Some arrivals are here purely because they are a delight, and this is one. It is a wristwatch styled like a Game Boy, and rather than a plain beep it wakes you with music from Super Mario Land. It is a small object with a big smile built into it, and a nice example of how the console's charm keeps being packaged into everyday things. What It Is This is an officially licensed watch by Paladone, the lifestyle-goods maker responsible for a whole line of Game Boy pieces. It takes the console's look and shrinks it onto the wrist, and its party trick is the alarm: instead of a generic tone it plays sounds from Super Mario Land, so waking up comes with a little jolt of nostalgia. It arrives in a neat crystal case, which makes it as much a display object as a wearable, something you might keep on a shelf as readily as on your arm. Wear your Game Boy on your wrist Why It Joined the Collection Modern licensed merchandise like this is a real part of the Game Boy story, the chapter where the console lives on as a cultural icon long after it stopped being current technology. The watch joins the collection's other Paladone Game Boy lifestyle items, and together they show how a games machine became a design motif, reproduced on objects that have nothing to do with playing. It is not rare or valuable in the traditional sense; it is here because it is charming, well made and unmistakably Game Boy, and because a collection about the console should have room for the joy it still gives. The Game Boy Watch is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: the Game Boy in disguise.

After Tetris turned falling blocks into a worldwide habit, Nintendo went looking for a second puzzle it could call its own. The answer, oddly enough, was to hand Mario a lab coat. Part two of Pick Up and Play is about that follow-up, a game of colours and pills that slots into a spare few minutes as easily as it fills an entire afternoon. The plumber who holds the cure Pills, pills, pills and a level you can finish on a bus In Dr. Mario you drop capsules into a bottle of viruses, lining up four or more of a colour to wipe them out. Clear every virus in the bottle and the level is done. That structure is what makes it such a good companion for short sessions: unlike Tetris, which just runs until you lose, Dr. Mario gives you a tidy little goal you can actually reach. A low level takes a couple of minutes, so you can clear one, feel like you achieved something, and put the machine down with a clear conscience. Or you can nudge the speed up, keep climbing, and suddenly the bus has arrived and you have not noticed. Like all the best quickies, it hides real depth under a friendly surface. Clearing several rows in one go, or setting up chain reactions where one clear triggers the next, is where the points and the bragging rights live. But you never need to understand any of that to enjoy your first bottle, which is exactly the balance this series is built around. Part of why it lodges in the memory is the presentation. The three virus types even have names, Fever, Chill and Weird, and two of them lent their titles to the game's music: the bouncy 'Fever' and the cooler 'Chill', a pair of loops players still argue over decades later. You can set the speed to low, medium or high and choose a starting level, so the same cartridge stretches from a gentle warm-up to a white-knuckle scramble where capsules fall faster than you can place them. That single dial is what lets Dr. Mario be both a two-minute distraction and an hour-long obsession, depending on how brave you feel that day. Nintendo's other puzzle pillar Dr. Mario arrived in 1990, released on the Game Boy and the NES at once, and became Nintendo's deliberate attempt to build a second puzzle phenomenon after Tetris. Rather than copy the falling-block formula, it found its own identity in that medical, virus-clearing theme, and it worked: Dr. Mario grew into one of the most recognisable early competitive puzzle games on the system, a fixture that Nintendo has revived again and again across decades of hardware. It also leans hard into head-to-head play, and two players can face off over the link cable, each trying to bury the other in viruses. That early success turned into staying power. Dr. Mario never really went away: Nintendo has brought the formula back again and again, from Dr. Mario 64 to download-only versions, a Dr. Luigi spin-off and a free-to-play mobile outing, and the good doctor even earned a place on the Super Smash Bros. roster as a fighter in his own right. Not bad for a character who began as a plumber in a borrowed lab coat, in a puzzle game built to chase Tetris. The Game Boy version is where that entire second career started. There is a small collector's wrinkle worth mentioning too. The UK edition held here went through several British print variants, so with Dr. Mario the regional and print-run differences matter more than you might expect for such a familiar game, a reminder that even a mass-market puzzle hides details for the people who look closely. What makes Dr. Mario such a natural fit for a pick-up-and-play shelf is that finish line the virus count hands you. Tetris runs until you fail; Dr. Mario lets you win. Clearing the last virus in a bottle delivers a tidy little hit of completion you can reach in a couple of minutes, which is exactly the feeling you want when a couple of minutes is all you have. And then the next bottle is right there, one level harder, quietly asking for just one more go. For a game about clearing infections, it is remarkably good for the soul: a couple of minutes, a bottle cleared, and back to your day. To see this cartridge and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Part 1: Tetris · Part 2: Dr. Mario (you are here) · Part 3: Mario & Yoshi · Part 4: Alleyway · Part 5: Mario's Picross · Part 6: Qix · Part 7: Game & Watch Gallery · Part 8: Game & Watch Gallery 2

GameBoy Comics System Series - First Print vs. Reprint Every console leaves a paper trail. Boxes and manuals, warranty slips and magazine spreads, the printed odds and ends that tend to outlive the machine itself. Usually that trail is practical stuff. But every so often it wanders somewhere unexpected, and for the Game Boy it wandered right onto a comic-shop rack. In 1990, while children across the world were still tilting their grey bricks toward the nearest lamp to catch the light, Valiant Comics handed the handheld its very own comic book. Four of them, in fact. The series was simply, proudly called Game Boy. These issues live on the museum's Publications shelf rather than in the hardware cabinet, and that is precisely where the pleasure of collecting them begins. Four issues, each printed twice, carrying the same adventures in more than one language. It is a small, self-contained corner of Game Boy history, and following it from cover to cover is exactly the kind of journey this series is about. So let us follow the paper trail. A licence in four colours The Game Boy comics were published by Valiant Comics as a licensed adaptation of Nintendo's games, and they appeared in both English and French. That bilingual detail is worth dwelling on for a moment. This was not a fan project or an unofficial cash-in, but an authorised piece of Nintendo merchandising, part of the wider Nintendo Comics System line that spun the company's game worlds into newsprint adventures. Where the cartridges gave you the games to play, the comics gave you the same universe to read, in colour, at your own pace, with no batteries required. The Game Boy's origin story, printed on paper instead of pressed into plastic. The run was capped at exactly four issues. No more, no less. That tidy little number is part of the charm for anyone who collects them: this is a finite series with a clear beginning and a clear end, the sort of thing you can genuinely complete rather than chase forever. Finish the fourth issue and you have finished the story. Where the comics sit in the collection In our catalogue the Game Boy comics are filed under Publications, the same broad family as the strategy guides, the magazines and the other printed matter that grew up around the console. It is an easy shelf to overlook. The hardware gets the glass case and the spotlight, while the paper gets a folder. Yet these fragile, colourful things are often the hardest survivors of all. A plastic shell can take a knock and shrug it off, but a thirty-five-year-old comic that has been read, folded, carried around and loved is a small miracle every time one turns up in good shape. That fragility is a big part of why edition and condition matter so much here. The four-issue run The trail opens with Game Boy #1 in its 1990 first print, the issue that introduced the licence to the comic racks. From there the story carries on through Game Boy #2 and Game Boy #3, both first printed in 1990, before arriving at Game Boy #4, the fourth issue and the last of the run. Four covers, one continuous story, and then the presses fell quiet. There is something appealing about a series that knows exactly how long it wants to be. Plenty of licensed comics sprawl on for years, but the Game Boy run says its piece in four issues and bows out. For a collector that means the finish line is always in sight. Track down all four first prints and the original 1990 series is complete, sitting in order on the shelf like the four chapters of a very short, very colourful novel. First print or reprint? Here is where collectors lean in a little closer. Every one of the four issues was reprinted in 1991, and in the museum both editions are catalogued side by side. The reprints arrived in neat monthly succession: issue #1 in February 1991, issue #2 in March 1991, issue #3 in April 1991, and issue #4 in May 1991. Same stories, same covers, roughly a year after the originals. To a casual eye a first print and a reprint can look all but identical on the rack, which is exactly why the distinction matters so much to the people who care about these things. In the museum's cataloguing the two editions even carry different product codes: the 1990 first prints are grouped under 1049-1473, while the 1991 reprints share 1049-149X. First prints tend to be the ones enthusiasts prize, being the original pressings, but a thorough collector often wants both editions of all four issues. That quietly turns a set of four comics into a set of eight, the whole paper trail laid end to end. And a reprint, in its quiet way, is a kind of compliment. Publishers generally bring an issue back around because the first run found its readers, and the fact that all four Game Boy comics returned within months of the originals hints that the little handheld's fans were showing up at the comic shop as faithfully as they showed up at the toy aisle. The Game Boy was a phenomenon on the screen, and it is rather lovely to think that some of its owners wanted its story on paper too. Whether you hunt only the 1990 first prints or chase the complete set of eight, the Game Boy comics are a happy reminder that a handheld's story was never told on its screen alone. It spilled out onto paper too, in two languages and two printings, and it has been waiting patiently on the comic-shop shelf ever since. You can browse the whole four-issue run, first prints and reprints together, over at the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books (you are here) · Part 2: Player's Guides and Strategy Books · Part 3: Catalogues and Club Nintendo · Part 4: Fan Magazines and Sticker Albums · Part 5: The Books That Made the Game Boy History Part of the The Paper Trail series.

If the grey Game Boy was the everyman, the red one was the show-off. This arrival is the red console from Nintendo's European Limited Edition series, one of the most recognisable colours in the run that finally took the DMG-01 beyond its original grey. What It Is The full European Limited Edition line covered red, green, black, yellow, white, blue and clear, and the collection now holds all seven. The console itself is a completely standard Game Boy underneath: the same monochrome green screen with no backlight, the same controls and the same four AA batteries that powered every DMG-01. Only the colour changed. Red is simply the most extroverted member of the family, the one that shouts where the grey original whispered. If the grey Game Boy was the everyman, the red one was the show-off. Why It Joined the Collection With red in place, the collection documents the complete seven-colour European run, and that completeness is the whole point. Gathered together, the colours tell a story no single console can: how Nintendo used nothing more than a change of casing to refresh a maturing product and turn identical hardware into a set worth collecting. The red unit is the eye-catcher of the group, and a colour line is only truly finished when its most famous member is present. The red Limited Edition console is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the Play It Loud colours.

It is easy to forget, now that the Game Boy's success looks inevitable, just how hard it was sold. Few electronic products of the early 1990s were advertised as relentlessly. This arrival is a single surviving page from that onslaught: a British magazine advertisement for the Game Boy, one voice in a very loud campaign. What It Is This is one of the British magazine advertisements from Nintendo's early-nineties Game Boy campaign, an official piece of marketing aimed at the UK audience. It joins a run of period Game Boy adverts in the collection, gathered from several countries, that together document how the console was pitched market by market. Where the hardware shows what Nintendo made, adverts like this show how the company persuaded millions of people they needed it. British Game Boy magazine advertisement early 1990s Selling a Phenomenon Nintendo poured enormous resources into promoting the Game Boy, and the campaign became famous in its own right, blanketing magazines and television with a consistent, confident message. In the United States the handheld rode the slogan that you were now playing with power, portable power; across Europe the adverts hammered the same core promise of proper gaming that fit in your pocket. Seeing an individual page from that effort is a reminder that the Game Boy's triumph was not just a matter of good design, but of one of the most sustained marketing pushes the young games industry had ever mounted. Adverts are also, paradoxically, among the hardest period print to preserve. They were bound into magazines destined for the recycling bin, valued by nobody at the time, so a clean, isolated example is a small rescue in itself. Gathered from country to country, the collection's run of Game Boy adverts becomes a comparative record of national taste and salesmanship, the same machine wearing subtly different clothes in Britain, America, Japan and beyond. Why It Joined the Collection To understand how the Game Boy conquered the world, you have to look at how it was sold, and advertising is the clearest record of that. This British advert adds another country to the collection's growing gallery of Game Boy marketing, and preserving it keeps a fragile piece of the campaign that turned a grey handheld into a household name. This UK Game Boy advert is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: Game Boy advertising.

Every great machine leaves a paper trail. The Game Boy arrived in 1989 as a small grey box with a green screen, and almost immediately the presses started rolling around it. Not just Nintendo's own manuals, but a whole ecosystem of independent magazines, supplements and collectibles, made by people who simply could not stop talking about the thing. This is a walk down that paper trail, from a British newsstand to a Tokyo bookshop, with a sticker album waiting at the end. The official starting point Our trail begins with something semi-official. The Handy Game Machine Gamebook was an official Japanese guide, sold only in Japan under its Handy Game Machine title. Across 82 pages it introduced games and hardware and offered complete walkthroughs with detailed hints for selected titles. Produced by Nintendo, it set the template so many later books would follow: a printed companion you kept beside the console. Before wikis, there were staples and glossy paper. It is one of several official Japanese guide books in the collection, and a reminder that even before the fan press turned up, the Game Boy already came wrapped in paper. From here, though, the interesting part is what the fans and independent publishers did next. A voice from the UK newsstand Cross to Britain and the tone changes completely. GB Action was an independent UK Game Boy magazine from Europress Interactive, first published in June 1992. It ran a remarkable 41 issues until August 1995, packed with tips, tricks, reviews and product news. For a magazine devoted to a single handheld, that is a long and healthy life. The very first issue, catalogued here, arrived with a 16-page Buyers Guide supplement carrying 50 extra game reviews, the sort of generosity that made a newsstand reader feel they had struck a bargain. It stands as one of the European magazines in the collection, and as proof that the Game Boy could carry an entire publishing operation on its little grey shoulders. Tips, tricks and product news, printed while the ink of the launch was still wet. Japan's fan press finds its feet Back in Japan, the independent press was busy from the very start. Game Boy Magazine (08/89) dates from the 1989 launch year, published soon after the console's release. It covers early titles such as Tetris, Makai Toushi SaGa and Dracula Densetsu, capturing the first software lineup that defined the Game Boy's market entry. Published by Tokumashoten Intermedia, it reads like a snapshot of a system still finding its audience. The same publisher's September 1990 issue shows how quickly the format matured, carrying tips, tricks, reviews and product introductions a full year deeper into the Game Boy's life. Placed side by side, the two issues make a neat before-and-after of a magazine, and a machine, growing up together. Then there is Game Boy Fan No. 1, whose first issue appeared in January 1990. Independent, enthusiastic and full of tips, tricks, reviews and product introductions, it is an early example of the Japanese print culture that grew up around the handheld. Holding issue one of anything carries a small thrill, and this is issue one of a magazine that existed for no other reason than that people loved a green-screened machine. The Game Boy Scouts report for duty The most charming corner of this trail is a set of four coloured booklets. The Game Boy Scouts supplements were distributed with the Japanese magazine Famicom Tsushin over a few short weeks in early 1990, and the collection holds the full four-volume run. Volume 1 led off in early February 1990, covering early post-launch titles such as Nemesis, Selection, Asmik-kun World and Baseball Kids with short previews and platform news. Volume 2 followed in mid-February with Batman, SD Lupin III, Othello, Trump Boy and Popeye, working as a curated software guide with editorial content. Volume 3 arrived in early March, highlighting Batman, Funny Field, Flappy Special, Flipull and Makai Toushi SaGa, before Volume 4 closed the series in mid-March with Quarth, Pitman, Dead Heat Scramble, Soccer Boy and World Bowling. Produced by ASCII Corporation, the Scouts were one of the earliest structured efforts to catalogue and promote the growing Game Boy library. It is a short-lived series, but a tidy one, and its rapid month-by-month cadence tells you exactly how fast the software was arriving in those first frantic months. Four booklets in six weeks is not a magazine, it is a running commentary. Peel, stick, collect The trail ends not with words but with pictures. Merlin's Nintendo sticker album from 1992 was a big hit with collectors, holding 274 stickers with motifs from popular Nintendo NES and Game Boy games. Among them were Super Mario Land and Mario Tennis on the Game Boy, and The Legend of Zelda on the NES. 274 stickers and only two sweaty thumbs to place them. Anyone who filled one of these knows the ritual: the swaps in the schoolyard, the pile of doubles, the one sticker that never once turned up. Today the album is a coveted collector's item and one of the more colourful publications in the collection, a licensed slice of playground history to round off a very papery story. From an official Japanese gamebook to a German sticker album, the Game Boy's paper trail crosses continents and formats, and all of it was set in motion by one small handheld. You can browse these publications and hundreds of other catalogued pieces at the Game Boy Museum. Bring a magnifying glass for the small print, and perhaps a spare sticker or two. The Full Series Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books · Part 2: Player's Guides and Strategy Books · Part 3: Catalogues and Club Nintendo · Part 4: Fan Magazines and Sticker Albums (you are here) · Part 5: The Books That Made the Game Boy History Part of the The Paper Trail series.

Some silhouettes are so famous that the object almost vanishes behind the shape. The Game Boy is one of them. By the mid-1990s the little grey slab, screen up top, D-pad below, two buttons set at a jaunty angle, was so instantly readable that it no longer needed to play anything at all. It just needed to look right. And so a small family of gadgets arrived wearing the Game Boy costume, and not one of them was a games console. Nearly the whole family comes from a single maker, Mani Industries, working under official Nintendo licence. Mani took the console's outline and quietly swapped the insides. A radio here, a clock there, a calculator, a wristwatch, a pair of walkie talkies. Line them up on a shelf and you get a row of fake Game Boys, each one a genuine, working gadget hiding inside the world's most recognisable handheld. There is a simple rule that unites them: each keeps the Game Boy on the outside and puts something entirely un-gamelike on the inside. The fun is all in the swap. So the best way to enjoy the collection is to look at the shape first, be fooled for a second, and then discover what the thing really does. Here is the family, oldest first. Radio Boy (1993): first out of the disguise box The oldest disguise in the collection is also one of the boldest. The Radio Boy, released in 1993, is styled to look exactly like a Game Boy and then flatly refuses to play a single game. Where the screen should be there is a tuning dial, the familiar Game Boy-style buttons are still in place, and a stereo earphone lets you listen in privately. Underneath the costume it is a working AM/FM radio, powered by batteries just like the console it imitates. It even carries its own item number, 83003, and it set the tone for everything that followed: take the shape people already love, and slip something useful inside it. Looks like a Game Boy, plays no games: the Radio Boy tunes in AM and FM instead. Time Boy (1995): the Game Boy on your keyring Two years later, in 1995, the shape shrank to fit in your pocket. The Time Boy is a Nintendo-licensed miniature replica of the Game Boy that clips onto your keyring and works as a clock, alarm included. Mani offered it in a range of colours, so you could choose a tiny Game Boy to match your keys and let it tell you, with a small beep, when it was time to stop playing the full-sized one. It is the console reduced to a charm, and somehow it loses none of its charm in the shrinking. The Time Boy shrinks the whole console down to keychain size and still finds room for an alarm. Watch Boy (1995): the console strapped to your wrist The same year brought the Game Boy all the way to your wrist. The Watch Boy is a working LCD wristwatch built to look like a miniature Game Boy, right down to a tiny screen and a directional pad printed on the face. It does far more than tell the hour. It shows the month, the date and the day of the week, switches between 12 and 24 hour display, and adds an alarm and a six-digit chronograph stopwatch for good measure. A single SR41 silver-oxide cell keeps it ticking, and, like several of its siblings, it came in six colours. Of all the fakes in the family, this is the one you could genuinely wear out of the house and pass off as a watch, at least until someone looked twice. Watch Boy wears the Game Boy on your wrist, D-pad and all. Walkie Talkie Boy (1995): two Game Boys that talk back If the Watch Boy was the loner, the Walkie Talkie Boy was the sociable one, because it arrives as a pair. Two Game Boy shaped units talk to each other as short-range walkie talkies, and, in a lovely flourish, they also include a Morse code transmission function for the moments when plain speech feels too ordinary. Each unit has a flexible antenna, a quartz crystal inside and a removable belt clip, and the set shipped in six colours. Picture two friends in 1995, each clutching what looks for all the world like a Game Boy, tapping dots and dashes at one another across a back garden. No cartridge required. Two Game Boys that talk to each other, and the Walkie Talkie Boy even speaks Morse. Calculator Boy (1997): the one that does your homework The family's youngest member is also its most deadpan. The Calculator Boy, from 1997, is simply a pocket calculator shaped like a Game Boy, released by Mani as officially licensed Nintendo merchandise. No radio, no alarm, no Morse code. Just sums, served in full Game Boy costume. There is something perfect about ending the line here, with the gadget that quietly helps you through your maths homework while looking exactly like the thing that was keeping you from it. It is worth remembering that none of this was bootleg tat. Every one of these gadgets carried an official Nintendo licence, which is why they wear their trademarks so proudly. In the mid-1990s the Game Boy look was spreading well beyond gaming, and Mani's little range is a perfect snapshot of that moment, when the console had become popular enough to lend its face to the humble objects on your desk, your keyring and your wrist. Calculator Boy does your maths homework in full Game Boy costume. One shape, five gadgets Set side by side, the five of them tell a neat little story. Between 1993 and 1997, Mani Industries turned the Game Boy from a console into a look: a shape so trusted that it could carry a radio, a clock, a watch, a calculator and a pair of walkie talkies, and sell every one of them. Not a single one plays a game. Every single one is unmistakably a Game Boy. That is the whole trick of the disguise. The shape did the talking, and the gadget hiding inside simply went along with it. Want to meet the rest of the family, and the real consoles they were only pretending to be? Come and browse the whole collection at gameboymuseum.com. The Full Series Some imitations barely pretend to be a Game Boy at all, like Radio Boy, which only plays the radio. Part 1: The Family of Fake Game Boys (you are here) · Part 2: On the Desk and Around the House · Part 3: Build It, Wear It, Frame It · Part 4: Cards, Stickers and Sweets Part of the Game Boy in Disguise series.

The enemy is time, light and damp A Game Boy collection is a small archive, and like any archive it rewards a little quiet care. The good news is that these machines were built to be dropped, carried and loved, so they are tougher than most vintage electronics. The threats they face in storage are slow and undramatic: leaking batteries, creeping humidity, strong light and the gentle chemistry of ageing plastic. None of these needs an expensive solution. What they need is attention, stable conditions and a few sensible habits. This guide walks through the ones that are widely accepted among collectors and conservators, and it is honest about the places where a popular technique carries real risk. Batteries: the silent killers If you do only one thing after reading this, remove the batteries from anything you are not actively using. Alkaline AA and AAA cells are the single most common cause of avoidable damage in a collection. As they age they can leak potassium hydroxide, a corrosive paste that eats through battery contacts, springs and circuit traces. Once it starts it spreads, and a leak inside an original Game Boy, a battery pack or an accessory can quietly ruin the part before you ever notice. Take the cells out of every console, camera, printer and controller that stores them, and check anything you keep loaded every few months. If a battery already shows white or green crust, handle it carefully, keep it away from skin and eyes, and clean the contacts gently rather than storing the leak next to healthy items. The original Maxell Super Power Ace Batteries - A little timebomb in the Game Boy Cartridges hide a second, sneakier battery. Many save-enabled Game Boy games, the Pokemon titles most famously, keep their saved data alive with a small coin cell, usually a CR2025 or CR2032, wired to a memory chip inside the cartridge. These cells were never meant to last forever, and most are now well past their designed life of roughly fifteen to twenty-five years. When one dies the cartridge still plays perfectly, but it can no longer hold a save, and older saves may already be lost. This is normal ageing, not a fault. If a saved game matters to you, the cell can be replaced, ideally by someone comfortable with a soldering iron, and your existing save can often be backed up first with a cartridge dumping tool. It is delicate work, so if you are unsure, ask an experienced repairer rather than risk the board. Light, heat and humidity Game Boys like the same conditions you do: cool, dry and stable. Aim for moderate room temperature and a relative humidity somewhere in the region of thirty to fifty percent, and value steadiness above any exact number. Wild swings are worse than a slightly imperfect average, because repeated expansion and contraction stresses plastic, labels and solder joints. Avoid damp basements, hot attics and exterior walls that sweat in winter. A small silica gel packet tucked into a box or case helps buffer moisture and is chemically inert, so it will not harm plastic or electronics, though it works best when you dry it out or replace it now and then. Keep everything out of direct sunlight. Ultraviolet light fades cartridge labels and box art and speeds up the yellowing of grey plastic, so a shaded shelf, a closed cabinet or a UV-filtering film on a bright window all pay off over the years. A small silica gel packet tucked into a box or case helps buffer moisture. Dust and display cases Dust is more than a cosmetic nuisance. It holds moisture against surfaces, works into buttons and connectors, and turns into grime once it mixes with the natural oils from handling. A closed display case or cabinet keeps the worst of it off while still letting you enjoy the collection, and a glass or acrylic front adds a layer of UV protection when it is the filtering kind. If you display consoles switched off and unplugged, you sidestep both battery worries and the small, needless risk of leaving old electronics powered for no reason. Paper and boxes Boxes, manuals and inserts are usually the first things to suffer and the hardest to replace. Paper and cardboard are acidic by nature and slowly break down, yellowing and growing brittle. To slow this, keep them away from light and damp, and store them in acid-free, lignin-free sleeves, folders or boxes of the kind sold for archival photo and document storage. Plain acid-free material is a safe and inexpensive upgrade over ordinary plastic bags, some of which can trap moisture or react with print over time. Handle paper with clean, dry hands, and never repair a tear with ordinary sticky tape, which yellows and leaves a permanent stain. Upright and supported How you physically place items matters more than it seems. Store boxes and cartridges upright, like books on a shelf, rather than stacked in tall piles. Stacking puts steady weight on the lowest boxes, crushing corners and edges over months and years, while upright storage lets each item support its neighbours. Pack a shelf firmly enough that nothing leans or sags, but not so tightly that you tear a box getting it out. For loose cartridges, individual sleeves or a divided tray keep contacts from rubbing together and stop labels from scuffing. Foam and old cases: the off-gassing trap That soft foam padding inside an old camera bag or flight case can be a hidden enemy. Older foams and certain soft plastics, particularly those containing PVC, break down over time and release acids and plasticisers, a slow process often called off-gassing that can corrode metal contacts and leave a sticky residue on anything resting against them. If a case smells sharp or vinegary, or the foam is crumbling and greasy, take your items out and store them elsewhere. Inert modern materials such as polyethylene foam, acid-free board and archival-grade sleeves are the safer bet for long-term contact. To whiten or not to whiten Sooner or later you will meet the temptation of a badly yellowed shell and read about Retrobright, a treatment that uses hydrogen peroxide and ultraviolet light to bleach the discolouration away. It is worth being honest here: it can give a striking short-term result, but it carries real risks, and this guide mentions it as a caution rather than a recommendation. The whitening is a surface bleach, not a repair, so the yellowing commonly returns within months to a couple of years. More troubling, long-term tests by hobbyists have found that treated plastic can end up more yellowed and more brittle than plastic that was simply left alone, and the change cannot be undone. If a shell is precious to you, the safest course is to prevent yellowing in the first place with shade and stable conditions, and to accept a little honest patina as part of the object's history. Display versus deep storage Finally, decide what is on show and what is resting. A display collection lives with a small, accepted trade-off: more light, more dust and more handling in exchange for the pleasure of seeing it every day. Manage that with filtered light, a closed case and gentle, clean handling. Items in deep storage can be protected more fully, boxed with a little silica gel, kept dark and cool, batteries removed, and simply checked once or twice a year. Both approaches are valid. The point is to choose on purpose, so that nothing important is quietly deteriorating in a spot you never look at. However large your shelf, the habits are the same: evict the batteries, keep things cool, dry and shaded, support them upright and handle the paper kindly. Do that and your Game Boys will keep working and keep their charm for decades to come. If you would like to see how we care for and document our own collection, you are always welcome to visit the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Part 1: What a Grade Really Means · Part 2: Storing and Preserving Your Game Boys (you are here) · Part 3: Cleaning a Game Boy Without Ruining It

Magazines are the diary of a console's life, and the earliest entries are the most precious, because they were written before anyone knew how the story would turn out. This arrival is one of those first entries: a Japanese Game Boy magazine from 1989, the console's launch year, printed only months after the handheld reached shops. Japanese Game Boy magazine August 1989 What It Is Published by Tokuma Shoten Intermedia in 1989, soon after the console's release, this magazine covers the very first wave of Game Boy software: Tetris, Makai Toushi SaGa and Dracula Densetsu among them. In other words, it captures the exact line-up that defined the Game Boy's market entry in Japan, the games that early buyers actually played while the library was still tiny. As an early publication it documents how the system and its first titles were introduced to Japanese players, and the collection also holds a later 1990 issue for comparison. The Games on Its Pages The titles this issue covers are a roll-call of early Game Boy history. Makai Toushi SaGa, known in the West as The Final Fantasy Legend, was Square's first role-playing game for the handheld and became a genuine phenomenon in Japan, going on to sell over a million copies and proving that deep, story-driven RPGs could work on a tiny monochrome screen. Dracula Densetsu is the game Western players know as Castlevania: The Adventure, the series' first outing on a handheld. Seeing these landmarks written up as brand-new releases, their reputations not yet made, is the particular magic of a launch-year magazine. There is a broader side-story here about how quickly a specialist press sprang up around the Game Boy. Within months of launch, Japanese publishers were dedicating whole magazines to a machine that fit in a pocket, a sign of how seriously the industry took it from the very beginning. These publications were printed cheaply, read to pieces and thrown away, so surviving copies from 1989 are genuinely scarce, and each one is a small time capsule of a library that had barely begun to grow. Why It Joined the Collection Contemporary magazines are irreplaceable sources, because they record how games were seen at the moment of release rather than through the haze of nostalgia. A 1989 issue documents the Game Boy's Japanese launch line-up in the words and images of the time, and paired with the collection's 1990 issue it lets the earliest years of the console's press be read as a short sequence. Preserving it keeps a fragile, first-hand account of the Game Boy's beginnings from being lost. This Japanese Game Boy magazine is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the Game Boy in print.

One advert tells you how a product looked; a run of them tells you how a campaign thought. This arrival adds a second German Game Boy advertisement to the collection, and it is in the accumulation, page after page, that the shape of Nintendo's German marketing really becomes visible. Rescued from a magazine that almost certainly went to the recycling bin. What It Is At the start of the 1990s the Game Boy was advertised right across German media, on television, in magazines and in newspapers. This is one of the German magazine advertisements from that period, and it belongs to a growing series of German Game Boy ads in the collection. Together they document not a single message but a sustained, multi-channel push that kept the console in front of German audiences wherever they looked. The Power of a Series There is a particular value in collecting adverts as a set rather than one by one. A single advert is easy to read as a one-off, but when you can lay several German pages side by side, the campaign's recurring choices come into focus, the consistent tone, the repeated visual motifs, the way the same core promise was restated again and again until it stuck. That repetition was the whole strategy: advertising works by accumulation, and a market as important as Germany received the message on a loop. Holding more than one page lets the collection show that machinery at work rather than just a single snapshot of it. As always with advertising, the preservation challenge is real. These pages were bound into magazines that went to the recycling bin, so building a series of them means rescuing several fragile survivors rather than one. Each German advert added to the collection strengthens the record of how thoroughly Nintendo saturated one of its biggest European markets, and brings the picture of that campaign a little closer to complete. Why It Joined the Collection The Game Boy's success was built as much on relentless advertising as on clever engineering, and Germany saw a particularly heavy campaign. Adding another German advert deepens the collection's record of that push and lets the campaign be studied as a series rather than a single image. Preserving it keeps one more fragile page of the German marketing story safe. This German Game Boy advert is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: Game Boy advertising.

mpleting a set is one of collecting's deepest pleasures, and it usually comes down to a single, stubborn final piece. For Europe's coloured Game Boys, that last piece is white, and it is the hardest of all to find. This arrival is that missing shade, the one that finally rounds out the run. White it is! What It Is This white Game Boy comes from the European Limited Edition colour series. By the collection's records it was the latest colour to appear and by far the rarest of the run, which makes it one of the harder DMG-01 variants to track down today. The same series also came in red, green, black, yellow, blue and clear, and the collection documents the full colour set. Underneath the paint it is a completely standard DMG-01: directional pad, A and B buttons, Start and Select, a green monochrome screen with no backlight, powered by four AA batteries. The one console in the set that shows its age. White plastic never forgets a sunbeam. Why the Last Colour Is the Rarest There is a pattern in coloured-console runs that this white unit illustrates beautifully. The shades released latest are almost always the scarcest, because by the time they appear the initial buying frenzy has cooled, the console is older, and fewer are produced and sold. A late-arriving white Game Boy therefore had a smaller production window and a smaller audience, and that scarcity has only sharpened with time. White plastic also ages conspicuously, yellowing in sunlight in a way darker shells hide, so a clean, un-yellowed white example is doubly hard to find. This is where the value of documenting a whole set, rather than a single trophy, really shows. Lined up together, the coloured European Game Boys tell the story of Nintendo's mid-nineties reinvention of the handheld as a fashion object, and the white one is the piece that makes the row complete. The satisfaction of that completeness is not just aesthetic; it turns a collection of individual consoles into a single, legible history of how the DMG-01 was sold in colour across Europe. Why It Joined the Collection The coloured Game Boys are a story the collection tells across a whole shelf, and the rarest shade is the one that completes it. This white console is the scarce final entry in the European Limited Edition set, and adding it closes a run that would otherwise always feel one piece short. Preserving it, ideally free of yellowing, safeguards the hardest-to-find colour in one of the Game Boy's most collectable families. The white Limited Edition Game Boy is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: the Play It Loud colours.

By early 1990 the Game Boy library was growing fast enough that someone needed to keep track of it, and Japan's biggest games magazine took on the job. This arrival is the result: the first volume of Game Boy Scouts, a supplement that set out to round up and promote everything arriving on the young handheld. Game Boy Scouts Vol. 1 Famicom Tsushin supplement 1990 What It Is Game Boy Scouts Vol. 1 was distributed with the Japanese magazine Famicom Tsushin in early February 1990, published by ASCII Corporation. It covers early post-launch titles such as Nemesis, Selection, Asmik-kun World and Baseball Kids, offering short previews and platform news. In effect it is one of the earliest structured efforts to catalogue and promote the growing Game Boy library, a job the collection itself now does. All four volumes of the series are catalogued here, and this is where it begins. Famitsu and the Birth of Games Coverage Famicom Tsushin, universally known today as Famitsu, was and remains the most influential games magazine in Japan, the publication whose review scores could make or break a title. That such a heavyweight devoted a dedicated supplement to the Game Boy barely half a year after launch says a great deal about how quickly the handheld was taken seriously. Game Boy Scouts was, in a sense, the professional press catching up with a phenomenon, trying to impose order on a flood of new cartridges before players drowned in choice. The titles it previews are a snapshot of the moment: Nemesis, the handheld version of Konami's beloved Gradius shooter, sits beside now-obscure curiosities like Asmik-kun World and Baseball Kids. That mix is exactly what makes early coverage so valuable, because it treats the famous and the forgotten alike, as equally new. Supplements like this were bound into a magazine and rarely kept separately, so a surviving standalone volume is a genuine find, and having the full run of four is the kind of completeness the collection is built for. Why It Joined the Collection Early games journalism is a primary source for how the Game Boy was understood as it happened, and Game Boy Scouts is a particularly pure example: a document whose whole purpose was to survey the library at a single moment in early 1990. As the first of four volumes already in the collection, it anchors a complete little run that traces the handheld's Japanese software scene as it expanded. Preserving it keeps a first-hand record of the Game Boy's fast, chaotic early growth. Game Boy Scouts Vol. 1 is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: the Game Boy in print.