Decades after the last one rolled off the production line, the Game Boy keeps generating brand-new objects, and this arrival is a cheerfully modern example: a set of drinks coasters, printed with classic Game Boy cover art, made for grown-up fans to scatter across a coffee table. What It Is This 2018 coaster twin-pack, made by Pyramid International, features the cover designs of popular Game Boy Classic titles. It is a modern licensed item, part of the steady stream of tribute products that keep appearing long after the console itself was discontinued, and it joins the collection's other contemporary Game Boy homeware, including the Paladone mug and clock. Small and functional, it is really a way of putting the console's artwork on display in an ordinary living room. Classic cover paintings, finally doing the important work of catching condensation. Box Art Refuses to Die There is a lovely theme running through the modern Game Boy merchandise the collection gathers: again and again, it is the box art that gets celebrated. From lavish coffee-table books to, quite literally, coffee-table coasters, the humble cover illustrations that once sold these games are being reframed as the console's real visual heritage. It is a striking reversal, because that artwork was originally disposable packaging, and here it is decades later, reprinted with care onto objects designed to sit out on display. The Game Boy's graphic identity, its logos, its cartridge shapes, its cover paintings, has quietly become a design language of its own. Companies like Pyramid International, which specialises in licensed posters, mugs and homeware, exist because there is now a large, affluent audience of adults who grew up with the Game Boy and want a little of it in their homes. A coaster is a small, low-stakes way to buy back a piece of childhood, and gathering these modern items shows how the console has settled into a comfortable second life as nostalgic decor. They are not rare, but as a group they document something important: that the affection for the Game Boy is still very much a live, commercial force. Why It Joined the Collection Documenting the Game Boy's present is as important as documenting its past, and modern tribute homeware like this shows the console living on as everyday decoration. These coasters join the collection's other contemporary licensed pieces to chart the console's ongoing second life, and their focus on box art ties them to a recurring modern theme. Keeping them records how the Game Boy quietly became design heritage. The Game Boy coaster collection is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the wild world of Game Boy merchandise.

If the first Game & Watch Gallery was a love letter to Nintendo's earliest handhelds, the sequel is a second helping, and a rarer one. Part eight of Pick Up and Play stays with the same brilliant format, bite-size classics in old and new clothes, but adds a collector's wrinkle that the first game did not have. More classics, same perfect format The Game & Watch Gallery 2 carries on exactly what made the first so easy to pick up. It gathers another set of Nintendo's Game & Watch handheld games and, as before, lets you play each one in a faithful Classic mode or a livelier, Mario-themed Modern mode. Every game inside is a self-contained few-minute burst of timing and reflex with a score to beat and nothing to lose by stopping, which is the whole reason the Game & Watch idea belongs at the heart of a series like this. It is comfort food for anyone who likes a quick round, and doubly so if you enjoy seeing a 1980s design and its modern reimagining side by side. The Japan-only sequel, still in monochrome. The line-up leans on the same deep well of early Game & Watch titles, classics such as Parachute and Chef, each rebuilt twice over. In Classic mode you get the game almost exactly as it was, all stark silhouettes and simple beeps; in Modern mode the action is restaged with Mario, Yoshi, Donkey Kong and friends, brighter graphics and the odd extra wrinkle to freshen up a decades-old design. Playing the two back to back is a quiet lesson in game design, showing how much personality you can layer on without touching the underlying rules that made the original work in the first place. It is also Super Game Boy enhanced, a nice touch for a late-era original Game Boy title, dressing the old games up with a coloured border and a splash of on-screen colour when played through the Super Nintendo adapter. As with its predecessor, the pick-up-and-play fit is total. Nothing here asks for more than a minute or punishes you for walking away; every game is a self-contained sprint for a high score. It is the sort of cartridge you leave in the Game Boy for exactly those moments when you want to play something and think about nothing, which turns out to be a rarer and more valuable thing than it sounds. The one that stayed in Japan Here is the twist that makes this one special to own. On the original monochrome Game Boy, Game & Watch Gallery 2 was a Japan exclusive. Western players did eventually get a version, but on the Game Boy Color rather than the classic hardware, which is why the plain grey-cartridge release in the collection is an import, and why collectors prize it precisely because its first outing stayed tied to the original machine. It is a small reminder that even a cheerful compilation of forty-year-old games can carry a real regional rarity for the people who go looking. For a collector, that regional quirk is half the appeal. The cartridge in the archive is the genuine Japanese release, grey plastic and Japanese text, the version that asks you to go looking rather than simply buy it off a shelf at home. There is a particular pleasure in an object whose very ordinariness, a friendly compilation of tiny classics, sits right alongside a genuine scarcity on the original hardware. It is the kind of game that only makes full sense once you know the story of why it is here and not there. The little handhelds refused to fade, too. Their flat, monochrome hero became Mr. Game & Watch, a fan-favourite fighter in Super Smash Bros., and Nintendo has since reissued brand-new Game & Watch units as collectibles for its anniversaries, charming players who were not even born when the format first appeared. Compilations like this one are a big part of why that memory stayed alive at all. And with it, the shelf comes full circle. We started this series with Tetris, a game with no ending, and we finish with a cartridge that is really a museum of games that never needed one. Everything in between, the pills, the shells, the bat and ball, the grids and the drifting line, has been a variation on the same simple gift the Game Boy gave its players: something good to do with a few spare minutes, and no reason to feel bad about stopping. That brings our first run of pick-up-and-play games to a close, from Tetris to two trips through Nintendo's own handheld history. To see these cartridges and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Part 1: Tetris · Part 2: Dr. Mario · 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 (you are here)

Mario has held a lot of jobs. He started as a carpenter, became a plumber, moonlighted as a referee, a boxing coach and a go-kart racer. In 1990 he added the strangest line to his resume yet. He put on a white coat, picked up a jar of oversized pills, and started fighting a disease with colour-matching. Dr. Mario is the game where Nintendo's mascot became a physician, and it turned out he had a very good bedside manner. Fever or Chill? Choose your soundtrack, choose your fate. A puzzle in a lab coat The setup is pure Nintendo: simple to grasp, brutal to master. A playfield fills from the bottom with viruses in three colours, red, yellow and blue. From the top, Dr. Mario tosses down two-tone capsules, and you rotate and slide each one as it falls. Line up four matching colours in a row or column and they vanish, taking any same-coloured viruses with them. Clear every virus and the level is won. Let the capsules stack to the top and the doctor loses his patient. It sounds gentle. It is not. Because each pill carries two colours, every piece is a small negotiation: place it to clear a red virus and you may strand a yellow half somewhere awkward. The higher levels bury the screen in viruses and speed the pills up until the whole thing becomes a test of nerve. On the Game Boy, where the four colours were rendered as four shades of grey, players learned to read the viruses by their little animated faces as much as their tone. Riding the Tetris wave Dr. Mario did not appear in a vacuum. It arrived in 1990, right in the middle of the puzzle mania that Tetris had unleashed. Tetris had shown Nintendo that a puzzle could sell a console, and the company was hungry for another. Dr. Mario was Nintendo's own answer, developed in-house and launched on the NES and the Game Boy at the same time, so that both the living room and the pocket had a falling-block habit to feed. Where Tetris was abstract and Soviet-cool, Dr. Mario was warm and cartoonish, wrapped in a friendly medical joke. Crucially, the Game Boy version supported the link cable, so two players could go head to head, dropping viruses on each other's screens with every combo. That competitive streak is a big part of why the game never really went away. Fever and Chill Ask anyone who played Dr. Mario what they remember and, sooner or later, they will start humming. The game offered a choice of two background tunes, named Fever and Chill, both composed by Nintendo's Hirokazu Tanaka. Fever is the bright, bouncing one that everybody knows; Chill is its cooler, jazzier sibling. Being able to pick your soundtrack before a session was a small luxury in 1990, and the tunes have long outlived the hardware, resurfacing in later Nintendo games and in the Super Smash Bros. series. The doctor keeps practising Few Nintendo puzzle games have proved as durable. Dr. Mario has been re-released, remade and reinvented across almost every Nintendo system since, from the Nintendo 64 to the Switch, occasionally handing the coat to Luigi. The formula barely changes, because it barely needs to. A jar of viruses, two-colour pills and one earworm remains a near-perfect design. Dr. Mario Complete-in-Box That is what makes the original Game Boy cartridge such a satisfying thing to hold. Everything the series would ever be is already there, in four shades of grey, ready to ruin an afternoon. You can see this copy of Dr. Mario in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.

. Yoshi is one of Nintendo's most beloved characters, a green dinosaur with a bottomless appetite and a starring role in dozens of games. But everyone has a beginning, and one of Yoshi's earliest leading parts was not a lush platformer at all. It was a modest falling-block puzzle on the Game Boy, in which the little dinosaur does not run or jump but simply hatches, over and over, from matched eggshells. It is a charming and slightly odd debut, and a reminder that even mascots start small. Made by the studio that would soon invent Pokemon. One game, several names The game is a small case study in how confusing Nintendo's regional naming could be. In Japan it was known by a name that translates roughly to Yoshi's Egg, in Europe it went out as Mario & Yoshi, and in the United States it was simply called Yoshi. Three territories, three titles, one game. Whatever the label on the box, it arrived in the early 1990s, not long after Yoshi had first appeared as Mario's dinosaur steed in the Mario platformers, and it was one of the first times the character got his name on a cover of his own. Juggling stacks and hatching eggs The playfield is split into columns, and pieces drop from the top: familiar Mario enemies like Goombas and shells, along with the top and bottom halves of Yoshi's eggs. Mario stands at the bottom holding two stacks, and you shuffle the columns left and right so that matching pieces land on one another. Stack a bottom eggshell and a top eggshell together, with monsters sandwiched in between, and the egg hatches into Yoshi, clearing everything and scoring you points. The bigger the sandwich, the bigger the Yoshi, and the greater the reward. It is a lighter, more forgiving puzzle than something like Dr. Mario, built around timing and tidy stacking rather than fiendish colour logic. That gentleness is part of its charm. It is the kind of game you play in a queue or on a short journey, chasing a slightly better score each time, with a friendly dinosaur popping into existence whenever you get it right. Match the eggshells, hatch the dinosaur. Made by a studio you now know well There is a lovely footnote here. The game was developed not by Nintendo itself but by a small outside studio: Game Freak, the very team that, a few years later, would create Pokemon and change the fortunes of the Game Boy forever. Long before they were building a world of pocket monsters, they were making tidy little puzzle games like this one, learning their craft on the same grey handheld. Held up against what came next, this modest cartridge looks like an early sketch by an artist who would soon paint something enormous. Yoshi would go on to headline far grander adventures, but there is something endearing about seeing him here at the very start, hatching quietly from a puzzle on a two-inch screen. You can find Mario & Yoshi in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.

The Game Boy had no business hosting great games. Even in 1989 it was modest hardware: no colour, a screen that smeared during fast motion, and sound from a single tinny speaker. Rival handhelds were flashier and more powerful. Nintendo made a different bet, that a game people wanted to keep playing mattered more than raw horsepower, and a decade of brilliant, strange and stubborn cartridges proved the bet right. Proof that fun never needed horsepower. Great Games, Tiny Screen is a tour through some of the finest, oddest and most ambitious games the handheld ever ran, all of them in the museum's collection. Here is the full series, grouped by the kind of magic each game pulled off. The puzzle boom The Game Boy and the puzzle game grew up together. It all started with Tetris, the Soviet puzzle that came bundled with the console and sold it to the world. Nintendo chased that success with Dr. Mario and its falling pills, while Mario Picross smuggled a superb logic puzzle into the West that few there quite knew what to do with. Further back still, the mahjong launch title Yakuman quietly became the first game to use the link cable, and Mario & Yoshi gave the friendly dinosaur one of his earliest starring roles. Mario, Pokemon and Nintendo's own The handheld was also a stage for Nintendo's biggest names. Super Mario Land gave the plumber a wonderfully weird pocket adventure, and its sequel introduced the greedy anti-hero of Wario Land. The block-breaker Alleyway put Mario at the controls on day one, while Donkey Kong grew from an arcade port into one of the finest games on the system. Game & Watch Gallery looked lovingly back at Nintendo's LCD past, and then Pokemon arrived at the very end of the machine's life and gave it a triumphant second act. Ports that should not have fit Finally there are the conversions that seemed to belong on bigger machines and were talked onto the handheld anyway. Space Invaders hid an entire Super Nintendo game inside a Game Boy cartridge. Lemmings crammed a mouse-driven strategy game onto four buttons and a two-inch screen. And Dragon's Lair, born as a lavish laserdisc cartoon, was rebuilt from scratch to survive on a battery. Not all of them succeeded, but every one is a monument to developers who refused to accept a machine's limits. One little machine, a whole library Taken together, these games make the case better than any spec sheet could. A console with four shades of grey hosted Soviet puzzles and pocket monsters, mahjong and nonograms, arcade legends and Hollywood cartoons, and it kept players hooked for a full decade. Great hardware helps, but it was never the point. Great imagination was. Every game above lives in the Game Boy Museum collection, and each has its own chapter in the Great Games, Tiny Screen series. Pick one and start reading.

In Part 1 we drew a start-screen picture and a small font. A picture, though, is not yet a title screen. A real one appears the moment the console boots, sits there looking inviting, and waits for the player to decide when to begin. In this part we bring the design to life: the game will show our SNAKE screen on start-up and hold there until START is pressed. As before, we will read every line together, so no coding background is needed. Painting the Title Screen Drawing the title screen is just placing tiles, using the draw_text helper from Part 1 for the words and the plain body tile for a little coiled snake. Painting the Home Screen for the snake like game We gather it all into one reusable instruction we can call whenever we want to show the title: void title_screen(void) { clear_screen(); draw_text(7, 5, "SNAKE"); // a small coiled snake, drawn from body tiles set_bkg_tile_xy(7, 8, T_BODY); set_bkg_tile_xy(8, 8, T_BODY); set_bkg_tile_xy(9, 8, T_BODY); set_bkg_tile_xy(9, 7, T_BODY); set_bkg_tile_xy(12, 8, T_FOOD); draw_text(4, 12, "PRESS START"); } Let us read it from the top. The screen is a grid twenty columns wide and eighteen rows tall, and we count from the top-left corner, so a position is written as (column, row). clear_screen() first wipes the display to a blank field so nothing old is left behind. draw_text(7, 5, "SNAKE") writes the word SNAKE starting at column 7, row 5, using the font we made in Part 1. The four set_bkg_tile_xy lines that follow each drop a single snake-body tile at one named square, and by choosing squares that sit next to each other we draw a little coiled snake by hand, one segment at a time. The next line places one food tile beside it. Finally, draw_text(4, 12, "PRESS START") writes the prompt lower down the screen. Nothing here is clever; the whole function is simply a list of what goes where. Waiting for the Player Now the game shows the title and simply waits. There is also a neat trick hidden in these few lines that gives us randomness for free: title_screen(); seed = 0; waitpad(J_START); // hold here until START is pressed while (joypad() & J_START) seed++; // count while the button is held initrand(seed); // seed the randomness waitpadup(); // wait for release, then begin Here is what each line is doing. title_screen() paints the screen we just built. seed = 0 sets a counter to zero, ready to use in a moment. waitpad(J_START) is the important one: it freezes the whole game on the title screen until the player presses START, so nothing moves until they are ready. The next line, while (joypad() & J_START) seed++, then runs over and over for as long as START is still held down, adding one to seed each time, so seed ends up holding roughly how long the button was pressed. We hand that number to initrand(seed), which uses it to decide where food will appear; because every player holds the button for a slightly different moment, every game gets a different pattern of food. Lastly, waitpadup() waits for the player to actually let go of START before the snake springs to life, so a long press does not accidentally carry over into the game. A Game That Greets You Build the ROM now and the difference in feel is out of all proportion to the few lines we added. Instead of dropping you straight into a moving snake, the game opens with a calm, confident title screen and lets you begin in your own time. It is a small courtesy that instantly makes the project feel finished rather than experimental, and it gives us a home to return to whenever a game ends. Coming Up in Part 3 Our game looks inviting, but it still does not tell you how well you are doing. In Part 3 we add a score: a counter that starts at zero, climbs with every piece of food the snake eats, and is drawn live at the top of the screen using the font we designed in Part 1. The console this all runs on is documented, with photographs, in the collection. The Level Up Series Part 1: Drawing Graphics the Game Boy Way · Part 2: A Title Screen for Your Snake (you are here) · Part 3: Keeping Score · Part 4: Three Lives · Part 5: A Proper Game Over · Part 6: Sound and Pause Part of the Write Your Own Game Boy Games series.

In Part 1 we set up GBDK-2020 and got a first ROM running, with a short message printed on screen. That printed text was a gentle shortcut. To build an actual game like Snake, we need to draw our own graphics, and for that we first have to understand how the Game Boy puts anything on screen at all. It is genuinely different from a modern computer, and once it clicks, the rest of the series becomes much easier. Understanding Game Boy Graphics The Game Boy screen is 160 pixels wide and 144 pixels tall. You might expect to draw by setting those pixels one by one, the way you would on a modern screen. The Game Boy almost never works that way. In 1989 there simply was not enough memory to hold a full picture of the screen and update it many times a second. So Nintendo's engineers used a clever trick that defines Game Boy graphics to this day: instead of pixels, the console thinks in small reusable tiles. A Screen Made of Tiles A tile is a tiny square image, 8 pixels by 8 pixels. You design a small set of these tiles once, and the Game Boy stores them in its video memory. The screen is then treated as a grid of these tiles, 20 tiles across and 18 tiles down. To draw something, you do not paint pixels; you tell the console which tile to show in which grid cell. A brick wall, a patch of grass, a letter of text: each is just an 8 by 8 tile, placed again and again wherever it is needed. This is why so many classic Game Boy games have that charming, blocky, grid-aligned look. Four Shades of Green The original DMG-01 cannot show colour. Every pixel is one of just four shades, rendered in that famous pea-green tint. When you design a tile, each of its 64 pixels is set to one of those four shades: think of them as white, light grey, dark grey and black. Behind the scenes each tile is stored in 16 bytes, using two bits per pixel to pick one of the four shades. You do not have to do that maths by hand, but it helps to know why graphics data looks the way it does when we start defining our own tiles in the next part. The Background Layer The grid of tiles we have been describing is called the background layer. It is the main canvas of most Game Boy games. GBDK-2020 gives us simple functions to work with it. One function loads your tile images into video memory, and another places a particular tile at a chosen grid position. Placing a tile is as easy as naming a column, a row and a tile number, like this: set_bkg_tile_xy(5, 5, 1); // put tile number 1 at column 5, row 5 Do not let the punctuation put you off. set_bkg_tile_xy is a ready-made GBDK instruction, and its name reads as set background tile, by x and y. The three numbers in the brackets simply answer where and what: the first is the column, the second is the row, and the third is which tile to place there. So this whole line says put tile number 1 into the cell at column 5, row 5. Change the three numbers and you move the tile anywhere on the grid. Almost everything we draw from here on is just this one instruction, repeated with different numbers. That single line is the heart of how we will draw everything in Snake. The whole game is really just deciding which tiles to place, and where, many times a second. Sprites: Things That Move Freely There is a second way to draw, and it is the one most people picture when they think of game characters. Sprites are small images, again built from 8 by 8 tiles, but unlike the background they can be positioned anywhere on screen, down to the individual pixel, and moved smoothly. Mario, a bouncing ball or a blinking cursor are all sprites. The catch is that the Game Boy can only show a limited number of them at once, 40 in total, and only a handful on any single horizontal line. Sprites are perfect for a hero that glides around, but less suited to something that grows without limit. Why Snake Lives on the Background This is exactly why we will build Snake out of background tiles rather than sprites. A snake grows longer and longer as it eats, and could easily pass the 40-sprite limit. It also moves on a neat grid, one step at a time, which fits the tile system perfectly. So our plan is simple and robust: we will design a handful of tiles, one for the snake's body, one for the food and one for the wall, and then play the entire game by placing and removing those tiles on the background grid. No flicker, no sprite limits, just clean and reliable drawing. 4 tiles for our little game The four tiles we need for our little game: Empty – empty light-colored area (background) Wall – solid dark square (wall) Food – dark diamond on a light background (food) Body – solid dark square (snake's body) Coming Up in Part 3 Now that we know the Game Boy thinks in tiles, it is time to make some. In Part 3 we will design our own tile graphics in code, load them into the console and draw the Snake playfield, complete with a wall around the edge. From there, the game starts to take shape quickly. If you would like to see the hardware behind all this theory, the original DMG-01 console in the collection is the very machine whose tile-based screen we are learning to command. The Full Series Part 1: Setting Up Your Workshop · Part 2: How the Game Boy Thinks (you are here) · 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.

Qix - The Game Boy version where Mario turns up in fancy dress. Some games are remembered for a hero or a story. Qix is remembered for a shape. There is no character to root for, no princess to save, just an abstract, twitching line and a simple, maddening goal: draw boxes and claim the screen before the line catches you. It is one of the strangest hits the arcades ever produced, and the little Game Boy version in the collection hides one of gaming's better-kept jokes, a costume gag from 1990 that Nintendo would dust off nearly thirty years later. An arcade original from 1981 Qix arrived in arcades in October 1981, made and published by Taito. Unusually, it was not born in Japan at all but came out of Taito's small American division, one of only a handful of games that studio ever produced, alongside the likes of Zoo Keeper. It was designed by a husband and wife team, Randy and Sandy Pfeiffer, which gives this cold, abstract game a rather warm origin story. First, the question everyone gets wrong: it is pronounced kicks, not quicks, a detail Taito printed right on the original arcade flyer. The concept was so unlike anything else that one writer of the era called it a state of the art Etch A Sketch, and the comparison stuck. That strangeness cut both ways. Qix was a genuine commercial hit and, in Japan, the fifth highest-grossing arcade game of 1981, yet Taito's own director of creativity later admitted it was conceptually too mystifying for gamers, impossible to master, and that once the novelty wore off the game faded. History has been kinder: it is now remembered as a sleeper hit and a real cult classic. How it plays The rules are easy to state and hard to survive. You steer a small diamond-shaped marker around a big empty rectangle, and by drawing lines out into open space you fence off chunks of the board. Claim enough of it, usually 75 percent, and you clear the level. The catch is the thing the game is named after: the Qix, an abstract geometric figure that drifts around the middle in constant, unpredictable motion. Touch it while you are mid-draw, before your line closes into a safe shape, and you lose a life. Claim the board, dodge the Qix: an arcade classic that plays like nothing else. The Qix is not your only problem. Sparx chase you along the edges of the board, later mutating into Super Sparx that can pursue you down your own unfinished lines. Stop drawing for a moment and a fuse begins burning along the line toward you. Get boxed into a corner and the attract screen has a name for your fate: the Spiral Death Trap. There is real strategy underneath the panic, too. You can draw slowly for double points, and from the third level onward there are two Qixes to deal with, so splitting the board to separate them becomes its own high-risk, high-reward art. It is tense, mathematical and completely unlike the platformers around it, which is exactly why it works so well on a Game Boy in short bursts. The Game Boy version, and Mario's wardrobe The Game Boy Qix in the collection is the 1990 conversion, developed by Minakuchi Engineering and published by Nintendo. Nintendo did something charming with this cold abstract puzzle: it warmed it up with cameos. Between rounds, depending on how well you are doing, the game cuts to little intermissions starring Mario, and Mario is dressed up. He appears in a whole series of costumes themed around different countries, cycling through outfits before settling back into his familiar red and blue, joined by Luigi, Peach and a few Toads in a proper Mushroom Kingdom scene. One of those intermissions is the reason Qix earns a special place in Mario trivia. In it, Mario stands in a desert in Mexican dress, playing a guitar while a vulture looks on. That single throwaway scene from a 1990 handheld puzzle game was quietly resurrected in 2017, when the poncho and sombrero returned as a wearable costume in Super Mario Odyssey. A gag most players never saw, hidden in a niche Game Boy port, became an official outfit for Mario a generation later. Reach 500,000 points and the whole gang, Mario, Luigi, Peach and the Toads, turn up to congratulate you, and there is even a two-player versus mode over the Link Cable in which player one is Mario and player two is Luigi. Pronounced kicks, not quicks. Get it right and impress your friends. The game that launched a thousand clones For a game its own maker thought too strange to last, Qix proved remarkably fertile. It has been named among the ten most cloned video games of all time, spawning a long line of imitators with names like Styx, Xonix and Zolyx. The most notorious descendant is Kaneko's Gals Panic from 1990, which kept the claim-the-area mechanic but revealed pin-up artwork instead of plain colour, launching an entire uncover-the-image subgenre. Taito itself kept the flame alive with a string of sequels and spin-offs, from Qix II and Super Qix to Volfied, and even a later Game Boy Color follow-up, Qix Adventure, in 1999. That is the quiet greatness of Qix. It has no mascot and no story, just a restless line and a blank rectangle, yet it seeded a whole family of games and smuggled one of Mario's best sight gags onto the Game Boy. To see this copy and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.

No ending, no save, no problem. The perfect two-minute game. Some games ask you to sit down for the evening. They want a saved file, a map, a few hours of your undivided attention. This series is a celebration of the other kind, the games built for the in-between moments: a bus ride, a queue, the five minutes before dinner is ready. You start, you play, you stop the instant you need to, and you never feel you abandoned anything. The Game Boy was made for exactly this, and no game understands it better than the one we are starting with. Welcome to Pick Up and Play, and welcome to Tetris. The perfect two-minute game The genius of Tetris is that it has no finish line. There is no last level to reach, no princess to save, no ending screen waiting at the top. You simply fit falling shapes together, clear lines, and keep going until the well fills up and it is over. That sounds like a limitation and is actually the whole trick: a game with no ending is a game you can leave at any second. Miss your stop chasing a high score and that is on you, but nothing is lost by switching off mid-fall. It is the purest pick-up-and-play design ever made. There is a reason it burrows into your head the way it does. Play for long enough and you start to see the shapes everywhere, fitting imaginary blocks into shelves, buildings and skylines long after the console is switched off. Psychologists eventually gave the phenomenon a name, the Tetris effect, after the game that produced it more reliably than any other. That gentle pull is the engine of every good pick-up-and-play title: the promise that this next line, this next piece, will be the one that finally tidies everything up. It never quite is, and so you keep going for just one more. The rules take about ten seconds to learn and a lifetime to master, which is the second half of the magic. A newcomer can enjoy their very first drop, and an expert can still be chasing a cleaner stack a thousand games later. Nothing about it needs a manual, a tutorial or a single minute of setup. You turn it on and you are already playing. It also fit the little grey machine perfectly. Tetris needs no colour, no scrolling world and no cast of characters, so the Game Boy's four shades of green were never a compromise here, only clarity. The whole board is legible at a glance on that small screen, the controls come down to two directions and a spin, and the chirpy soundtrack loops away happily whether you play for one minute or forty. Where flashier games made the handheld look underpowered next to its rivals, Tetris made it look purpose-built. This was the machine the puzzle had been waiting for. The game that sold the Game Boy Tetris is the best-selling game the Game Boy ever had, with more than 35 million copies sold, and the relationship ran both ways: the game did not just sell well on the handheld, it helped sell the handheld itself. In several markets, notably North America and Europe, Nintendo bundled Tetris right in the box with the console, a decision often credited with taking the Game Boy beyond children and into the hands of commuters, students and grown-ups who might never have bought a games machine otherwise. A simple puzzle about falling blocks turned a toy into a mainstream phenomenon. Several of those Tetris console bundles are catalogued in the collection alongside the standalone cartridge. For all that it is remembered as a solitary time-filler, Tetris also offered one of the Game Boy's first tastes of head-to-head play. Link two consoles together with the cable and you can face a friend directly, clearing lines to dump junk rows into their well and racing to be the last one standing. It was competitive handheld gaming in miniature, years before that became a genre in its own right, and it could turn a quiet puzzle into a very loud argument on the back seat of the car. For a lot of players it was the first time a pocket machine felt like a shared toy rather than a private one. Bundle: Tetris with Game Boy or Game Boy with Tetris The story behind it is far stranger than the tidy grid suggests. Tetris was invented in 1984 by Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, who first built it on an ageing Elektronika 60 terminal that could not even draw the blocks as proper squares. That makes it that rare thing: a global entertainment icon that came out of the Soviet Union. The tangle of who actually held the rights to sell it, especially on handhelds, became one of the most infamous legal sagas in gaming, a cross-continental scramble in which a determined publisher named Henk Rogers flew to Moscow to negotiate face to face and helped Nintendo lock down the handheld rights, clearing the way for the version that would ride in millions of pockets. Even the music is borrowed heritage: the famous main theme is an arrangement of Korobeiniki, a nineteenth-century Russian folk song that an entire generation now hums without ever knowing its name. None of that history is visible while you play, of course, which is part of the charm. A Soviet mathematician's after-hours experiment, a courtroom drama spanning three continents and a borrowed folk tune all vanish the moment the first piece drops. What is left is the cleanest loop in games, ready in a second and gone in a second, waiting patiently inside a grey plastic shell for the next spare minute you can give it. Why it belongs at the front of this series Every game in this series shares Tetris's quiet promise: that a few minutes is enough, and that stopping costs you nothing. But Tetris is where the idea was perfected, the game that proved a handheld did not need epics to be essential. It is easy to learn, impossible to finish, and almost impossible to put down, which is exactly why it is impossible to leave off the top of a list like this. Pick it up for one line. We both know how that ends. To see this cartridge and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Part 1: Tetris (you are here) · Part 2: Dr. Mario · Part 3: Mario & Yoshi · Part 4: Alleyway · Part 5: Mario's Picross · Part 6: Qix

We finish this first run of Pick Up and Play with the most abstract game of the bunch, and one of the purest quickies the Game Boy ever held. No characters, no plot, no finish line. Just a blank rectangle, a nervous line drifting across it, and a simple, addictive urge to fence off more of the screen than last time. Claim the board, dodge the line, chase the score. Claim the board, then claim a bit more In Qix you steer a marker around the edge of a rectangle and draw lines out into the open, fencing off chunks of the board a piece at a time. Claim enough and you clear the level. The catch is the Qix itself, an abstract shape twitching around the middle that ends your run if it touches a line while you are still drawing it. That tension, deciding whether to grab a safe little slice or gamble on a huge sweep, is the whole game, and it resolves in seconds. You can play one nervy round and stop, or chase a bigger and bigger percentage until you forget the time. Either way, nothing is saved and nothing is lost, which is precisely the pick-up-and-play deal. There is a little more to survive than the Qix alone. Sparks skitter around the edges of the board hunting for the exact spot where you are sitting, so you cannot dawdle on the border either, and if you stop halfway through drawing a line a slow fuse begins creeping up it toward you. Every claim becomes a small gamble with two speeds: draw quickly for a safe, low-value patch, or crawl along for double the points and pray nothing reaches you before you close the shape. Fence off enough of the board, usually around three-quarters of it, and the level is yours. Like the best entries in this series, it is trivial to start and genuinely hard to master. A first round teaches you the rules by feel, and a hundredth is still tempting you into one risky draw too many. On the small screen its cold, geometric style feels strangely modern, an arcade idea with no fat on it at all. Qix - The perfect quick game for every coffee break There is something bracing about a game with no theme at all. Where the rest of this series leans on Mario, Yoshi or a friendly puzzle premise, Qix offers only pure geometry, and on the Game Boy's plain green panel that starkness works in its favour. It looks less like a toy and more like an instrument, a clean test of nerve that could pass for something released yesterday. For a spare minute it asks one honest question, how greedy do you feel, and answers it fast. That instant resolution is what makes it such a natural quickie. A board is won or lost in well under a minute, and the score screen is a clean full stop rather than a cliffhanger, so you can switch the machine off with no loose ends. Of course you rarely do, because the next board is always right there, quietly promising that this time you will play it more carefully. You will not, and that is the fun. Qix also turned out to be quietly influential. The simple idea of claiming territory by drawing across a contested space grew into a small genre of its own, from arcade descendants to countless later imitations, and you can still feel its DNA in modern mobile games where the goal is to wall off as much of the screen as you dare. Not bad for a design with no hero, no story and barely any graphics. The idea was strong enough to carry all of it. Want the deep dive? Qix has a history far richer than its plain grid lets on: a 1981 arcade original from Taito's American division, a name pronounced kicks, and a Game Boy version that hides a whole wardrobe of Mario cameos, one of which resurfaced in a modern Mario game decades later. Rather than repeat all of that here, we have given it its own feature. If this quick round has you curious, read the full story in our dedicated Qix article, then come straight back for just one more board. It makes a fitting end to this opening run. We began with Tetris, the game that proved a pocket machine could hold a whole hobby in a few falling blocks, and we finish with Qix, which strips the idea back even further to a line, a box and a steady nerve. Between them sit a doctor, a dinosaur, a bat and ball and a grid of numbers, six different answers to the same quiet question: what can you enjoy, completely, in the time it takes to wait for a kettle? That wraps our six pick-up-and-play puzzlers and arcade games, though the series carries on with Nintendo's own handheld history. To explore the collection and see these cartridges up close, visit the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Qix is one corner of a much larger story; see how the Game Boy ruled the puzzle game. Part 1: Tetris · Part 2: Dr. Mario · Part 3: Mario & Yoshi · Part 4: Alleyway · Part 5: Mario's Picross · Part 6: Qix (you are here) · Part 7: Game & Watch Gallery · Part 8: Game & Watch Gallery 2

Pick this cartridge up and the first thing you notice is that it is the wrong colour. Instead of the familiar grey, Donkey Kong Land arrived in a bright yellow shell, and that small act of rebellion is a clue to how ambitious it was: a game determined to look like nothing else on the little green screen. What It Is Donkey Kong Land is the best-selling Donkey Kong game ever released for a Game Boy system, shifting around 3.91 million copies worldwide, a figure that gives it real historical weight. It was made by Rare, the British studio behind the Super NES hit Donkey Kong Country, and its great trick was carrying that game's lavish visual identity onto monochrome hardware. It is also one of the most distinctive original Game Boy cartridges simply to look at, thanks to that yellow housing, which set it apart on the shelf from the grey crowd around it. The Trick Behind the Graphics On the Super NES, Donkey Kong Country had stunned players in 1994 with characters that looked three-dimensional, the result of Rare rendering models on expensive Silicon Graphics workstations and then squashing the results into sprites, a technique the studio called Advanced Computer Modelling. Donkey Kong Land pulled off a quieter miracle: it applied that same pre-rendered look to a handheld with four shades of grey and a fraction of the memory. The barrels, the rolling animation, the heavy, tactile feel of Donkey and Diddy, all of it survives the shrink, which is why the game is regularly named among the most technically impressive platformers on the original Game Boy. Donkey Kong Land - A banana yellow Game Boy cartridge There is a nice side-story in the name, too. Rather than simply port Donkey Kong Country, Rare built a fresh adventure, and the in-game story even winked at itself: the plot framed the whole thing as a challenge to prove the pair could do it all again on weaker hardware. Donkey Kong Land went on to spawn two sequels of its own on the Game Boy, turning a single technical showpiece into a proper handheld trilogy, and cementing Rare's reputation as the studio that could make the machine do things it had no business doing. Donkey Kong Land Guide: For those, who needed a little bit of help Why It Joined the Collection A collection about the original Game Boy wants its landmark cartridges, the ones that pushed the hardware to its limits, and Donkey Kong Land is exactly that. It is a commercial heavyweight, a technical showpiece and, thanks to that yellow shell, an instantly recognisable object. Together those qualities make it one of the more meaningful games a Game Boy shelf can hold, proof of how far a clever studio could stretch a humble machine. Donkey Kong Land is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: the games that made the Game Boy.

Not every Game Boy is meant to be switched on. Some are meant to be built brick by brick, some to be shuffled like a deck of cards, and at least one to be perched on your nose while it takes a phone call. This is the Game Boy as costume, as furniture, as fashion accessory, four items from the collection that borrow the famous grey silhouette and then wander off to do something else entirely. Welcome to Game Boy in Disguise, the corner of the collection where the console stops being a console. The DMG-01 has one of the most recognisable outlines in all of gaming, that stout grey brick with the round A and B buttons, and once a shape gets that famous, people start reproducing it in every material they can find. Plastic bricks, both licensed and not. Trading cards. Even eyewear. Here are four of our favourite disguises, and what each one says about how far a little grey handheld can travel. The Official Brick Game Boy The story starts, fittingly, with the most elaborate tribute in the whole collection. In October 2025 the Lego Group released the Lego Game Boy (72046), a full building set that treats the DMG-01 like a monument. The buttons actually press. There is a volume control and a cartridge slot, the small authentic touches that separate a toy from a love letter. The finished model measures 14 by 9 by 3 centimetres, roughly the footprint of the real hardware, so it reads as a Game Boy from across the room rather than as a novelty. The original Lego Game Boy - Build your Game Boy piece by piece The clever part is what goes in the screen. The set ships with two interchangeable game modules, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Super Mario Land, and each one carries a lenticular panel, so tilt it and the artwork shifts, about the closest a brick can get to pretending it is powered on. For a certain kind of collector this is the dream object, a Game Boy you get to earn one piece at a time, and the display can change its mind whenever it likes: Hyrule one week, Super Mario Land the next. We happily call it one of the most elaborate modern tributes we own. The Unofficial Brick Game Boy Every official icon eventually gets a rebel cousin, and here it is. The Game Consoles Building Blocks Set arrived in 2023, a full two years before Lego made its version canon, and it takes the unlicensed route to exactly the same idea: 191 pieces that click together into a replica of the Game Boy Classic. It is a construction-style tribute produced by a company with the gloriously un-Nintendo name of eVatmaster Consulting GmbH, and in our shelves it sits right beside the official Lego set like a bootleg twin. Put the two brick Game Boys next to each other and you get the whole story of fan culture in a single glance: the licensed homage with its lenticular screens, and the scrappy 191-piece kit that got to the finish line first. Same beloved silhouette, rather fewer legal blessings. There is something honest about a building set that skips the branding and simply wants you to enjoy snapping a Game Boy together, and we would not want the collection without it. The 191-piece Game Boy you have to earn, one click at a time. The Game Boy You Frame in Miniature Now we shrink things right down. Back in the Game Boy's heyday, Nintendo sold a miniature Game Boy replica with trading cards, bundling the little console together with a set of cards, and this is one of several Japanese card-and-replica collectibles the collection has held on to. The cards shown here feature characters from Donkey Kong, which turns the whole bundle into a tiny crossover event you can hold in one palm. A Game Boy small enough to lose in your pocket, sold with Donkey Kong cards. The charming detail is that this is an official product. Nintendo itself decided the Game Boy was iconic enough to reproduce as a keepsake, complete with cards to shuffle and a replica far too small to actually play. It is a reminder that the Game Boy was collectible long before the internet ever told anyone it should be. Frame it, display it, or simply enjoy the fact that Nintendo was making Game Boy merchandise of its own Game Boy while the real ones were still flying off shelves. The Game Boy You Actually Wear And then there is the item that wears you back. The Game Boy Smart Gaming Glasses are a pair of Bluetooth glasses by Mutrics that borrow the look of the Game Boy Classic and quietly hide a whole audio system inside. Speakers and a microphone are built into the arms, so you can take hands-free calls and play music with the grey-and-black icon sitting on your face, and the lenses swap out as needed. Bluetooth glasses that heard about the DMG-01 and never got over it. This is easily the strangest branch of the family tree. Not a console, not a toy, but a modern piece of wearable tech that looked at the DMG-01 and decided it was a fashion statement worth borrowing. There is no game inside these, only sound, and yet they are unmistakably Game Boy the moment you glance at them. Somewhere an eleven-year-old from 1989 is very confused and very pleased. Build it, wear it, frame it. The Game Boy has spent decades quietly escaping the definition of a games console, and these four items are proof it just keeps finding new disguises. If you would like to meet the rest of the family, the ones you switch on and the ones you simply admire, come and wander through the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Part 1: The Family of Fake Game Boys · Part 2: On the Desk and Around the House · Part 3: Build It, Wear It, Frame It (you are here) · Part 4: Cards, Stickers and Sweets Part of the Game Boy in Disguise series.