Collecting the original Game Boy is one of the most rewarding corners of retro gaming: the hardware is affordable enough to start, deep enough to spend a lifetime on, and full of regional quirks and one-off oddities. This guide gathers the essentials, drawn from a collection of more than 330 catalogued DMG-01 items, and links to the full detail on each topic. Whether you are buying your first boxed console or chasing the last rarity on your list, start here. What Makes a Game Boy Valuable Condition, completeness and rarity drive everything. Read what makes a Game Boy valuable for the collector's perspective, and our editorial on sealed and slabbed versus complete-in-box, the thinking behind why this collection chose CIB. Reading the Box and the Code Half of collecting is knowing exactly what you are looking at. Learn to decode the DMG model numbers and the abbreviations every collector should know, from DMG and CGB to the region tags that tell you where a copy was sold. Box Sets and Bundles Nintendo boxed the Game Boy a dozen ways, and the box is often the real prize. Our guide to Game Boy box sets covers console-only, single-game, dual-game, triple-game star sets and theme bundles, and you can see standouts like the Star Wars console bundle and the classic Tetris bundle that built an empire. Chasing the Rarities The deep end is where it gets addictive. The complete Japanese boxed accessory line is one of the hardest sets to finish, a developer prototype like the Loopz cartridge almost never reaches collectors, and even a one-off fan-art console has a place in a serious archive. Building a Collection Finally, the long game. Read the lessons from building a complete DMG-01 archive and, for the pure joy of it, what is really inside an original 1989 box. Explore the Full Collection Every item referenced here is documented, photographed and catalogued in the Game Boy Master Collection, which is also available for acquisition as a whole.

Some of the collection's most touching objects are also its smallest and cheapest. This arrival cost fifty yen when it was new, a handful of loose change, and it was never meant to outlive a school term: a little Super Mario Land cap eraser, handed to Japanese Mario fans around the game's launch in 1989. What It Is Around the release of the hit game Super Mario Land, Nintendo offered these cute cap erasers to Mario fans in Japan for fifty yen each. Small promotional trinkets like this, produced in 1989, are the definition of ephemeral, cheap, plentiful and completely disposable, which is exactly why so few survive. A surviving example is a charming piece of very early Game Boy merchandise, and it joins the collection's other Super Mario Land curiosities. 1989 Super Mario Land cap eraser Japan promo The World of the Keshigomu There is a whole culture behind an object like this. In Japan, the character eraser, the keshigomu, was a playground institution: cheap moulded rubber figures of popular characters that children collected, traded and occasionally even used to rub out a mistake. Nintendo, alert as ever to its youngest fans, folded Mario into that world, turning a fifty-yen impulse buy into another small thread connecting children to the games they loved. The eraser was merchandising at its most grassroots, not a pricey statue for adults but pocket-money joy for kids. The timing is what gives it real weight. Nineteen eighty-nine was the Game Boy's birth year, and Super Mario Land was one of the games that launched it. To hold a piece of merchandise from that exact moment, however humble, is to hold a fragment of the Game Boy's very first wave of cultural impact, before anyone knew how big it would all become. That the survivor is a fifty-yen eraser rather than something grand only makes it more evocative, a reminder that the phenomenon began with children and their pocket money. Why It Joined the Collection The most disposable objects are often the hardest to preserve and the most revealing to keep, and this eraser is a perfect example. It documents the everyday, pocket-money side of the Game Boy phenomenon at its very beginning, and it sits among the collection's other Super Mario Land pieces as one of the earliest. Keeping it holds on to a scrap of 1989 that was never supposed to last. The Super Mario Land cap eraser is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Most Game Boys keep their secrets behind a solid grey shell. This new arrival gives them all away. It is the transparent model from Nintendo's European Limited Edition colour series, and its clear case puts the whole machine on display: the green circuit board, the ribbon cable, the speaker and the little cluster of chips that make the thing work. See-through consoles have always been among the most loved of the coloured variants, and it is easy to see why. Transparent Limited Edition Game Boy (DMG-01) What It Is Underneath the novelty of the clear plastic, this is a completely standard DMG-01. It has the same directional pad, the same A and B buttons, the same Start and Select, and the same 2.5-inch green screen with no backlight, all running on four AA batteries just as every original Game Boy did. Nothing about the electronics is special; the magic is entirely in being able to see them. That is rather the point of a transparent case, and it turns an everyday console into a display piece that rewards a second look. Completing the European Colour Run The transparent unit belongs to a specific European Limited Edition run of coloured Game Boys, and that is where it earns its keep here. The collection already holds the red, green, black, yellow, white and blue versions from the same series, so this clear model rounds the set out. Having every colour from a single run side by side tells a story that no individual console can: it shows exactly how Nintendo tried to freshen a maturing product by dressing identical hardware in new coats, and how a simple change of casing could make an old machine feel desirable all over again. Why It Joined the Collection Beyond completing the colour set, the transparent Game Boy is quietly educational. Anyone curious about how the DMG-01 is put together can learn a great deal simply by turning this one over in the light, no screwdriver required. It is a console and a cutaway diagram in one, and it pairs beautifully with the collection's other coloured shells to document the moment the Game Boy stopped being only grey. For a project built around the original hardware, a variant that lets you look right inside it was always going to be welcome. The transparent Limited Edition console is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

A single magazine issue is a snapshot; a run of them is a film. This arrival is the next frame in one such film: the second volume of Game Boy Scouts, following the first that already sits in the collection, and continuing Japan's earliest attempt to keep pace with a library growing week by week. Second Edition of the Game Boy Scouts Magazine (JPN) What It Is Game Boy Scouts Vol. 2 was included with the Japanese magazine Famicom Tsushin in mid-February 1990, just weeks after the first volume. It continues the series' early coverage of the handheld with titles such as Batman, SD Lupin III, Othello, Trump Boy and Popeye, working as a curated software guide with editorial commentary. It shows Japanese gaming media actively supporting and shaping the emerging Game Boy library, and it forms part of a complete four-volume run held in the collection. A Library Finding Its Range The line-up in this volume shows how fast the Game Boy was stretching its legs. Batman, developed by Sunsoft, would become one of the most admired action games on the handheld, proof that a licensed superhero title could be genuinely excellent rather than a quick cash-in. Alongside it sit an eclectic mix, an anime tie-in in SD Lupin III, the timeless board game Othello, a card game in Trump Boy, and the cartoon veteran Popeye. That spread, from prestige action to humble card games, captures a platform still discovering what it was for, and a press trying to make sense of the flood in real time. The value of owning a run rather than a single issue is that it lets you watch this evolution unfold. Read Volume 1 and Volume 2 back to back and you can see the library thickening month by month, the coverage growing more confident, the sheer variety expanding. Supplements like these were flimsy inserts, easily separated from their host magazine and lost, so assembling all four in one place is a real feat of preservation, and each new volume in the collection makes the sequence more complete. Why It Joined the Collection Completing a series is one of the quiet joys of collecting, and this volume brings the collection's Game Boy Scouts run closer to whole. As a contemporary record of the handheld's fast-expanding early library, it pairs directly with the first volume to document how Japan's press covered the console as it happened. Preserving the full sequence keeps a rare, continuous account of the Game Boy's first year of growth intact. Game Boy Scouts Vol. 2 is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Most Game Boy cartridges are content to sit still and wait for your thumbs. This latest arrival is different: it can feel which way you tip it. The Tilt Sensor Game Pack is one of the more unusual pieces of official Nintendo hardware, a cartridge with a genuine motion sensor built in, and it earns its place in the collection for a reason that has as much to do with history as with the game inside. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble Tilt Sensor What It Is Inside the cartridge is an accelerometer, a small component that senses the console's position and how quickly it is being moved. That is not something a normal Game Boy game ever needed, because the machine's only inputs were meant to be its buttons. Here, the tilt of the whole console becomes a control in its own right. The pack was made for one game in particular, Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, in which you guide Kirby by physically leaning and tilting the Game Boy rather than pressing a direction on the pad. It is a small, self-contained experiment in motion control, years before such things became commonplace. A Curious Footnote in the DMG Numbering There is a wrinkle that makes this piece especially interesting to a collector focused on the original Game Boy. The Tilt Sensor Game Pack only actually works on the Game Boy Color, yet it carries a DMG number, DMG-20, tying it by its code to the original 1989 hardware family. More than that, it is the last item ever to follow the original DMG coding scheme. Every product Nintendo released for the platform had been catalogued under that system, and this cartridge sits right at the end of the line, quietly closing a numbering convention that had run since the beginning. For anyone documenting the DMG-01 and its family, that gives it a significance out of all proportion to its size. DMG-20 but for Game Boy Color Why It Joined the Collection Two threads made this one an easy decision. The first is the technology: a cartridge that reads movement is a lovely example of how far makers were willing to push a machine built around four grey shades and a handful of buttons. The second is that quiet record it holds as the final DMG-numbered product, a bookend to the whole coding story the collection tries to document. Together they turn what could look like an offbeat Kirby accessory into a genuinely meaningful piece, one that speaks both to the platform's inventiveness and to the tidy way its history was catalogued. The Tilt Sensor Game Pack is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Getting a clean picture of what is actually happening on a Game Boy's tiny screen has always been awkward. This arrival solves it in a thoroughly modern way. The GBinterceptor is an open-source project for building a small device that captures the Game Boy's screen through a PC. Capture the Game Boy's tiny screen in pixel-perfect clarity, no camera required. What It Is Rather than filming the screen with a camera, the GBinterceptor taps into what the console is doing and reconstructs the picture on a computer, so any game can be recorded cleanly as video or grabbed as a snapshot. It is a community-built, open-source tool, the sort of thing enthusiasts design, share and improve together, and it turns a stubbornly analogue little machine into something you can capture and stream with pixel-perfect clarity. It belongs firmly to the present day rather than the 1990s. The DIY scene is still soldering, still sharing, still inventing for a very old machine. Why It Joined the Collection The collection deliberately reaches beyond vintage hardware to document the Game Boy's living afterlife, the modern DIY and modding scene that keeps inventing new things for a very old machine. The GBinterceptor sits among those contemporary projects, alongside builds like the Zeroboy, and it makes a clear point: the community around this console is still designing, still soldering and still sharing. A tool built decades after the last Game Boy rolled off the line is exactly the kind of piece that keeps the story open-ended rather than closed. A gadget designed decades after the last Game Boy left the line. The GBinterceptor is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

The Game Boy launched with a small, carefully chosen handful of games, and each of them helped define what the machine was for. This arrival is one of them: Alleyway, one of the original launch titles and one of Nintendo's earliest attempts to give a simple brick-breaker its own personality. Launch-day DNA: modest in ambition, large in the story of the console's beginnings. What It Is At heart Alleyway is a straightforward bat-and-ball block-breaker, but Nintendo gave it a distinct identity by tying it to the Mario universe. The player's paddle is styled as Mario's spaceship, and the bonus stages arrange their blocks into character shapes drawn from the Mario series, little flourishes that turn a generic genre into something recognisably Nintendo. As a foundational 1989 release, it captures the stripped-down, slightly experimental spirit of the Game Boy's very first generation, when the machine and its makers were still working out what a handheld game should be. A brick-breaker with a Mario twist, greeting the very first Game Boy owners in 1989. Why It Joined the Collection The launch line-up is the DNA of the platform, and a collection about the original Game Boy is stronger for holding those first titles. Alleyway is a perfect example of the type: modest in ambition, but historically important as one of the games that greeted the very first owners, and an early sign of Nintendo's instinct to fold its own characters into even the simplest ideas. It is a small cartridge with a large place in the story of the console's beginnings. Alleyway is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Advertising Star Wars in Japan There is a particular thrill in seeing a galaxy far, far away squeezed onto a screen the size of a matchbox. This arrival is a Japanese advertisement for the Star Wars Game Boy game, and it makes the pitch with a straight face: the biggest film franchise on Earth, now in the palm of your hand, in four shades of grey. What It Is This Japanese advert pairs original film imagery with promotion for the handheld game, listing Micro World as the title's local Japanese publisher. Luke, Leia and Han Solo anchor the advert firmly in the film's universe, while smaller screenshots showcase the actual Game Boy action. It is a neat example of early-nineties marketing that sold Game Boy titles as extensions of major cinema franchises, leaning on the movie's stars to carry a monochrome game. The American advertisement for the same title and the game itself are also held in the collection. Hollywood on a Handheld The Star Wars Game Boy game was developed by Capcom, a studio with a real gift for turning licences into genuinely good action games, and the result was one of the more respected film tie-ins on the platform. That matters, because the era was awash with cynical movie cash-ins, and an advert like this had to promise more than a famous logo. Placing photographs of the film's heroes beside gameplay screenshots is a careful balancing act: reassure the fan that this really is Star Wars, while quietly proving there is a playable game underneath the branding. There is a nice regional side-story in the publisher credit. In Japan the game was handled by a local publisher, Micro World, a reminder that Western franchises often reached Japanese shelves through a chain of licensing deals invisible to the player. Comparing this Japanese advert with its American counterpart, both in the collection, shows how the very same game was dressed up for two utterly different audiences, the imagery and emphasis shifting to suit each market's tastes. Why It Joined the Collection Advertising is where the Game Boy meets the wider culture it borrowed from, and film tie-ins are a vivid part of that. This Japanese Star Wars advert documents how a blockbuster licence was sold to Japanese players, and it forms a small trio with the collection's American advert and the game itself, letting the marketing and the product be studied together across two regions. Preserving the paper keeps the pitch alongside the plastic. The Japanese Star Wars advert is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

The Game Boy was built to be played in the palm of your hand, so there is something quietly wonderful about an official device whose whole purpose was to put its games on the living-room television. This arrival is that device: the Game Boy Player, the last piece of official Nintendo hardware made to run original Game Boy cartridges on a home console. Game Boy Games on the Nintendo GameCube What It Is The Game Boy Player plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games through the Nintendo GameCube. The unit, catalogued as DOL-017, clips onto the high-speed port on the underside of the GameCube and is driven by a boot disc (DOL-006) that you load like an ordinary game. Crucially, it does not emulate the Game Boy at all: inside, it contains hardware almost identical to a Game Boy Advance, so the games run on real silicon rather than software imitation. It joins the Super Game Boy and the Transfer Pak in the collection's small family of cross-console adapters. The End of a Lineage Nintendo had form for this. Back in 1994 the Super Game Boy let players run Game Boy cartridges through the Super NES and see them on a television, in colour borders no less. The Game Boy Player is the last chapter of that same idea, arriving nearly a decade later on the GameCube, and it is the final time Nintendo officially built dedicated hardware to bridge its handheld and home worlds. The choice to pack in real Game Boy Advance hardware rather than emulate is telling: Nintendo wanted the games to look and feel exactly right, not merely close, a small point of pride at the end of a long line. The boot-disc quirk is a nice piece of trivia in itself: the adapter is useless without its little DOL-006 disc, so complete, working setups depend on a small optical disc surviving alongside the hardware, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets separated and lost. That fragility is part of what makes a full Game Boy Player setup satisfying to document. It represents the moment the original Game Boy's games made their last officially sanctioned jump onto the big screen. DOL-006 - The Software Piece for the Adapter Why It Joined the Collection The ways people connected the Game Boy to other machines are a fascinating strand of its story, and the Game Boy Player closes that strand with a full stop. Set alongside the Super Game Boy and the Transfer Pak, it completes the collection's picture of how Nintendo repeatedly bridged its handheld and console lines. Preserving it, ideally with its boot disc, keeps the final official chapter of that idea intact. The Game Boy Player is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Tetris is often remembered as a solitary game, one player against the falling blocks. But this arrival remembers a different, noisier Tetris: the British bundle that came ready for two, with a cable in the box to link one Game Boy to another and turn the puzzle into a duel. Game Boy Tetris Bundle (UKV) What It Is This is one of the fuller versions of the classic Tetris set. Alongside the console and the Tetris cartridge it includes a game link cable and the original stereo headphones. The link cable let two players connect their Game Boys for head-to-head Tetris, a huge part of the game's appeal, while the headphones added the stereo sound the console's built-in speaker could not manage. Both accessories are catalogued separately in the collection too; here they arrive as part of one complete, boxed British package. The Cable That Made Tetris Social The little link cable is easy to overlook, but it changed what the Game Boy was. Two-player Tetris, in which clearing lines dumps garbage rows onto your opponent, is a genuinely tense, competitive game, and it turned the handheld from a private pastime into something you shared on a bus seat or a school desk. Nintendo understood the power of connected play early, and building the cable into the Tetris bundle was a deliberate nudge: buy the set, rope in a friend, and the game you already loved becomes twice as addictive. It is a small piece of plastic that quietly previewed decades of multiplayer gaming to come. Game Boy Link Cable Comparing this set with its American cousin is a small lesson in regional marketing. The United States bundle leaned on the headphones and the simple pairing of console and game; this British version threw in the link cable, selling the Game Boy as a machine for playing together. Same console, same landmark game, two subtly different pitches, and a complete example of each is exactly the kind of side-by-side comparison the collection is built to make possible. Why It Joined the Collection Complete regional bundles are hard to keep whole, and one that still contains its link cable and headphones is a particular prize, since those loose accessories are the first things to wander off. Preserving this British set intact documents how Nintendo sold the Game Boy as a social machine in the UK, and it pairs directly with the collection's American Tetris bundle to show the same iconic package tuned for two different markets. The UK Tetris bundle is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

This is the set that launched a million commutes: the classic American Game Boy and Tetris bundle. But this particular arrival carries a small secret on the outside of its box, the kind of detail that turns an ordinary boxed set into a collector's quiet delight. US Game Boy Tetris bundle box with headphones What It Is The US Tetris bundle brings together the console, the Tetris cartridge and the original stereo headphones in one box, the definitive package that introduced most Americans to the Game Boy. Tetris was the perfect pack-in, a game that sold the machine to commuters and children alike, and the headphones let players hear its music in stereo, which the console's small mono speaker could never deliver. It is the archetypal Game Boy set, the one that turns up in a thousand nostalgic memories. Unusual: The Game Boy Serial Number on the Backside of the Box The Serial Number on the Box Here is the collector's secret. For a period in the United States, the Game Boy's serial number was attached to the outside of the box along with the warranty card. The warranty card could be peeled away, but the serial number stayed put. At the time it probably looked a little untidy, a sticker most owners never gave a second thought. Decades later it has become a small gift to collectors, because a serial number on the box is strong evidence that the packaging is genuinely original and not a modern reproduction, a reassurance that matters more and more as clever fakes appear. Hard to find: Matching Serial Number Box & Game Boy It is a lovely example of how the passage of time rewrites the meaning of a detail. A rushed piece of retail packaging logic, born of the need to register a warranty, has aged into an authenticity marker that helps separate real boxes from the growing tide of reproductions. Little quirks like this are exactly what a preservation-minded collection lives for: the small, accidental fingerprints that a genuine period object carries and a copy cannot easily fake. Why It Joined the Collection The Tetris bundle is arguably the single most important Game Boy package there is, the set that turned a Japanese handheld into a Western phenomenon. Preserving a complete American example, with its telltale serial on the box, keeps both the object and its authenticity intact, and it pairs neatly with the collection's British Tetris bundle to show how the same landmark set differed from market to market. The US Tetris bundle is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Somewhere tonight, on a small stage with a big sound system, a musician is holding a grey 1989 Game Boy and a room full of people is dancing to it. The Game Boy was designed to play games, but almost by accident it became one of the most beloved musical instruments of the last two decades. This is how a handheld turned into a synthesizer. Two Programs That Turned It Into a Synth The magic comes from software that hijacks the Game Boy's sound hardware. The two classics are LSDj, short for Little Sound Dj, written by Johan Kotlinski, and nanoloop, written by Oliver Wittchow. Both run directly on the console and drive its onboard four-channel sound chip, generating tones through synthesis rather than playing back samples. LSDj is a tracker, a pattern-based sequencer where short phrases are written out and arranged into full compositions; nanoloop takes a more visual path, where you sculpt a sound's shape and decay by moving small marks around a grid. Different philosophies, same grey box. The nanoloop cartridge in an early version. Why the Original Machine, Specifically Musicians could use almost anything, so why cling to a 1989 handheld? Because the original DMG's sound chip has a particular gritty, punchy character that later machines smoothed away, and that grit is the point. The console's rugged simplicity, the thing Gunpei Yokoi built it around, turns out to be exactly what an instrument wants: cheap, portable, robust, and full of personality. Playing Live What sets LSDj and nanoloop apart from ordinary music software is that they were built for performance. A musician can twist loops and instruments on the fly, so no two sets sound the same, closer to DJing than to pressing play. And the scene has built its own plumbing: in 2008 Timothy Lamb, better known as Trash80, released the Arduinoboy, an open-source interface that lets a Game Boy sync with modern MIDI gear, so LSDj, nanoloop and other tools can sit inside a full studio setup. A Global Scene Around these tools grew a worldwide community of chiptune artists, from Bit Shifter's danceable sets to the bigger, brasher sound of groups like Anamanaguchi and Starscream, played out at festivals and club nights on every continent. It is a scene that treats the Game Boy not as nostalgia but as a living instrument with its own repertoire, its own virtuosos and its own future. Why a Museum Cares A museum of the Game Boy could stop at the games. But the machine's second life as an instrument is part of the same remarkable story: a piece of throwaway 1980s consumer electronics that people still choose to make new art with today. It sits naturally alongside the studios still writing new games for the console, which we cover in the new-cartridge renaissance. To meet the hardware behind the music, start with our complete guide to the original Game Boy. The grey brick is still making noise, and the crowd is still dancing.