a kiss and a scan. Neither feature was ever likely to reach the West, and neither is famous today, but together they show a handheld that people kept nudging to do more than it was ever meant to. GB KISS reached out by light to another Game Boy nearby, while the Barcode Boy reached out by reading the world's own printed code. Two completely different answers to the same quiet question. You can explore Pocket Family GB, Pocket Bomberman, all three Barcode Boy sets and plenty more of the Game Boy's hidden powers over at the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series The Game Boy's Hidden Powers · Part 1: A Sense of Movement · Part 2: Eyes and Ears · Part 3: Talking Cartridges (you are here) · Part 4: A Bigger Memory · Part 5: Cheat Modules · Part 6: Making Music · Part 7: Getting to Work · Part 8: Every Game at Once · Part 9: Getting Online · Part 10: Keeping Time · Part 11: The Modern Scene

Some cartridges are unusual before you ever switch them on. The Japanese Pocket Bomberman is one of them. It arrived in 1997 from Hudson Soft, the studio that had looked after Bomberman for years, and it is strange on three separate counts: the way it is packaged, the way it plays, and a feature hidden inside the cartridge that most players never knew was there. A metal case, a black cartridge, and a Bomberman that plays sideways. Strange in the hand Start with the object itself. Where almost every Game Boy game came in a cardboard box with a grey cartridge inside, the Japanese Pocket Bomberman came in a metal case, and the cartridge tucked within it is black rather than the familiar Nintendo grey. In a shelf of near-identical grey bricks it stands out at a glance, and that alone makes it a favourite among collectors who like an object with a bit of physical personality. It is the kind of release you notice from across the room. A Bomberman that plays sideways The game is just as much of a departure. For most of its life Bomberman had been a top-down affair, a maze seen from above where you box opponents in and blow up walls to reach them. Pocket Bomberman throws that template out and turns the series into a side-scrolling platformer, viewed from the side as your little bomber runs and jumps through levels rather than plotting across a grid. It is a genuine reinvention of a familiar formula, which makes the cartridge as distinctive to play as it is to hold. The secret inside: GB KISS The best surprise is the one you cannot see. Look at the Japanese box and you will find a small logo that most Game Boy owners never encountered: GB KISS. This was Hudson's own infrared system, and it worked in a way that still catches people out. Rather than building the infrared hardware into the console, Hudson put it inside the cartridge itself, on a special chip that carried the infrared diodes right on the board. The console was never part of the equation, which is why a GB KISS game could beam data even on an original 1989 Game Boy, years before the Game Boy Color arrived with its famous built-in infrared port. The Bomberman with a secret: Hudson's GB KISS lives inside this cartridge. In Pocket Bomberman the feature has a lovely use: sharing levels. Bring two cartridges close together, hold the Game Boys almost nose to nose, and players could exchange and pass around their own custom-built maps through the air, with no link cable at all. Hudson named the whole system after exactly that awkward little dance of holding two handhelds together, and the range was tiny, only a couple of centimetres, so a transfer really did feel like a private moment between machines. It is worth noting that this infrared trick lives only on the Japanese Game Boy cartridge; the later international Game Boy Color version of Pocket Bomberman dropped it entirely. That chip, Hudson's HuC-1, was the simplest of Hudson's infrared cartridges: it carried the wireless link and nothing else, with no clock or alarm of its own. Later GB KISS cartridges such as Pocket Family GB moved to the HuC-3 and added exactly those things, which places Pocket Bomberman right at the start of the line. That hidden radio makes Pocket Bomberman more than a curiosity of packaging. It is a working example of one of the Game Boy's strangest capabilities, sitting inside an ordinary retail game rather than a technical novelty. If you want the fuller story of Hudson's infrared and the other ways the handheld learned to reach beyond its own screen, it has a dedicated home in the museum's feature on the Game Boy's talking cartridges. Pocket Bomberman sits right at the start of a small family of these infrared cartridges; I lined it up against Pocket Family and Robopon in a separate comparison of the three. A metal case, a black cartridge, a series turned on its side and a secret infrared kiss: few Game Boy games pack this many oddities into one release. To see Pocket Bomberman and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.

A Game Boy does not know what day it is. Switch one on after ten years in a drawer and it starts as blankly as it did the morning it left the shop: no clock, no calendar, no sense that any time has passed at all. And yet a small family of cartridges could tell the time to the minute, keep a day and a night of their own, and in one case even wake you with an alarm. The clock was never in the console. Like so many of this machine's hidden powers, it was hiding in the cartridge. This is Part 10 of The Game Boy's Hidden Powers, and it is about the quietest trick of them all: a real-time clock. The idea is simple once you see it. A tiny clock chip and a coin battery sit on the cartridge board, ticking away whether the Game Boy is on, off, or sitting in a drawer. When the game starts again it asks the chip what time it is, and suddenly a toy from 1989 is following the real world. Three different makers built it, in three different ways, and all of them run on the original DMG-01. Nintendo's clock: the day that turns in Pokemon The famous one is Pokemon Gold and Silver. Nintendo built the clock into a version of its own memory chip, the MBC3, and used it to give the games a real day and night. Play in the morning and the world is bright; play at night and different creatures come out. Certain events only happen on certain days of the week, and the whole schedule runs off a clock that keeps counting while the cartridge sits on a shelf. These are black dual-mode cartridges, so they run happily on the first grey Game Boy as well as the Color. It also gave a generation of players their first lesson in how fragile a cartridge clock is. When the little battery finally dies, the clock stops, the time events freeze, and the game puts up a message that has become infamous: the internal battery has run dry. On these cartridges a single cell powers both the clock and the saved game, so when it goes flat the save is lost along with the sense of time. It was the first time most people met a game that quietly kept its own calendar, and the first time they watched one forget. Hudson's clock, with an alarm attached Hudson went a step further. Its HuC-3 chip carried the same kind of real-time clock, and added a small piezoelectric buzzer that could actually make a sound. The Pocket Family GB is the cartridge that shows this off: it is a household life-simulation where you can set a wake-up time, choose from nine alarm tones, and even load new melodies over Hudson's GB KISS infrared link. A cartridge that keeps time and rings an alarm, on a handheld from 1989, is exactly the kind of hidden power this series exists to find. Pocket Family GB with HuC-3 chip The same HuC-3 hardware powered Hudson's Robot Poncots role-playing games, where the clock drives in-game events and the buzzer chimes from inside the module. If you want the full tour of Hudson's infrared-and-clock cartridges, including how the chips grew from the simple HuC-1 to the HuC-3, I lined them up in a separate piece on three cartridges that taught the DMG-01 new tricks. Bandai's clock: a pet that ages while you sleep The strangest version belongs to a children's toy. Game de Hakken!! Tamagotchi: Osutchi to Mesutchi carries a one-off board built from custom Toshiba and Bandai parts, including a real-time clock chip of its own. The point of the clock is lovely: your Tamagotchi age in real time, growing and needing care by the actual calendar, continuing to live their little lives while the Game Boy is switched off. Game de Hakken!! Tamagotchi: Osutchi to Mesutchi comes with its own real-time clock chip (TC8521AM) It is the same hidden power as Pokemon's day and night, pointed at a virtual family instead of a world map. The full story of that remarkable cartridge, and its ordinary shelf-mate, is in the Tamagotchi feature. It also carries its own small speaker, switched on or off by a physical slider on the shell, so the pet can chirp and sound its alarms straight from the cartridge. The catch: a clock is only as alive as its battery Every one of these clocks has the same weakness, and it is the reason the power is quietly disappearing. The chip keeps time only while a coin cell on the cartridge keeps feeding it. Those cells were rated for about ten years, and the earliest of these cartridges are now past twenty-five. When the cell goes flat the clock stops, and with the older designs the saved game goes with it. A Pokemon that can no longer tell day from night is simply a cartridge whose heart has stopped beating. The good news is that the cell can be replaced; the catch is that doing it without losing the save takes a careful hand and a soldering iron. Seen together, the clock is the hidden power that made the Game Boy aware of the world beyond its own screen: morning and night, a day of the week, a birthday, an alarm at seven. Three makers reached for it independently, Nintendo with the MBC3, Hudson with the HuC-3 and Bandai with its one-off Tamagotchi board, and all three landed on the same quiet idea. A machine that cannot tell the time, holding a cartridge that never stops counting. The Full Series Part 1: A Sense of Movement · Part 2: Eyes and Ears · Part 3: Talking Cartridges · Part 4: A Bigger Memory · Part 5: Cheat Modules · Part 6: Making Music · Part 7: Getting to Work · Part 8: Every Game at Once · Part 9: Getting Online · Part 10: Keeping Time (you are here) · Part 11: The Modern Scene

Picture two Game Boys held face to face, close enough to touch, quietly swapping data through the air with no cable between them. It sounds like something the Game Boy Color made possible, but this trick is older than that. It was already happening in 1997, on the plain grey original Game Boy, and the secret sat not in the console but inside the cartridge. The company behind it was Hudson, and the feature had a wonderfully cheeky name: GB KISS. A Kiss Between Machines GB KISS was Hudson's own wireless communication system, introduced in 1997 through a special cartridge chip called the HuC-1. Instead of relying on the console for anything, Hudson soldered tiny infrared diodes straight onto the cartridge's circuit board. Line up two of these carts, hold the Game Boys within a few centimetres of one another, and they could trade data over infrared with no link cable at all. The name is a joke about exactly that: to make the connection work, the two machines had to get so close that they looked like they were kissing. GB KISS: the infrared port that lived in the cartridge, not the console. Why Building It Into the Cartridge Was Clever The smart part is where Hudson chose to put the hardware. The original Game Boy, the DMG-01, had no infrared of its own and never would. By placing the transmitter inside the cartridge, Hudson handed that ageing 1989 machine a brand new wireless ability without touching the console at all. Any Game Boy that could accept the cartridge could suddenly beam data across a table. Nintendo would not build infrared into a handheld itself until the Game Boy Color arrived in late 1998, more than a year later, and even then only on that newer model. GB KISS, by contrast, worked on everything, right back to the very first grey brick. There were catches. The range was tiny, only a few centimetres, and both players needed a copy of the same GB KISS game, so it was never going to replace the link cable for everyday multiplayer. But for passing small pieces of data back and forth, a character here, an item there, it was tidy, cable-free and faintly magical. The Logo on the Box: Pocket Family GB You can see that little logo in action on one of the more charming oddities in the collection: Pocket Family GB. It is a Japan-only life simulation by Hudson, a gentle game about looking after a household, furnishing its rooms and caring for the family that lives there, a sort of pocket-sized dolls' house. Tucked among the Japanese text on the box sits the GB KISS mark, and that is what turns an obscure domestic sim into a piece of hardware history. Hudson beat the Game Boy Color to infrared by more than a year. Thanks to GB KISS, two players could hold their copies together and pass things between their virtual families over infrared, the game quietly showing off a feature most of the world never knew the Game Boy had. And because it is a standard DMG cartridge, it plays, and kisses, perfectly happily on the original DMG-01, which is exactly why it earns a place in a collection built around that first machine. Complete Japanese copies like this rarely travelled abroad, which makes a boxed example all the more fitting as the face of the story. Pocket Family also shows how far GB KISS had come. The early cartridges, like Pocket Bomberman, used Hudson's first chip, the HuC-1, which offered only the infrared link. Pocket Family runs on its successor, the HuC-3, which added a real-time clock that keeps ticking while the console is off and a small buzzer for alarms. The game puts both to work: you can set a wake-up time and choose from nine alarm tones, with further melodies, and even extra family members, beamed in as GB KISS files. Hudson handed out one such alarm called Saita Saita, and a bundled tool named Family Shot could photograph your household and send it to a Game Boy Printer to come out as a sticker. An Idea Ahead of Its Time Pocket Family GB was far from alone. Hudson shipped a whole run of GB KISS titles, from Super B-Daman: Fighting Phoenix, the very first HuC-1 game, to the Japanese Pokemon Trading Card Game and the ten-player Chousoku Spinner. In early 1998 the company went further still with the GB KISS LINK, an infrared modem that let a Game Boy talk to a home computer and download data through the same beam. It was, remarkably, one of the earliest examples of downloadable content on any handheld, arriving even before Nintendo's own Mobile Adapter GB. The same HuC-3 hardware powered Hudson's Robot Poncots role-playing games, Sun and Star, in 1998. Marketed as Game Boy Color titles, they are labelled Game Boy Compatible and run on the original DMG-01 too, and the Japanese versions speak GB KISS in full. The American release, Robopon Sun, keeps the chip and its infrared but drops the GB KISS file system, so the feature stays a Japanese one even on a cartridge that otherwise looks identical. Robot Ponkottsu (aka Robopon): Suv Version with GBKiss and HuC-3 chip Seen from today, GB KISS reads like a first sketch of ideas Nintendo would return to again and again: the Game Boy Color's infrared window, the wireless adapters that followed, and eventually the effortless local play of later handhelds. Hudson simply got there first, and did it with a soldering iron and a sense of humour. If you want to see these chips lined up against each other, Pocket Bomberman's HuC-1 beside the HuC-3 in Pocket Family and Robopon, I compared all three in a separate piece on the cartridges that taught the DMG-01 new tricks. It is easy to remember the Game Boy as a machine that changed slowly, yet hidden inside these cartridges was a genuinely forward-looking idea: wireless play, years ahead of schedule, made to run on hardware that was already old. That is exactly the kind of detail this museum likes to keep, the clever trick sitting quietly behind an cheerful yellow box. You can find Pocket Family GB in the collection, GB KISS logo and all, where its full details are catalogued.

Most Game Boy cartridges do exactly one thing: they hold a game. A small, almost entirely Japanese family of them did more. They carried infrared eyes to talk to one another, a real clock that kept running, and in one case an alarm that could wake you. Three of these oddities sit in the collection, or are on their way to it, and all three share two things: they run on the original 1989 DMG-01, and they were built around Hudson's quiet little empire of extra chips. What ties them together is a system called GB KISS, and the custom chips that made it work. The common thread is worth following, because across these three cartridges you can watch a single idea grow up: from a simple infrared link, to a clock and an alarm, to a full role-playing game, all on hardware Nintendo had already written off as old. The infrared kiss, and the chips behind it Hudson introduced GB KISS in 1997. Supported cartridges carry tiny infrared diodes soldered onto the circuit board, so two of them held a few centimetres apart can beam files to each other with no link cable, storing what they receive in the cartridge's own memory. Those files could be game data, extra content or small tools, and the whole system stayed in Japan. I wrote about the trick in more detail in our article on GB KISS. The hardware came in two flavours, and the difference is the whole story here. The first was the HuC-1: it added the infrared link and memory banking, and nothing else. Its successor, the HuC-3, kept the infrared and added two things the older chip never had, a real-time clock that keeps ticking while the console is switched off, and a small piezoelectric buzzer that can sound an alarm. Line the three cartridges up and you are really looking at those two chips doing progressively more ambitious work. Pocket Bomberman: where it starts (HuC-1) The earliest of the three is the Japanese Pocket Bomberman (product code DMG-APOJ-JPN), released on 12 December 1997, with a HuC-1 inside, 256 kilobytes of ROM and 32 kilobytes of RAM. It is an odd object before you even switch it on: the Japanese release shipped in a metal case, and the cartridge inside is black rather than Nintendo grey, so it stands out instantly on a shelf of near-identical bricks. Japanese Version of Pocket Bomberman with Hudson's HuC-1 Chip and GBkiss The game is a reinvention too. Bomberman had been a top-down, grid-based affair for most of its life, but Pocket Bomberman turns it into a side-scrolling platformer. The GB KISS feature has a fittingly playful use: players could build their own levels and pass them to a friend over infrared. One warning for anyone hunting a copy: only this Japanese cartridge has the feature. The later international and Game Boy Color versions of Pocket Bomberman dropped GB KISS entirely. And because it runs on the HuC-1, it is the plain member of the family: it can talk, but it cannot tell the time or make a sound of its own. Pocket Family GB: the full toolkit (HuC-3) The Pocket Family GB (DMG-HFAJ-JPN, released 9 August 1998) steps up to the HuC-3, with 512 kilobytes of ROM. Developed by Outback for Hudson, it is a gentle household life-simulation, a sort of pocket dolls' house where you furnish rooms and look after the family living in them, with a handful of mini-games and room for up to four families. Pocket Family GB with HuC-3 chip It is also the cartridge that actually puts the HuC-3's extras to work, which is what makes it such a satisfying object. You can set a time and a wake-up alarm, choosing from nine built-in tones, and load further melodies in as GB KISS files; Hudson handed out an extra one called Saita Saita. The same channel could bring in additional characters, and a bundled tool called Family Shot could take a picture of your current family and send it to a Game Boy Printer to come out as a sticker. A cartridge that keeps time, rings an alarm, receives new content over the air and prints, in 1998, on a nine-year-old handheld. There was a sequel, Pocket Family GB2 in 1999, but it was a Game Boy Color title and quietly dropped GB KISS, the same fate that met the international Pocket Bomberman. Robot Poncots and Robopon: the same chip, a far bigger game The third stop uses exactly the same class of hardware for something much more ambitious. The Japanese Robot Poncots games, Sun (DMG-HREJ-JPN) and Star (DMG-HRCJ-JPN), both arrived in 1998 on the HuC-3, with the real-time clock, infrared and full GB KISS support. They are monster-collecting role-playing games, a whole genre away from a puzzle game or a virtual pet, built on the same chip that rang Pocket Family's alarm. An expanded Moon Version followed in 1999. Robopons (Robot Ponkottsu): The full fledged usage of the HuC-3 capabilities Here a careful distinction matters, because it is easy to get wrong. The games were marketed as Game Boy Color titles, but Sun and Star are explicitly labelled Game Boy Compatible, so they run on the original DMG-01 as well; their boards are the DMG-UFDT-01 type. Only Sun was ever localised into English, published by Atlus in North America in December 2000 as Robopon Sun. That American release still uses the HuC-3 with its infrared hardware, but it does not support the GB KISS file system, so the Japanese Robot Poncots speak GB KISS and the US Robopon does not. You cannot simply say Robopon has GB KISS without naming the region. Robot Poncots also makes the clearest use of the HuC-3's alarm of any of these carts: a sensor sits on top of the cartridge for infrared, and the built-in buzzer genuinely chimes from inside the module when certain in-game events come due. There are even reports that it can sound with the Game Boy switched off, which is plausible given that the clock and buzzer draw on the cartridge's own battery rather than the console, though I would want a manual or a period source in hand before stating that flatly. The three at a glance Cartridge Mapper IR GB KISS RTC Buzzer / alarm Pocket Bomberman (JPN) HuC-1 Yes Yes No No Pocket Family GB HuC-3 Yes Yes Yes Yes Robot Poncots Sun / Star (JPN) HuC-3 Yes Yes Yes Yes Robopon Sun (USA) HuC-3 Yes No Yes Yes A small evolution on one chip family Lined up together, the three cartridges read like a development log. Pocket Bomberman shows the early HuC-1 and GB KISS: infrared and nothing more. Pocket Family adds the HuC-3 with a working clock and a genuine cartridge alarm, and builds a whole game around using them. Robot Poncots then pours that same HuC-3 hardware into a sprawling RPG, while quietly staying playable on the first grey Game Boy. There is even a melancholy coda to the story: by the time the sequels and the Color era arrived, GB KISS was being left behind, which is why these particular Japanese cartridges are the ones worth keeping. Each is a reminder that a cartridge was never only a game. Given the right chip, it could keep time, talk in the dark, ring an alarm, and still answer to a machine built in 1989.

Label Boy - Currently in Alpha State Content and Introduction Strictly speaking, the headline is not true. The Game Boy Printer arrived in 1998 with software of its own. The Game Boy Camera printed photos, Pokémon Yellow printed its Pokédex, and a handful of other games could put a picture on paper. What it never had was a program that lets the person holding the Game Boy decide what goes on the paper. Thirty-seven years after the Game Boy and twenty-eight after the printer, that program now exists. It is called LABEL BOY. "Marcel LOVES Game Boy": A label made with the Game Boy Printer I am fully aware that in 2026 this is mostly a joke. A phone, a laptop and the label printer from any office supply shop do all of it faster, sharper and on paper that is still being made. But to me, the printer from Nintendo has always felt unfinished. A printer that only prints what somebody else decided is half a printer, and this cartridge is the other half, delivered a little late. It is the third cartridge built here, after The GB Museum on a Cartridge and the diagnostic GB Test Lab. An early alpha, and an invitation LABEL BOY is an early alpha and a one-person hobby project under semi-active development. I do not test every update thoroughly, so the cartridge may well still contain bugs. Please try it, and please tell me what breaks: a code that would not scan, a label that came out wrong, anything at all. And if you are missing a feature you would want, I would genuinely love to hear it. Friendly, constructive feedback is worth more than gold here, and it is the quickest way to make the cartridge better. System Requirements A classic Game Boy. LABEL BOY is built and tested for the DMG-01. A Game Boy Printer or Pocket Printer, a link cable, printer paper and six fresh AA batteries (non rechargeable ones). A flash cartridge with MBC5, 256 kilobytes and 32 kilobytes of battery-backed memory. The saved labels, the list for serial printing and the undo all live there, and without a battery they are gone when the power goes off. Optional: Namco's Barcode Boy, for the cards described further down. Nintendo built the printer, nobody built the label maker The printer is a small thermal machine with a print head exactly as wide as the screen, 160 dots. Its paper is self-adhesive and came in three subtle tints rather than bold colours: a neutral white, a warm yellow and a cool blue, much like the warm, neutral and cool of lamplight. Nintendo sold a sticker printer in 1998, but it only ever printed what a game offered: photos from the Game Boy Camera, a handful of template stickers, a page of the Pokédex. What you could never do was simply type what you wanted and print it. This did not start as a practical problem. It started as the thing I would have loved to print as a child: not a photo or a Pokédex page the game handed me, but my own words, my own stickers, whatever I could dream up. The printer could obviously do it; nothing ever let me. Coming back to it years later, the tools I found were drawing apps, photo printers and a clever homebrew that turns doodles into on-screen QR codes. None of them lets you simply type text, a code and a layout and print a label. So I built the one that does. So I did what any reasonable adult does with a sticker printer from 1998: I spent precious time teaching it to create labels. Thats what I ever hoped for that the printer is able to do: My sweet dreams about the Game Boy printer (finally came true) A label you can see while you make it The one thing a label maker has to get right is the preview. You are making something physical, so you should see it exactly as it will come out of the printer, not as a list of settings. So LABEL BOY shows the label itself, full size, and every change appears on it the moment you make it. You start from a template rather than a blank page: a plain label, a shelf label, a numbered box, a website QR code, a cable flag or a card for the Barcode Boy. From there the controls stay the same everywhere. Up and down move between the parts of a label, with small corners marking the one you have selected; left and right change its setting; and SELECT steps to the next one: size, bold, alignment, grey shade, or turning a part to run along the roll. The footer always shows what A will do on the line you are on, so you are never guessing. Two small touches make it easy to live with. A part can be moved past its neighbour to reorder the label, and behind the last part there is always a slot to add the next one. And any change can be undone, then redone by pressing again, which is a little more forgiveness than the Game Boy itself ever offered. Typing with a D-pad There is no way around it: text on a Game Boy is typed letter by letter on a grid. The keyboard has four pages: small letters, capitals, signs, umlauts and symbols. A label for a German shelf needs ä, ö and ü more than it needs a heart, but it has the heart as well. Thirteen symbols are drawn by hand, seven dots tall: arrows, a warning sign, a wine glass for fragile boxes, an umbrella for keep dry, a heart, a note, a D-pad, a phone and a tiny Game Boy. A recycling sign was planned and dropped, because three arrows in a circle are just a smudge at seven dots tall. Four saved snippets hold text typed once and inserted with a single key, such as the start of a web address. After the third time typing https on a D-pad, they stop feeling like a luxury. QR codes calculated on a Game Boy The museum cartridge renders its 355 QR codes in advance on a PC, because every link is known before it ships. A label maker has no such luck. Nobody knows what will be typed, so here the Game Boy has to build every code itself. It takes the text, splits it into blocks, adds the error correction that lets a phone read a creased code, and draws every module. It handles the first ten sizes at all four correction levels, which is more than anyone will ever type with a D-pad. A new code first asks what it is for: a web address, Wi-Fi access, a contact card, a phone number or any text. For Wi-Fi it asks for the network and the password and builds the code a phone understands. It also prints both in plain text underneath, for the one guest whose phone has no camera. Umlauts were the last trap. On the cartridge an ä is simply the next glyph in the font, but a phone expects something else entirely, so every special character is translated on its way into the code. A word like Grüße now encodes the way a phone expects, instead of coming out as gibberish. Printing QR Codes with the Game Boy? No problem anymore! Barcodes, and why they lie down Barcodes posed a different puzzle. A typical EAN-13 is 113 modules wide including its quiet zones, and the print head has 160 dots. At one dot per module most scanners give up. So when a code does not fit across, LABEL BOY turns it by ninety degrees: the bars run across the paper and the code grows along the roll, where there is no limit. There is a word of caution built in as well. EAN numbers are issued by GS1 to the companies that make the goods. The cartridge will encode any number and calculate the check digit, but for numbers of one's own it suggests Code 128, which takes any text and belongs to nobody. Twenty labels from one Most labels come in batches, and LABEL BOY can print a whole run from a single layout. The simplest way is a counter: drop one into the text and it counts up by one on every copy, so one label becomes twenty numbered boxes in a single run. A list does the same for words. You type a list of up to 64 lines once, place a list marker on the label, and each copy takes the next line from the list. That is how you label a drawer of cables or a shelf of jars: type the names once, print them all. And between two labels the printer can lay down a dashed cut line instead of winding to the tear-off edge, which saves a surprising amount of paper that nobody makes any more. Saving, and printing it again Fourteen finished labels fit in the cartridge's memory, plus the last one printed. Print again in the main menu repeats that one without touching the label being worked on, which is exactly what is needed when the first copy came out crooked. A card for the Barcode Boy In 1992, six years before the printer, Namco sold a barcode reader for the Game Boy in Japan. Its games turn the number on a card into a fighter or a monster, and they do not look the number up: any number gives a result, and a new number gives a creature nobody has seen. A word of honesty here: this card has never actually been tested. It is built purely from the published Barcode Boy specifications, so whether the printer's dots are fine enough for Namco's 1992 reader is a question only real hardware can answer. If it works, a printer from 1998 will feed a reader from 1992, which would quietly be my favourite thing in the whole project. If you have a Barcode Boy and can try it, I would love to hear how it goes. Testing the printer before trusting it The Label Boy comes with a full test suite for the printer From the Test Lab, LABEL BOY inherits a printer check that uses no paper. It asks the printer who it is, how it feels, whether the cable is clean and whether the motor turns. Then come the tests that do use paper: a dot check for dead heaters and an exposure ladder that finds the darkness this paper still needs. New is the Test sheet, eleven numbered labels in one run: a frame to measure, the sizes, the greys, the letters, four QR codes, the barcodes and a Barcode Boy card. Each one answers a question on a checklist, and SELECT shows them all on screen first, without spending a centimetre of paper. A printer guide on the cartridge Like the other two cartridges, LABEL BOY carries its own reference: nine short articles on the printer, from the protocol it speaks to why thermal paper fades, plus a help page, the settings and an about page. It is a label maker that explains the printer it drives, which is the museum's habit and probably incurable. Download and browser emulation The ROM is free to download. It is an early alpha built around a thirty-year-old printer, so expect the odd rough edge, and if a print comes out wrong on your own machine I would genuinely like to hear about it. It will run in a browser too, with one honest limitation: a browser has no Game Boy Printer on its link port. Everything up to the preview works, and printing reports that no printer answers, which, for once, is exactly right. Explore and have fun! Found a bug? Please let me know. LABEL BOY is an independent homebrew project, not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Nintendo. Game Boy and all product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Changelog Built in in three broad steps rather than a day-by-day log: The scaffolding nobody applauds: First came a menu system, a text engine, a font drawn pixel by pixel and enough of the printer protocol to get a single dot onto paper. With that standing, the first real build followed: text in four sizes, QR codes, and EAN and Code 128 barcodes all worked out on the Game Boy itself, a live preview, a counter and fourteen memory slots. Changed the list design to a semi-WYSIWYG editor. Added templates including a Barcode Boy card, a QR assistant for web addresses, Wi-Fi, contacts and phone numbers, umlauts and thirteen hand-drawn symbols, serial printing from a list, and undo and redo, because a Game Boy with no undo is a cruel teacher. Added a printer know-how (wiki) and a start screen: the printer checks and driver corrections from the GB Test Lab moved across, a Test sheet was added, and then the genuinely hardest part remained, which was naming it. LABEL BOY won, mostly because it made me smile, which is how this museum makes most of its decisions. If you have not read them yet: This article explains the protocol the label maker speaks (How the Game Boy Printer works).

A tiny AI experiment, written for the hardware of 1989 Poor GBuddy walks into a wall. He stands there for a moment, tries again, and walks into it a second time. Then he turns, trots down a corridor he has already visited twice, and somewhere along the way, slightly to his own surprise, finds the exit. GBuddy's Great Escape What looks like a clumsy little robot is a learning experiment. GBuddy, the mascot of this museum, is small, square and endlessly patient. He collects experience, one bump at a time, and changes his decisions based on it. And all of that learning happens inside a ROM for the original Game Boy. The DMG-01 was never meant for anything of the kind. Its processor runs at a little over four megahertz, it has eight kilobytes of working memory, and it cannot even multiply two numbers without being taught how in software. GBuddy's Escape joins three other cartridges built for this collection. One is a reference work in the manner of the InfoGenius titles of 1991, one tests the console it sits in, and one prints labels. This one hands the screen to a robot and lets him work out a maze for himself. A robot that knows nothing The maze is ten fields wide and eight high, each field sixteen pixels square, and all of it fits on the screen at once. GBuddy starts in one corner, the exit is marked G, and he has four possible moves: up, down, left and right. What he does not have is any idea where the exit is. There is no map in his head, no recorded sequence of moves and no table worked out on a computer beforehand. On a fresh cartridge, every one of his opinions is exactly zero. At the very beginning for poor GBuddy every move is pure trial and error. So he guesses, cheerfully but blindly. He bumps badly into every wall and visits the same dead end as if it might have changed since last time. A training run ends when he reaches the exit or after 256 moves, whichever comes first, and on the early runs it is usually the second. Then the next run begins, and what he learned stays with him. Each move earns him a small score. An ordinary step costs one point, bumping into a wall costs five, and reaching the exit earns fifty. Those three numbers are the only thing anyone tells him about the maze. Everything else he has to find out for himself, antenna first. Game Boy machine learning, one move at a time The method is called Q-learning, a form of learning by trial and feedback. It helps to imagine GBuddy keeping a small notebook for every field of the maze. It holds four entries: how good it has turned out to be to go up, down, left or right from there. After every step he adjusts the entry for the move he just made. He takes into account the score of the step and how promising the field he landed on already looks. Good experience near the exit therefore spreads backwards along the corridors, field by field, until the moves that lead towards it are rated higher than the moves that lead away. The arithmetic is done in whole numbers, taking a quarter of each surprise on board at a time. The DMG-01 has no hardware for fractions, and a learning rule that relied on them would not fit. Most of the time GBuddy picks the move he rates highest. Now and then he deliberately tries a random direction instead, at first on one move in four. With training these tries become rarer, but they never disappear, because without them he would settle on the first route that worked and never find a shorter one. It is worth being precise about what this is. GBuddy does not understand the maze the way a person does. He learns ratings for decisions at particular positions. This is tabular Q-learning, not a neural network, a chatbot or a language model, and it is still genuine machine learning: experience changes what he does next. Fun fact: Christopher Watkins described this machine learning approach in his doctoral thesis at Cambridge in 1989, the year the Game Boy came out. Luck is not knowledge Reaching the exit proves surprisingly little. A robot that tries things at random will stumble out of a small maze sooner or later, and to anyone watching, that looks exactly like success. The cartridge is a fond but strict teacher. Every time GBuddy reaches the exit in training, it immediately runs a second, silent check. It sets him back at the start and lets him walk on what he has learned alone: no random tries, no learning, always the move he rates highest. If that walk does not reach the exit, something other than his learned decisions helped him in training. The screen then says so: EXIT REACHED, LUCK INVOLVED. The cartridge does not measure how much of a success was luck. The line is a playful way of saying that the route could not yet be confirmed. Two counters, and why they differ That distinction runs through the whole cartridge, and it is easiest to see in its two counters. SUCCESS counts every time GBuddy reaches the exit in training on the current maze, however he got there. IMPROVEMENT counts only progress that has been checked: the first confirmed route, and after that every confirmed route that is shorter than the best one so far. An example shows the difference. GBuddy reaches the exit five times in training, which makes SUCCESS #5. Only then does he manage it in a check with no random tries, his first confirmed route and IMPROVEMENT #1. Later he learns a shorter way, and that is IMPROVEMENT #2. Testing the same route again adds nothing. The test that proves it The same check is open to the player. Once at least one training run is complete, TEST puts GBuddy at the start and lets him walk on what he has learned. Nothing he does during a test changes his ratings, the statistics or the random sequence of the training. A confirmed run replayed step by step: GBuddy walking the shortest route he learned A test ends at the exit, at a safety limit, or when he steps onto a field he has already visited on the same walk. That last case matters. Without randomness, the same ratings on the same field produce the same choice every time, so a robot that comes back to a field would go round in circles forever. The cartridge stops him kindly and explains that he needs a little more practice. Solved, and then the walls move GBuddy finally made it!!! How does the cartridge know a route is the shortest? A separate function works out the shortest possible length through the current maze. It never hands GBuddy a single move and never trains him; it only measures his route against that number. The cartridge can judge a solution without giving it away. When his confirmed route matches that length, training pauses and the screen reads MAZE SOLVED. In the run that produced the pictures for this article, that took sixteen training runs on the standard maze, with a shortest route of twelve moves. Another run may take more or fewer, because the random tries differ. Solved: the shortest route from start to exit on this maze. The cartridge then suggests the obvious next step, which is to change the maze. EDIT ARENA moves a cursor over the fields and turns floor into wall and back. Start, exit and the outer walls are protected, and the editor refuses any change that would cut the exit off. The maze never changes by itself; only the player moves the walls. New walls, new headache for GBuddy GBuddy keeps what he has learned, and that is the interesting part. On the changed maze he sets off confidently along his old favourite route and meets a wall that was not there yesterday. Now he has to adjust the corridors that no longer lead anywhere. It is hard not to feel for him. His willingness to explore is raised again, and the counters for the maze start from zero. On the edited maze from these pictures he went on to find the new shortest route, fourteen moves long. For a clean start there is RESET AI. It erases his ratings, statistics and counters but keeps the maze, so the same task can be watched again from nothing. A wiki for a robot Fifteen short pages on the cartridge explain what is happening, in plain language and without a single formula. They cover the scores, the difference between practice and test, luck against learned decisions, every status message and both counters. The cart internal wiki explains the test and its results The last page says what the whole experiment shows. The learning happens in the ROM: no internet connection, no server, no external AI and no calculation on a connected PC. What is on the screen is what the program itself has worked out, through a loop anyone can follow: try, receive feedback, adjust, check, and face a new challenge. Try it The cartridge is written for an original Game Boy DMG-01 on a flash cartridge with battery backed memory. Testing took place on an EverDrive X7 Pro. Try it yourself: GBuddy's Escape runs in your browser, and the ROM is free to download for a real Game Boy, on its player page. There is something fitting about it. The machine that made handheld gaming ordinary was built from cheap, proven parts, and it has no business learning anything. Thirty-seven years later a small robot learns a maze on it anyway, one quarter of a surprise and one bumped antenna at a time. And when he gets lucky, the cartridge says so, plainly and without holding it against him.

The Game Boy did not just give us games to play. It gave a whole generation the itch to make them. If you have ever held a DMG-01 and wondered what it would feel like to write something of your own for it, this series is for you. Over the next few parts we are going to build a complete, playable game from scratch, in the C programming language, and run it on a real Game Boy. The game we will make is Snake: simple enough to understand fully, yet a proper game with food, growth and a satisfying way to lose. You do not need to be a professional programmer to follow along. A little curiosity and a willingness to experiment is enough. This first part is all about setting up your workshop, so that by the end you have written your very first Game Boy program and watched it boot up on screen. Why Write a New Game for a 1989 Console Here is the wonderful part. The Game Boy is still very much alive as a platform for makers. Thanks to a dedicated community, the tools to build new games are free, modern and surprisingly friendly. The machine itself is also a joy to develop for, precisely because it is so limited. There is no sprawling operating system to fight and no hidden layers. You talk almost directly to the hardware, and you can hold the entire console in your head. When your code finally runs on that pea-green screen, it feels like magic in a way that modern development rarely does. The Toolchain: Meet GBDK-2020 To turn code into a Game Boy game we need a toolchain: a set of programs that take what you type and translate it into something the console can run. We will use GBDK-2020, the Game Boy Development Kit. It is a modern, actively maintained descendant of the original GBDK from the 1990s, and it bundles everything you need in one package: a C compiler, an assembler, a linker and a library of ready-made functions for talking to the Game Boy hardware. In plain terms, you write your game in C, GBDK-2020 compiles it, and out comes a .gb file. That .gb file is a ROM, the exact same kind of file a real cartridge holds. It will run in an emulator on your computer and, with the right hardware, on an actual Game Boy. What You Will Need The good news is that the whole setup is free and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. You need four things. First, a copy of GBDK-2020. Second, a plain text or code editor to write your C files; something like Visual Studio Code works beautifully, but even a simple editor will do. Third, a Game Boy emulator to test your game quickly, where Emulicious, BGB and SameBoy are all excellent and free. And fourth, optional but deeply rewarding, a flash cartridge such as an EverDrive so you can eventually play your creation on a genuine DMG-01. Installing GBDK-2020 Installation is refreshingly simple, because there is no installer. Head to the GBDK-2020 releases page on GitHub and download the latest package for your operating system. Unzip it somewhere sensible, for example a folder called gbdk in your home directory. Inside you will find a folder named bin, and that is where the important tools live. The one we care about most is called lcc, the program that turns your C code into a ROM. There is nothing else to configure to get started. GitHub Page: https://github.com/gbdk-2020/gbdk-2020/releases Your First Steps in Game Boy Programming With the toolkit in place, let us write something. Create a new file called hello.c and type in the following. It is about as small as a Game Boy program gets, and it already does something real. #include #include void main(void) { printf("HELLO, GAME BOY!"); } Before we run it, let us read those few lines, because you will meet them again and again. The two #include lines at the top pull in ready-made code so we can use it: gb.h brings in the Game Boy functions, and stdio.h brings in printf. The line void main(void) marks where the program begins; every Game Boy program starts running from main, and the curly brackets hold everything it does. Inside, the single instruction printf("HELLO, GAME BOY!"); prints that text on the screen. That really is a complete program: pull in what you need, then do one thing. Save the file. Now open a terminal, navigate to the folder that contains hello.c, and run a single command. Adjust the path so that it points at the lcc program inside your GBDK bin folder. lcc -o hello.gb hello.c If everything is set up correctly, you will now have a brand new file sitting right next to your code: hello.gb. That is a real Game Boy ROM, and you wrote it. Open it in your emulator and you should see your message printed on screen in that unmistakable Game Boy font. Take a moment to enjoy it. You are now, officially, a Game Boy developer. Your first line of Code "Hello, Game Boy!" What Just Happened In just a few seconds, GBDK-2020 did quite a lot on your behalf. It compiled your C into the low-level machine code that the Game Boy's processor understands, linked it with the kit's built-in library, and packaged the result into a .gb ROM laid out exactly the way the console expects. The printf function you called is part of that library; it quietly handled the fiddly business of drawing letters on the screen. As the series goes on we will step away from printf and start drawing our own graphics, which is where the real fun begins. Coming Up in Part 2 Before we can move a snake around the screen, we need to understand how the Game Boy actually draws anything at all. It does not work like a modern computer with a simple canvas of pixels. Instead it thinks in small tiles and sprites, a clever system born from the hardware limits of 1989. In the next part we will explore that mental model, and it will make everything that follows click into place. If you want to get to know the machine we are writing for, browse the collection or look closely at the original DMG-01 console that started it all. Then open your editor, install the tools, and get that first ROM running. See you in Part 2. The Full Series Part 1: Setting Up Your Workshop (you are here) · Part 2: How the Game Boy Thinks · Part 3: Drawing Your World · Part 4: Taking Control · Part 5: Food, Growth and Game Over · Part 6: From Emulator to Cartridge Part of the Write Your Own Game Boy Games series.

The original Game Boy was declared finished in 2003, when Nintendo quietly ended production of the line. Nobody seems to have told the people still making games for it. More than twenty years on, the grey brick from 1989 has something close to a release calendar: boutique labels signing new titles, a workshop in rural France pressing fresh cartridges, and crowdfunding campaigns raising real money for a console with no official game in two decades. Where the homebrew scene is about hobbyists building games for love, this is the other half of the story: the small but genuine industry that has grown up around selling new Game Boy games as proper, boxed objects. A real industry, in miniature What sets this corner apart from pure homebrew is its professionalism. The games arrive complete in the box, with a printed manual and an insert, made to the standard of a 1990 release and often beyond it. Several of the makers behind them now run on pre-orders, numbered print runs and published catalogues, which is why a museum devoted to the original hardware pays as much attention to what is being pressed today as to what was sold in 1990. The crowd that funds the cartridges The clearest sign that there is an audience willing to pay was Greenboy Games, the studio led by Dana Puch that made games exclusively for the original Game Boy. Greenboy Games - Shapeshifter II Its Kickstarter for The Shapeshifter raised around 72,000 dollars from close to 900 backers, at the time the most successful Game Boy crowdfunding campaign yet seen. The sequel, The Shapeshifter II, shipped as a physical release spread across two cartridges and sits in this collection on the same shelves as the 1989 games. In May 2023 Greenboy was absorbed by Incube8 Games, folding its catalogue into a larger label while the original team stayed on to finish the trilogy. The label raising the standard If new Game Boy games now have a gold standard, it belongs to Incube8 Games, which has built a catalogue of dozens of new titles for the original hardware and its successors. Incub8 Games - Deadeus Its best-known release in this collection is the horror game Deadeus, boxed for real cartridges after beginning life as a free download. Incube8's importance is less about any single game than about treating new Game Boy releases as a serious, numbered catalogue worth keeping in print. The factory in the hills None of these games reaches a shelf without someone to manufacture it, which is where Broke Studio comes in. Based in the Auvergne region of France, it makes new Game Boy cartridges from the circuit board to the box, and its Homebrew Factory service now lets independent developers turn a finished game into a real, boxed product. Assembling a game at Broke Studio Its own catalogue runs from the point-and-click adventures Lost Treasure of Lima and Inspector Waffles: Early Days to the officially licensed reissue of Jaleco's Fortified Zone 2, produced with City Connection. The full account of how the factory works is in the factory in the French countryside. Not only new games The renaissance is not limited to brand new titles. Limited Run Games presses official, licensed reprints of genuine classics, and this collection holds its 2019 re-release of Capcom's 1992 Star Wars, a real DMG cartridge manufactured long after the original had sold out. Re-Release of Capcom's Star Wars Game It is a different impulse from homebrew, aimed at players who would rather own a sealed, boxed copy than hunt down a worn one, but it belongs to the same story: brand new Game Boy cartridges still coming off a production line today. Why the museum documents it What links all of these is care for the object: the box, the manual and the insert treated as part of the release, not packaging to be discarded, which is exactly the standard this collection holds for the original hardware. It is also part of the museum's wider guide to the Game Boy's living scene. The grey brick from 1989 is not a relic. It has a release calendar, and it is still open for business. The full tour is in Still Building for the Grey Brick: A tour through the Game Boy's Living Scene.

Most machines go quiet when the shops stop stocking them. The Game Boy never took the hint. Decades after the last cartridge left a production line, people are still writing brand new games for the 1989 hardware, and a good number of them do it for the love of the thing rather than for money. This is the grassroots, do-it-yourself end of that story: not the boutique labels with their boxed releases, but the hobbyists, the game jams and the free tools that keep the DMG-01 a living platform. Games made under the old rules What makes this corner of the scene distinctive is that its makers accept the limits of 1989 on purpose. The original Game Boy draws everything on a screen of 160 by 144 pixels in four shades, built out of small 8 by 8 tiles, and homebrew developers work inside exactly those walls. Nowhere is that discipline clearer than GBJAM, the Game Boy game jam that has run on itch.io each August for over a decade. Its rules are strict by design: the original 160 by 144 resolution, no more than four colours, and every asset made from scratch during the jam. The 2016 edition alone produced 486 new games in ten days, which says a great deal about how alive the format still is. The tool that opened the gates For most of the machine's life, writing a Game Boy game meant hand-coding in assembly or wrestling with a C toolchain, which kept homebrew a specialist pursuit. That changed in 2019, when Chris Maltby released GB Studio, a free and open-source engine that lets someone build a working Game Boy game with almost no code at all. It did for the Game Boy roughly what cheap cameras did for photography: the barrier became imagination rather than a computer-science degree. A good share of the new games of the past few years, from weekend experiments to polished releases, began life in it. A horror story in four shades The clearest proof of what the tools now allow is Deadeus, built in GB Studio by the solo developer IZMA and released free in 2019 before it was ever boxed. A boy dreams that his village has three days left to live, and the game offers eleven different endings with no correct path through them. One detail is telling: when its creator tried to register a speedrun, the submission was rejected as too short, and was accepted only once someone explained that the game had eleven endings to find. A story with real weight, running on a screen that manages four shades, is exactly the kind of thing this scene exists to make. From a file on a laptop to a cartridge in a slot A new game is only half the story; getting it onto genuine hardware is the other half, and that takes two kinds of device, both documented in the collection. Flash cartridges, such as the EverDrive, carry a memory card so a whole library of homebrew ROMs can run on an unmodified DMG-01. The the Flash Boy is the little writer that burns a finished ROM onto a flashable cartridge in the first place. Between them, any file built in GB Studio or a C toolchain can end up behaving exactly like a 1989 cartridge, which is the quiet bridge between the modern workflow and the vintage machine. The museum's own attempt To understand the scene from the inside, the museum built a Game Boy game of its own: a complete version of Snake, written from scratch in C, drawn with tiles and sprites, reading the joypad, growing with each bite and ending on a proper game-over screen, and finally run on a real DMG-01 through a flash cartridge. The whole project is documented step by step in the Build Your Own Game Boy Game series. Why homebrew belongs in a DMG-01 collection It would be easy to argue that a Game Boy collection should stop at the last official release in the early 2000s. That would miss the point. The homebrew scene proves the DMG-01 is not a closed artefact but a platform still capable of genuinely new ideas more than thirty years on. Documenting the new cartridges beside the old ones tells the fuller, more hopeful story: not only what the Game Boy was, but what it still is. These makers are part of the museum's wider guide to the Game Boy's living scene. The homebrew titles, flash carts and the museum's own Snake build are all catalogued, with photos, in the collection. The full tour is in Still Building for the Grey Brick: A tour through the Game Boy's Living Scene.

The Game Boy should have been finished long ago. It came out in 1989, Nintendo stopped making the grey brick in 2003, and the last official game shipped in Japan over two decades ago. And yet the museum's shelves keep filling with things that did not exist when I started collecting: new cartridges, new hardware, new modifications, all of it made for a machine the industry gave up on. The Game Boy is one of those rare objects that outlived its own maker's interest, kept alive by people who simply refused to let it go. I find that genuinely moving. This is the museum's guide to that world. Not the games of the 1990s, but everything being built for the grey brick right now: the engineers designing new hardware, the one-person studios developing new games, the publishers pressing boxed cartridges, the musicians who treat it as an instrument, the artists who repaint the machine itself, and the tools that make all of it possible. If the rest of the museum is about remembering what the Game Boy was, this part is about what it still is. A machine that never quite died Two pieces set the scene. The Game Boy is still alive looks at the homebrew movement on the original DMG-01, at the fact that people are still writing brand new games for a console older than most of the people writing them. And the new-cartridge renaissance follows the other half of it: real, boxed cartridges, professionally manufactured and sold today for a system that has not had an official release in over twenty years. Between them they explain how a supposedly dead platform ended up with a release schedule again. New titles now appear often enough that simply keeping up with them has become its own small hobby. The people building new hardware The most surprising part is the hardware, and it comes down to a handful of stubborn engineers. Sebastian Staacks is the man behind There Oughta Be. He built a WiFI cartridge for the Game Boy that could reach the internet. However, his masterpiece is the GBInterceptor. A tiny device that reads the console's screen straight off the cartridge bus and turns it into live video, with no screen capture involved at all. GBinterceptor streaming the video signal to a laptop The team at insideGadgets went the other way and turned the handheld into a wireless controller, driven by a wifi cartridge of their own making. These are not patched-up old parts but genuinely new designs for a thirty-year-old socket, which is far harder than it sounds: building for original hardware means working inside the same tight limits Nintendo's own engineers did, only without their documentation. That spirit of building is not only about circuit boards. Some makers turn their craft on the shape of the machine itself: the collection includes a handcrafted arcade kiosk, a stand-up cabinet built by hand around a real Game Boy, which serves as the controller while the picture plays on a screen set into the cabinet. It is an unofficial, one-off tribute, and a reminder that the people still building for the Game Boy are not only writing new games but reimagining the machine as an object. This Zeroboy ist the museums own creation The building bug reaches the museum too. One piece in the collection was built by hand rather than bought: the Zeroboy, a working console built inside a genuine DMG-01 shell around a Raspberry Pi, with a sharp colour screen, a proper battery and more buttons than Nintendo ever fitted. It belongs to the wider Raspberry Pi Zero retro gaming movement, and it grew out of the ZeroBoy project at zeroboy.eu, which has since sadly shut down. There was never an official product or a tidy kit, so every one of these is hand-built and no two are ever quite alike. It took parts ordered from around the world and an HDMI cable soldered together strand by strand. The full build story is in the Journal. The makers giving their games away Then there are the people who write games and simply give them away. Dr. Ludos is a one-person studio that makes new Game Boy titles and releases them for nothing, because the point was never the money, and he is far from alone: a whole culture of makers now puts fresh games on itch.io for free, to be downloaded and flashed onto real hardware by anyone who wants them. The museum gathers more of them in the story of the still-living Game Boy. What strikes me is the range, from studios with a proper catalogue down to one person uploading a game on a weekend, all aimed at the same grey cartridge slot. The GB Museum's own collection of free homebrew The museum has dabbled a little in this itself, not to add to the pile or to show off but as a small homage to the old grey brick. They are gathered on the museum's homebrew page, deliberately humble things next to the work above. Once you have spent enough time among people still building for this machine, it is hard not to want to join in. The people pressing boxed cartridges Not every new game is a free download. A small group of publishers now press brand new Game Boy games as real, boxed cartridges, with printed manuals and proper packaging, and several of them have found their way into the collection. More than the individual games, it is the people behind them that matter here. inCube8 Games is the closest thing the scene has to a dedicated label, a publisher specialising in high-quality physical releases for the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. The example in the collection is Deadeus, a bleak little horror game about a village with three days left to live, but the point is the publisher: a team that treats new Game Boy games as something worth boxing, numbering and taking seriously. Greenboy Games was essentially one person, a studio that built a run of original Game Boy titles and sold them as proper carts in classic-style boxes, including The Shapeshifter II in the collection. In 2023 Greenboy was absorbed by inCube8, a small sign of how this corner of the scene is slowly consolidating into something closer to a real little industry. The most prolific maker in the collection is Broke Studio, a French outfit that has turned cartridge pressing into a craft of its own. Their own catalogue spans the point-and-click adventures Lost Treasure of Lima and Inspector Waffles: Early Days and the Jaleco action reissue Fortified Zone 2, and through their Homebrew Factory they now help other developers finance and manufacture their games too. The museum covers how they work in the factory in the French countryside. Broke Studio - Cartridge pressing at it's best A different kind of publisher reissues the classics rather than making new ones. Limited Run Games specialises in official, licensed reprints, and the collection holds their 2019 re-release of Capcom's 1992 Star Wars, a genuine DMG cartridge pressed long after the original run had sold out. It is a reminder that the new-cartridge wave is not only homebrew: even bona fide old games are being manufactured again for collectors who would rather have them boxed and sealed than hunt down a worn copy secondhand. The Game Boy as an instrument No community has kept the Game Boy alive quite like the musicians, and they owe it above all to a few determined people. In 1998 Oliver Wittchow, then a student in Hamburg, wrote nanoloop, a music tool with an interface unlike anything else on the machine, and began selling it on cartridges; the museum's example is the nanoloop NL13. Around 2000 Johan Kotlinski in Stockholm built LSDj, Little Sound DJ, the four-channel tracker that became the scene's workhorse. Between them these two homemade programs turned the little sound chip that once bleeped out Tetris into a real instrument. Arduinoboy - A MIDI port for the Game Boy The hardware makers took it further. Timothy Lamb, who works as trash80, wrote mGB, a cartridge that turns the Game Boy into a MIDI sound module, and Arduinoboy, the little bridge that lets LSDj, nanoloop and mGB sync with modern MIDI studios and synthesisers. Both are kept in production by HobbyChop, the studio devoted to keeping the Game Boy singing, whose output in the collection also includes Droneboy, a cartridge that does nothing but generate endless drones. This is where the chiptune scene stops being software and becomes stage gear: with an Arduinoboy in the chain, a 1989 handheld holds its own next to a rack of synthesisers. The museum goes deeper into all of this in the Game Boy as a musical instrument. It is the clearest case of the machine being loved for exactly what it is, limitations and all, rather than in spite of them. Fan art and repainting the brick Not everyone building for the Game Boy writes code. Some simply love the object, and they say so with a paintbrush. The collection includes a Pikachu fan-art Game Boy, an original console given a hand-painted Pikachu finish it never wore from the factory, the work of a fan who wanted a machine that looked the way they felt about it. It earns its place precisely because it is unofficial: one person's affection for the grey brick made visible, which is as much a part of the living scene as any new cartridge. The full story of that little console is in the Journal. Pikachu Fan Art Game Boy Bundle The tools that make it all possible None of this happens without tools, and the most important ones are software. For most of the Game Boy's life, writing a game meant wrestling with assembly language and a toolchain like GBDK, which kept homebrew the preserve of real programmers. That changed in 2019, when Chris Maltby released GB Studio, a free, open-source engine that lets someone build a working Game Boy game with almost no code at all. A huge share of the new games above, from weekend jam experiments to ambitious full releases, would simply not exist without it. The rest of the modern workshop matters just as much. Artwork is drawn in pixel editors such as Aseprite and then squeezed into the console's strict tile format with Game Boy-specific tools like Game Boy Tile Designer and Game Boy Map Builder. And almost no one tests on real hardware first: accurate emulators such as BGB, Emulicious and SameBoy let a developer run and debug a game on a PC before it ever touches a cartridge. The museum traces that whole path, from emulator to a finished cart, in Build Your Own Game Boy Game. The hardware side closes the loop. Flash cartridges, from krikzz's EverDrive and beyond, let a modern file run on an unmodified original console, and the Flash Boy is the little kit that dumps, backs up and re-flashes a cartridge, so that a save from 1999 does not quietly die with its battery. For the wider story of how preservation, piracy and homebrew all tangle together, Bootlegs and Flashcarts is the place to start. None of it is glamorous work, but without these tools the whole living scene above would stay locked on the shelf. People sometimes assume a museum only looks backwards. This part of the collection is the opposite. It is the proof that the Game Boy is not a closed chapter but a living one, still being written by anyone with a soldering iron, a compiler or a tracker and a soft spot for a grey plastic brick. Preservation is not only about keeping the old things safe. It is also about noticing that the story is not over. That is why these pieces sit here beside the thirty-year-old boxes: the collection is a record of a machine still, improbably, in use.

When the Game Boy launched in 1989, Mario came along for the ride, as everyone expected. What almost nobody expected was that his handheld debut would be one of the strangest games ever to carry his name, and that it would quietly introduce two characters who had never existed anywhere before. Part one of Born on the Game Boy is about Super Mario Land, and the new faces it smuggled into the series. A launch title that quietly introduced two brand-new characters. A Mario game from a different hand Super Mario Land was not made by Shigeru Miyamoto's team. It was built by Nintendo R&D1, the group led by Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi, and it shows in every corner. Instead of returning to the Mushroom Kingdom, the game invents an entirely new land called Sarasaland, split into four exotic worlds loosely themed on ancient Egypt, a sunken sea, Easter Island and a vision of China. The enemies are unfamiliar, the physics feel a little lighter, and Mario's fireball has become a bouncing Superball that ricochets around the screen collecting coins. Two of the levels abandon platforming altogether and turn into side-scrolling shooter stages, with Mario piloting a tiny submarine and then a little aeroplane. It is Mario as seen in a funhouse mirror, and it is all the more charming for it. Mario's first adventure on the Game Boy That eccentric little adventure was a colossal success, selling in the region of eighteen million copies and giving the new handheld a genuine Mario game to call its own. It even had its own catchy soundtrack, whose bright, marching main theme is still fondly remembered today. But the most lasting thing Super Mario Land left behind was not its music or its submarine levels. It was two characters, born on the Game Boy, who would take very different paths afterward. You can find this cartridge in the collection at the Game Boy Museum. Daisy and Tatanga, born in Sarasaland The princess Mario is racing to rescue this time is not Peach. It is Princess Daisy, the ruler of Sarasaland, appearing here for the very first time. For years afterward she all but vanished, a piece of Game Boy trivia more than a star. Then, around the turn of the millennium, Nintendo revived her as a regular in its sports and party games, and today Daisy is a fixture of Mario Kart, Mario Party, Mario Tennis and more, usually cast as the spirited counterpart to Peach and a frequent partner to Luigi. Every one of those appearances traces back to a single Game Boy cartridge in 1989. More on this twist in the princess who wasn't there. Her kidnapper is the other newcomer: Tatanga, described in the manual as a mysterious spaceman, an alien who invades Sarasaland, hypnotises its people and carries the princess off. He is the game's final boss, met in an aerial showdown at the controls of his flying machine. Tatanga proved memorable enough that he returned as a boss in the sequel, Super Mario Land 2, which makes him one of the earliest examples of a Mario villain created specifically for the handheld and then carried forward. For a supposedly minor spin-off, Super Mario Land was doing real world-building. This is the whole argument of the series in miniature. A game that looks, at a glance, like a scaled-down port of a console hit turns out to be the origin point of a princess who now appears in nearly every Mario spin-off, and of a villain who outlived his own game. The Game Boy was not just carrying Mario around. It was adding to his world. To see this cartridge and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Born on the Game Boy · For the plumber's full run across the handheld library, see Mario's Game Boy empire. Part 1: Super Mario Land, Daisy and Tatanga (you are here) · Part 2: Kirby's Dream Land · Part 3: The Birth of Wario · Part 4: Link's Awakening, Marin and the Wind Fish · Part 5: Pokemon Changes Everything