Ask a collector for the single strangest thing ever plugged into a Game Boy, and this arrival is a strong contender. It is not a game, not a light, not a printer, but a working sonar, an officially licensed device that turned Nintendo's handheld into a genuine fish finder for anglers standing at the water's edge. The Game Boy's weirdest job: finding actual fish in actual water. What It Is The Pocket Sonar by Bandai, released in 1998, is one of the strangest accessories ever made for the Game Boy, and, remarkably, an officially licensed one. Built for fishing, it actually locates fish underwater. A chunky, battery-powered unit fits into the cartridge slot, and a float-equipped sonar sensor hangs from it on a long cable, ready to be cast or lowered into the water, with a dry bag included to keep the Game Boy itself from getting wet. The software adds a fishing mini-game and a fish database for identifying your catch. It works with the original Game Boy and the Game Boy Pocket, but not with later models. A Toy That Was Also a Tool What lifts the Pocket Sonar beyond mere novelty is that it genuinely worked. This was not a fishing-themed game dressed up as a gadget; it was a real piece of sonar equipment that happened to use the Game Boy as its screen and brain. Bandai, a company with a long history of ambitious and eccentric licensed products, looked at the best-selling handheld in the world and saw not a games console but a cheap, ubiquitous portable computer that millions of people already owned, and built an actual fishing instrument around it. The dry bag, the long sensor cable, the float, all of it points to a device meant to be taken out on a real riverbank, not played with on the sofa. Comes with a dry bag, because Nintendo never designed this thing to go swimming. It belongs to a wonderful category of Game Boy peripherals that tried to make the console do serious, unexpected jobs, the cameras, printers, organisers and translators that reimagined a toy as a tool. The Pocket Sonar is the wildest of them, and its very specificity, a device for one hobby, used outdoors, near water, is exactly why complete examples with the float, cable and dry bag intact are so hard to find today. It is the ultimate proof that people saw the Game Boy as a platform for almost anything, even for finding fish. Why It Joined the Collection The Pocket Sonar is one of the crown jewels of Game Boy oddity, an officially licensed sonar that stands for the whole idea of the console as a do-anything platform. Its outdoor, single-purpose design makes complete examples genuinely scarce, and it caps the collection's group of peripherals that turned the handheld into a serious tool. Preserving it keeps hold of perhaps the most gloriously unlikely thing the Game Boy was ever asked to do. The Bandai Pocket Sonar is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

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

This arrival is the companion to a piece already in the collection, and one of the most colourful things on its shelves. Merlin's 1992 Nintendo sticker album was a big hit with young collectors, a book to be filled, sticker by hard-won sticker, with the heroes of the day. A completed sticker album is a small triumph of childhood persistence. What It Is The album held two hundred and seventy-four stickers featuring motifs from popular Nintendo NES and Game Boy games, Super Mario Land and Mario Tennis on the Game Boy, and The Legend of Zelda on the NES, among many others. Like all sticker albums, it was designed to send children hunting, swapping and pestering for the ones they lacked, and a fully completed book is a small triumph of childhood persistence. Today it is a coveted collector's item and one of the brightest, most nostalgic publications in the collection. Why It Joined the Collection The album pairs directly with the Merlin sticker collection already documented here, completing a little Merlin cluster from the same 1992 licensing wave. Publications like this are precious precisely because they were treated as disposable and, once filled, easily discarded, so an intact example carries real charm and rarity. It captures a very particular flavour of the era, the Game Boy as playground currency, and keeping it preserves the softer, paper-and-glue side of the console's cultural footprint. 274 stickers of NES and Game Boy heroes, one hard-won book to fill them. The Merlin sticker album is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

The Game Boy's afterlife as a design icon is nowhere clearer than on the bedside table. This arrival is a modern one: an officially licensed alarm clock, made by Paladone, that takes the exact shape of the original Game Boy and wakes its owner the only proper way, with Super Mario Land. An alarm clock shaped like a DMG-01 that wakes you with Super Mario Land. Perfect. What It Is Released in 2018, the clock is moulded to look like a DMG-01 and runs on two AA batteries, a nice nod to the console's own appetite for them. Its alarm plays original sounds from Super Mario Land, so the object is as much a piece of nostalgia as a timepiece. It belongs to a whole range of Paladone Game Boy lifestyle items that the collection holds, sitting alongside the money box, the heat-change mug, the watch and the bottle opener, a small family of homeware that turns the console into everyday decor. Why It Joined the Collection Modern licensed merchandise matters to the collection because it shows that the Game Boy never really became history, it became a brand people still want on their shelves decades later. The Paladone clock is a perfect small example, and it also completes a set: gathered with the other Paladone pieces, it helps document how one company has kept turning the DMG-01 silhouette into new lifestyle products. Preserving the whole family, rather than one piece of it, tells that ongoing story far better. The Paladone Game Boy alarm clock is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Every so often a Game Boy cartridge carries a piece of gaming history far bigger than itself. This arrival is one of them: Space Invaders, one of the most historically loaded releases in the entire Game Boy library, bringing one of the most influential arcade games ever made to the handheld. One of the most influential arcade games ever, shrunk to the little green screen. What It Is This is the officially branded 1994 edition of Taito's arcade landmark, the game that helped launch the entire video-game boom, now shrunk down to the little green screen. What makes the Game Boy version especially notable is that it was Super Game Boy enhanced, adding a technical layer, colour and a decorative border, to what is otherwise a deliberately minimalist monochrome shooter. So it stands out less for lavish packaging than for what it represents: a genuine arcade legend, faithfully carried onto Nintendo's handheld and given a small modern upgrade in the process. Why It Joined the Collection A collection about the Game Boy is also, inevitably, a collection about the wider history of games the console absorbed, and few titles carry more of that history than Space Invaders. Having it here connects the handheld directly back to the arcade era that preceded it, and its Super Game Boy support ties it neatly to the other enhanced titles in the collection, showing how Nintendo's adapter gave even the oldest ideas a fresh coat of colour. It is a small cartridge that lets the collection tell a very big story. Space Invaders is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Most Game Boy collectables were made to be sold to players. This one never was. The latest arrival is an original Nintendo Game Boy kiosk drawer, a retail display component that lived behind the counter rather than on the shelf. A piece of 1990s shop furniture that never went home with a customer. What It Is This is a piece of shop furniture: a drawer used in stores to present Game Boy games in an organised way, part of Nintendo's official in-store displays. It was never sold to consumers, but formed part of the fittings that dressed a retailer's counter or stand. Its compartments held multiple boxed games or cartridges, which makes it a wholly authentic relic of early-90s retail, the very furniture that framed how children first saw the games they wanted. For collectors it stands apart as a rare piece of store infrastructure rather than a product. Why It Joined the Collection Retail display pieces are among the hardest Game Boy items to find, precisely because they were never meant to leave the shop, and were usually thrown out when a display was refreshed. Keeping one preserves a side of the story the packaged products cannot tell: how the Game Boy was actually presented at the point of sale. It is a tangible fragment of the shopping experience that surrounded the console, and a genuinely uncommon one, which makes it a standout among the collection's more unusual objects. The Game Boy game display is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.