Our snake now has a proper title screen to greet the player, but once the game starts it still says nothing about how well you are doing. Time to fix that. In this part we add a score: a number that starts at zero, climbs by one every time the snake eats, and is shown live at the top of the screen using the little font we designed in Part 1. As always, we will read every line in plain English. A Home for the Score First the score needs somewhere to live where it will not clash with the game. We keep the very top row of the screen as a status line and, importantly, start the wall one row lower so the playing field sits neatly beneath the score. Adding a Score to the Game Then a small function writes the labels and numbers onto that top row: void draw_hud(void) { draw_text(0, 0, "SCORE"); // label on the left draw_num3(6, 0, score); // the score number beside it draw_text(13, 0, "LIVES"); // label on the right set_bkg_tile_xy(19, 0, tile_for('0' + lives)); } This function, draw_hud (short for heads-up display, the name games give to that status strip), simply writes four things onto row 0, the top row. draw_text(0, 0, "SCORE") puts the word SCORE at the far left. draw_num3(6, 0, score) prints the score itself, as three digits, just after it; we will build draw_num3 in a moment. draw_text(13, 0, "LIVES") writes the second label further along, and the last line draws the number of lives as a single digit at the right edge. Because all of this sits on row 0 and the wall now begins on row 1, the status line and the arena never overlap. Counting Up The score is just a number we keep in memory, called score. Back in the beginner series, the moment the snake ate food lived inside our game step. We add three small lines right there: if (hit == T_FOOD) { // the head landed on food // ... the snake grows, as before ... if (score < 999) score++; // add one point (stop at 999) draw_num3(6, 0, score); // redraw the number so it updates place_food(); // drop a new piece of food } Reading it plainly: the line if (hit == T_FOOD) means only do the following when the square the head moved into was a piece of food. When that happens, score++ adds one to the score (the little guard if (score < 999) just stops the number growing past three digits). We then call draw_num3 again to repaint the number so the player sees it tick upward, and place_food drops a fresh piece somewhere new. Eat, add one, redraw, repeat. Drawing a Number There is one puzzle left: our font holds separate tiles for the digits 0 to 9, so to show a score like 42 we must split it into its individual digits and draw each one. Showing the Score Logic That is what draw_num3 does: void draw_num3(uint8_t col, uint8_t row, uint16_t n) { set_bkg_tile_xy(col, row, tile_for('0' + (n / 100) % 10)); // hundreds set_bkg_tile_xy(col + 1, row, tile_for('0' + (n / 10) % 10)); // tens set_bkg_tile_xy(col + 2, row, tile_for('0' + n % 10)); // units } The trick relies on two everyday-maths symbols. The slash / means divide and throw away any remainder, so 42 / 10 is 4, not 4.2. The percent sign % means the opposite: keep only the remainder, so 42 % 10 is 2 (what is left after taking away the whole tens). Put them together and each digit falls out: n / 100 % 10 is the hundreds digit, n / 10 % 10 is the tens, and n % 10 is the units. The little '0' + in front turns a plain number like 4 into the character '4' so the font can look up the right tile. For a score of 42 that gives a 0, a 4 and a 2, drawn side by side, exactly as the diagram shows. Coming Up in Part 4 You can now watch your score climb, which raises the stakes nicely, but a single mistake still ends everything at once. In Part 4 we soften that with lives: the snake will start with three, lose one on each crash, and only reach the end when the last one is gone, with the count shown live in the status bar we just built. The Game Boy whose screen we are filling 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 · Part 3: Keeping Score (you are here) · Part 4: Three Lives · Part 5: A Proper Game Over · Part 6: Sound and Pause

Ask most people what the Game Boy could do and they will describe a grey brick with four buttons, a directional pad and a screen the colour of pea soup. It could not tell which way you were holding it. It could not push back against your hands. It had no idea whether it was resting flat on a table or being waved through the air. On its own, all of that is true. The quiet genius of the platform, though, was that the console never had to do everything itself. Nintendo learned to hide the missing hardware inside the cartridges, so that a plain plastic slot became a doorway for senses the machine was never built with. This first part of The Game Boy's Hidden Powers looks at two of those cartridges, both held in the museum, and both giving the handheld something it was never born with: a real sense of movement. The slot as a secret compartment A Game Boy cartridge is usually pictured as a container for a game and nothing more. Slide it in, the code runs, that is the end of the story. But the connection between console and cartridge carries power and signals in both directions, which means a cartridge can hold far more than memory chips. It can carry a genuine piece of hardware and then offer that hardware to the game as if the console had owned it all along. It was an elegant piece of thinking. Rival machines tended to bolt their extras on from the outside, with cables and adaptors and boxes that hung awkwardly off the hardware. The Game Boy kept the magic tidy and out of sight, sealed inside the same grey cartridge you would blow the dust from before every session. Nothing about the console had to change. The new ability simply arrived in the post, ready to click into place. Two accessories in the collection show the idea at its most charming. One lets the Game Boy feel how you move it. The other lets the Game Boy move you back. A cartridge that feels how you tilt it The Game Boy Tilt Sensor Game Pack was built for a single game, Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, released in Japan in the summer of 2000. Inside the cartridge sits an accelerometer, a small component that senses the console's position and how quickly it is being moved. With that chip in place, the game no longer leaned on the directional pad to move its hero. You steered Kirby by physically tilting the whole machine, rolling him across each board as though the Game Boy were a little wooden maze balanced in your palms. A sharp flick of the wrist, rather like flipping a pancake, popped him up into the air. The cartridge even looked the part, moulded in a translucent pink shell with a shape all of its own. The sensor was modest by the standards that would follow. It read movement in a handful of simple directions rather than measuring every fine degree of tilt, and it worked only on the Game Boy Color rather than the original grey model. Even so, it holds a peculiar place in the platform's history. Although it belongs to the Color era, it carries the old DMG numbering as DMG-20, and it is the very last accessory to follow that original coding scheme. It is, in a sense, both a glimpse of the motion controls to come and the closing entry in the Game Boy's oldest catalogue of parts. The tilt sensor that turned the whole Game Boy into a joystick. No thumbs required. A cartridge that shakes in your hands Where the tilt sensor let the console read your movement, the Game Boy Rumble Pack Cartridge did the exact opposite. It gave movement back. Tucked inside the shell is a small vibration motor, the same basic idea behind the force feedback in a modern controller, so that a game could deliver physical feedback straight to the player's hands. There was a catch. A spinning motor is hungry, and the slender slot could not spare the power, so the cartridge carried its own AAA battery in a little compartment built into the top. The console supplied the game. The cartridge supplied the shaking, and if you preferred your Game Boy calm, you could simply switch the rumble off. The most famous home for this trick was Pokemon Pinball, released for the Game Boy Color in 1999 and one of the first Game Boy games to buzz in your palms as you played. Every bumper struck and every ball lost came with a jolt you could feel through the plastic. Later titles such as Perfect Dark used the same rumble cartridge to add weight to their action. It remains one of the more unusual pieces of cartridge-based hardware in the collection, a happy reminder that a handheld with no rumble feature of its own could still learn to tremble, one game at a time. Yes, that is a AAA battery bolted onto a game. The Game Boy could not afford the rumble, so the cartridge brought its own. One slot, many senses What ties these two cartridges together is a single, quietly radical idea. The Game Boy did not have to be finished when it left the factory. Its abilities could keep growing for years, not through software updates or bulky boxes clipped to its side, but through the humble slot on the back. A tilt sensor here, a rumble motor there, each one arriving disguised as an ordinary game. Long before phones learned to sense a shake or answer a tilt, this small grey machine was quietly doing both. The console that supposedly could not feel the world turned out to be full of hidden powers, each one waiting for the right cartridge to switch it on. This is only the first part of the story. There are stranger cartridges still, and more hidden senses to uncover in the entries to come. If you would like to see the objects behind these tales for yourself, you are always welcome to explore the collection at the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Part 1: A Sense of Movement (you are here) · Part 2: Eyes and Ears · Part 3: Talking Cartridges · Part 4: A Bigger Memory · Part 5: Cheat Modules · Part 6: Making Music · Part 7: Getting to Work · Part 8: Every Game at Once

The Game Boy is remembered as a games machine, but it always had a second life in sound. Its audio hardware was almost comically simple: four thin channels, no orchestra, no warmth, just two square waves, a sliver of programmable wave and a channel of noise. And yet that tiny voice set off in two directions at once. It became an instrument that musicians still carry on stage today, and it became a muse that inspired records, tapes and radios out in the wider world. This page is the hub for both journeys, a single doorway into the whole strange story of the Game Boy and music. We have split The Sound of the Game Boy into two features. One looks inward, at the music people make on the console itself. The other looks outward, at the music the console inspired other people to make. They are two sides of the same coin, and you can read them in either order. Together they show just how far four little channels can travel once they escape the plastic shell. Part 1: The Game Boy as an instrument In the first part we hand the Game Boy a cartridge and let it sing. Trackers and sequencers like Nanoloop and Little Sound Dj turn the grey brick into a pocket studio, and a worldwide scene of chiptune artists has been writing, performing and releasing music on real Game Boys for decades. Part 1 explains how the hardware actually makes its sound, how those cartridges coax songs out of it, and why a handheld from 1989 is still taken seriously as an instrument. If you have ever wondered what it means to play the Game Boy rather than play on it, start here. The museum even keeps a Nanoloop NL13 cartridge on the shelves so you can see the tool behind the music. Part 1: The Game Boy as an instrument The console that made music, then made the charts. Part 2: The Game Boy as a muse The second part turns the machine around. Here the Game Boy is not the player but the inspiration. In the early 1990s its bleeps climbed the UK Singles Chart on novelty hits, from a Tetris single produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber to a Super Mario Land dance record. The console went on to inspire cassette and vinyl oddities, mini players that only hum Pokemon tunes, fresh chiptune vinyl pressed decades later, and even radios built into Game Boy shells. Part 2 tells that story entirely through the records, tapes and players sitting in the collection, following one folk melody as it becomes a game theme, becomes a chart hit, and becomes a collectible all over again. Part 2: The Game Boy as a muse Whichever way you come at it, the Game Boy's sound turns out to be far bigger than its speaker. Pick a side and start reading, then come and explore the collection to hear the rest for yourself.

In the winter of 1992 a machine built to keep bored children quiet on car journeys did something no toy is supposed to do. It walked into a recording studio and came out with a hit single. The Game Boy's sound chip, four thin voices meant for jumping plumbers and falling blocks, escaped the plastic shell, picked up a beat, and marched straight onto the British charts. What follows is the story of the Game Boy's unlikely second career in music, told entirely through the records, players and radios that now sit in the museum's collection. Novelty hits built from bleeps The early 1990s were a golden age for the novelty single, the kind of record that lives or dies on one irresistible gimmick. A video game was the perfect source: instantly familiar, faintly ridiculous, and armed with a tune that had already burrowed into millions of heads. The Game Boy owed much of its fame to Tetris, and Tetris owed its hook to a Russian folk tune called Korobeiniki. A melody that catchy, welded to a machine that popular, was never going to be left in peace. Somebody was always going to bolt a dance beat onto it and see who danced. That somebody was Doctor Spin, whose 1992 Tetris single is one of the collection's happiest oddities. Behind the silly pseudonym stood two men who were anything but silly: the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the producer Nigel Wright. Their record climbed to number six on the UK Singles Chart, backed with a B-side titled, with total honesty, Play Game Boy. The 7-inch pressing came out on Carpet Records as catalogue number CRPT 4, and you can read its own feature for the full tale of how the man who wrote Cats ended up scoring a puzzle game. The same release survives in the collection in a second form, the cassette single (catalogue number CRCPS 4), which carried the identical two tracks for anyone whose bedroom ran on a tape deck rather than a turntable. Its own feature covers the tape edition. Two formats, one gloriously daft idea, and proof that in 1992 you could buy the Game Boy's most famous melody in whatever format your Walkman preferred. If Doctor Spin borrowed the Game Boy's most famous melody, Technician 2 borrowed the machine itself. Playing with the Boy, a 1992 vinyl single, was assembled from the actual sound of the Game Boy and then, in a neat piece of circular logic, used in the Game Boy's own television commercials. The advert's soundtrack was, in effect, the product singing about itself. It appeared on BMG Records in the UK as catalogue number MCS 1710, and the story of how a jingle became a record you could buy in a shop is told in its own feature. Game Boy's soundtrack for television commercials The following year the mascot took his turn. Super Mario Land, credited to Ambassadors of Funk featuring MC Mario, spun the little platformer into a dance-floor novelty. It became a UK top-ten hit, proving Doctor Spin had been no fluke, and it arrived on Warlock Records as catalogue number WARCD-135. We gave it its own arrival post when it joined the shelves. Three chart-bothering records in two years, all of them powered by a handheld that cost less than the studio time behind them. The sound outlives the machine Novelty singles come and go, but the Game Boy's music has proved unusually durable, outliving the very hardware that produced it. Take the Pokemon Game Music Collection player, a Japanese curiosity from Game Freak. It is a miniature Game Boy that faithfully copies the original DMG-01 down to its grey shell, except this one plays no games at all. Instead it plays the music and sound effects from Pocket Monsters Red and Green, the tunes that soundtracked a generation's first steps through the tall grass. The example in the collection wears Charizard on its packaging, and it belongs to a whole line of these collectible mini Game Boys made purely to be listened to. It is a strange thing to hold: unmistakably a Game Boy in miniature, yet stripped of the interactivity that made the original matter. All it keeps is the music, as if the machine had been boiled down to the one thing nobody could get out of their head. Game Music Collection - Revival of the Pokemon Sountracks Then there is proof that people are still recording this music from scratch. A chiptune, for the uninitiated, is music made from the deliberately limited sounds of vintage game chips, and it has grown from a hobbyist niche into a genre with its own vinyl releases. Disappearing Lines: Chiptune Music of Tetris is one of them, a 2021 record built on a sound already three decades old. Working under the name Gamer Boy, Dave Marino re-recorded the classic 8-bit Tetris themes: the A-side pairs the Main Theme with Tetris Game Boy A-Type, while the B-side offers B-Type and C-Type. It came out on Enjoy the Ride Records as catalogue number ETT030 and was pressed in the Czech Republic, as its own feature explains. A folk song became a game theme became a chart hit became a collectible vinyl. The melody simply refuses to stop travelling. Disappearing Lines: Chiptune Music of Tetris (2021) From making music to playing it: the Game Boy as a radio So far the Game Boy has been the instrument. But collectors also chased the opposite trick, turning the handheld into something that plays music made by other people. In the world before smartphones, a pocket device that could double as a radio was genuinely useful, and since so many people already owned a Game Boy, a small cottage industry grew up to press that hardware into service. Why buy a separate radio when the grey brick already in your bag could be talked into the job? The purest version was the third-party FM tuner. These cartridges and adapters plugged into a real Game Boy and turned it into a working pocket radio, borrowing its screen, its battery and its speaker to pull stations out of the air. We rounded up several of them in Tune In: FM Radio Add-ons for the Game Boy, and they remain some of the stranger accessories the system ever inspired. Do not confuse those with the Radio Boy, which approaches the same idea from the opposite direction. Radio Boy is a Nintendo-licensed radio shaped like a Game Boy: it looks the part, but there is no console inside and no cartridge slot to fill. The FM tuners made a genuine Game Boy behave like a radio, whereas Radio Boy is a radio wearing a Game Boy costume. You can read its own feature on the charming little impostor. Both, in their way, complete the circle. A machine that once sang its way onto the charts eventually learned to sit still and let other people's music come to it. A FM radio wearing a Game Boy costume The Other Side of the Sound: Making Music on the Game Boy Everything so far has been about music the Game Boy inspired: the records it climbed, the tapes it filled and the vinyl it still turns up on. Yet there is a whole other story, about music made on the Game Boy rather than about it. Fitted with the right cartridge, the handheld stops being a muse and becomes an instrument in its own right, and the museum tells that side of things in a companion piece. Cartridges like Nanoloop and Little Sound Dj turned the Game Boy into a pocket music studio, sequencing beats and melodies from the very same four channels that once bothered the charts. If you would like to see one up close, the collection's Nanoloop NL13 shows exactly what that looks like. From bleeps that reached number six to a mini console that only hums Pokemon tunes, the Game Boy's musical life is far stranger and richer than its four little voices would suggest. Every record, player and radio mentioned here has a place on the shelves, and there is a great deal more to hear. Come and explore the collection.

There are two ways to love an old video game. You can keep it sealed, boxed and pristine, a small monument to the day it left the factory. Or you can switch it on, take hold of the controller and let it do the one thing it was built to do. At the Game Boy Museum we mostly do the former. A few tram stops away, in the west of the city, a museum does the latter, and does it beautifully. GamePlaza is exactly the kind of place every collector secretly wishes existed around the corner, so we wanted to introduce it properly. GamePlaza, Zurich: where every machine is set to free play. An Interactive Video Game Museum in Zurich, Fully Switched On GamePlaza is an interactive video game museum in Zurich, tucked onto the first floor at Badenerstrasse 569, a short walk from the Kappeli stop on tram 2 and bus 89. The idea behind it is refreshingly simple. You buy one ticket, and everything inside is yours to play. No coins, no tokens, no queue at a change machine. Arcade cabinets, home consoles, PC stations and virtual reality are all set to free play. That single decision changes how a visit feels. Instead of rationing your francs across a handful of machines, you wander, sit down at whatever catches your eye and stay as long as a game holds you. Entry is CHF 22 for adults and CHF 19 for children, and because each time slot is capped at sixty visitors, the room never turns into a scrum. From Arcade Classics to Virtual Reality The floor is a deliberate sweep through gaming history. Vintage and modern arcade cabinets stand ready for a high-score run. Home consoles from Nintendo, Sega, PlayStation and Xbox line up so you can jump from an eight-bit platformer to something far newer in a few steps. There are PC stations for the mouse-and-keyboard classics, and a virtual reality area for anyone who wants to see how far the medium has travelled. The care shows. Visitors routinely mention how good the machines look and how much passion they can feel behind the collection. GamePlaza works with recognised partners such as Nintendo and supports gaming initiatives and events including Game Days. Preservation Through Play This is where our two houses meet. Preservation has more than one meaning. One kind protects the object: the box, the manual, the shrink wrap, the exact state in which a thing was sold. The other kind protects the experience: the muscle memory, the sound, the shared laughter around a screen. Both are real, and both are needed, because a game that can never be played again is only half preserved. The Game Boy Museum guards the first kind. Our collection is built around original packaging and complete-in-box condition, the DMG-01 ecosystem catalogued piece by piece so the record survives. GamePlaza guards the second kind, keeping the controllers warm and the screens glowing. Put the two together and you get something a single institution rarely manages on its own: the full story, from the sealed artefact to the living game. Building a Retro Gaming Hub in Zurich Zurich is quietly becoming a good city in which to be a retro gamer. GamePlaza gives visitors a place to play, the Game Boy Museum gives them a place to study the hardware in detail, and Switzerland has a growing network of game-preservation efforts around them. The pieces of a genuine retro gaming hub are already here; they simply deserve to be better known. There is room for the idea to grow, too. As collectors, museums and preservation projects across Switzerland get to know one another, Zurich has a real chance to become the place people think of first when they picture gaming history in the German-speaking world. Cooperation, not competition, is how a scene like this matures. And if an afternoon at GamePlaza leaves you curious about the little grey handheld that started so many gaming lives, you can explore the whole original Game Boy story in our complete DMG-01 guide, then browse the collection item by item from there. Play it at GamePlaza; study it here. Who It Is For You do not need to be a hardcore gamer to enjoy GamePlaza. It works just as well for a family with young children, a group of friends after a rainy-day plan, a nostalgic thirty- or forty-something chasing one specific memory, or a company after a team event that is not another escape room. The free-play model means nobody is left watching from the sidelines because they ran out of coins. Plan Your Visit GamePlaza is normally open from Wednesday to Sunday, with extended opening hours during school holidays and special periods. Current opening times are available on the GamePlaza website. Beyond the standard ticket, it runs birthday packages, school-class visits and company events, and GamePlaza also offers arcade and gaming machine rentals for events, companies and institutions throughout Switzerland. Full details and tickets are on the museum's own site at gameplaza.ch. Our advice: book a slot ahead, give yourself the full two hours, and do not be surprised if the youngest person in your group ends up teaching you something about a game older than they are. That, really, is the whole point.

Picture a business traveller in 1992, somewhere in a French restaurant, holding up a grey plastic brick to help order dinner. On its small green screen, one careful letter at a time, they are hunting for the word for the bill. The brick is a Game Boy. This scene is a little exaggerated, but only a little, because for a few earnest years Nintendo's toy really did try to grow up and get a proper job. Somebody in Florida had looked at the most popular gadget in the country and decided it was wasting its talents on games. GameTek's big idea The company behind the experiment was GameTek, a Florida-based publisher best remembered for turning television game shows into cartridges, among them Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune. Around 1991 it launched something very different under the name InfoGenius Productivity Pak, also branded InfoGenius Systems: a family of non-gaming Game Boy applications. The titles were developed for GameTek by Imagineering Inc, with the Frommer's Travel Guide sometimes credited to NovaLogic. Rather than invent its own reference material, GameTek borrowed trusted names, partnering with Berlitz for language and Frommer's for travel, so the words on the cartridge arrived with real authority behind them rather than being cobbled together in-house. If you were going to trust a grey plastic slab to help you abroad, it helped that the names on the label were ones you already recognised from the bookshop shelf. Productivity: now available in grey plastic. The pitch was genuinely ahead of its time. This was years before the PDA, the palm-sized organizer that would briefly rule the late 1990s, and well over a decade before the smartphone quietly slipped a translator, a calendar and a travel guide into everyone's pocket. GameTek looked at the best-selling electronic device in the country, one that millions of people already carried everywhere, and asked a perfectly reasonable question. Why should all that portable computing power be spent solely on falling blocks? A calendar, a phrasebook, a calculator: none of it was beyond a machine that could already animate Mario, and every one of those tools was something a traveller or an office worker carried anyway. The InfoGenius line, cartridge by cartridge The travel ambitions started with the Frommer's Travel Guide (product code DMG-TG-USA), released in 1991 and built on the well-known Frommer's guidebooks. It squeezed destination information and travel tips onto a single cartridge, so that in theory you could leave the fat paperback at home and let the Game Boy point you toward a hotel and warn you which sights were tourist traps. Its own feature covers the arrival. Next came language. The Berlitz French Translator (code DMG-FH-USA, 1992) put a Berlitz phrasebook and translator on a cartridge, offering travel phrases and vocabulary for anyone bravely facing a menu in Paris, all of it delivered in text rather than sound, since the Game Boy could not exactly pronounce anything for you. It is perhaps the most quietly sensible idea in the whole range, and it has its own feature too. Its sibling, the Berlitz Spanish Translator (1992), did the same job on the other side of the Pyrenees. The box promises around 300 travel phrases, some 12,000 words and even currency conversion, which was no small boast for a cartridge of that era and hints at just how seriously GameTek wanted these things taken. Its exact product code is not yet verified in our records, but the item's own feature shows what it set out to offer. Not every InfoGenius title was about going abroad. The Frommer's Spell Checker and Calculator (code DMG-SC-USA, 1991) combined a dictionary and spell checker with a calculator, recasting the handheld as a desk accessory of sorts, the sort of thing you might reach for beside a keyboard rather than on a plane. It is the one that tried to help with your homework as much as your holiday, and you can read its own feature on the attempt. The centrepiece of the office side was the InfoGenius Personal Organizer and Phone Book, which offered a calendar, appointments, a phone book and memo functions. This is the one with the calendar, the cartridge that most directly promised to replace the paper diary in your bag, appointments, contacts and reminders all living in a slot on a games console. It was the closest thing the line had to a genuine PalmPilot-in-waiting, a whole day planner living inside a cartridge. Our example is a WATA-graded copy, sealed and rated like a rare game rather than the humble office tool it was sold as, and it carries its own feature. The Game Boy as a Proto-Palm It is worth pausing on how close this came to the shape of things that followed. Strip away the games and what the InfoGenius line describes is a personal digital assistant: a contacts book, a calendar with appointments and reminders, a calculator, a notepad, a phrasebook and a travel guide, all living in one pocket device you already carried everywhere. That is almost exactly the feature list Palm would ship on the Pilot in 1996, and that the smartphone would later fold into a single slab of glass. The difference was the hardware, not the ambition. Palm's success rested on a stylus, a touch-sensitive screen and its Graffiti handwriting recognition, all purpose-built for quick input on the move. GameTek was chasing the same destination with a D-pad, an on-screen alphabet and a four-AA games console. The InfoGenius cartridges were, in effect, a Palm Pilot imagined five years too early and aimed at the only mass-market pocket computer that existed yet: Nintendo's toy. Seen that way they are not a failed gimmick but a first, rough sketch of the pocket organizer almost everyone would soon carry. Others tried it too GameTek was not alone in the idea. Konami joined in from Japan with the Nano Note electronic organizer (product code DMG-NNJ, 1992), a rival take on the organizer cartridge built for the same little screen, and a reminder that GameTek's odd idea was tempting enough that a giant like Konami wanted a version of its own. Later still came the Smartcom Note for GB from Karat, an electronic-note cartridge with diary, contacts and clock functions. It arrived after the first wave had already crested but chased exactly the same dream, squeezing a diary, a contact list and a clock into a cartridge slot, and we gave it its own arrival post. If you want the wider picture of the translator cartridges in particular, our overview The Game Boy as Translator: The Berlitz and Frommer's Cartridges gathers them together. Why it did not stick So why did none of this catch on? The honest answer is that people bought the Game Boy to play, not to file. Buyers wanted Tetris and Mario, not a spell checker, and the hardware itself quietly fought back against any attempt at serious work. The screen was tiny, and entering text meant nudging a cursor around an on-screen alphabet with the D-pad, one painstaking letter after another. Composing a memo this way was slower than simply writing it down on paper. The PDA and, later, the smartphone would eventually make pocket productivity feel effortless, with proper keyboards, touchscreens and processors to match. The Game Boy had none of that. It was the wrong shape for the job and arrived too early to fix it, a lovely idea saddled with a control scheme designed for jumping, not typing. And yet that is precisely why the InfoGenius line is such a joy to collect today. These cartridges are honest little failures, earnest attempts to make a toy do a grown-up's work, frozen at the exact moment before the technology caught up with the ambition. They tell you what people hoped a pocket computer might be, years before anyone actually held one, and they wrap that hope in the friendly grey plastic of a children's toy. Few objects capture the gap between ambition and technology quite so neatly. The whole InfoGenius family, along with its Konami and Karat rivals, has a home on the museum's shelves, each cartridge a small monument to a future that arrived a little late. Held up against a modern phone they look almost touchingly optimistic, but that optimism is exactly the charm. There is plenty more to browse. Come and explore the collection.

Most treasure-hunt games invent their loot. This one did not have to. Lost Treasure of Lima, a brand-new Game Boy cartridge pressed in 2024, sends you digging for a fortune that genuinely existed, genuinely disappeared, and has never been found in more than two hundred years of searching. The loot in this game is real, and still buried somewhere off Costa Rica. What It Is The game is a Broke Studio release developed by drgd_retro. You play the adventurer Sebastian Madsen across four levels of environmental puzzles, exploration and race-against-the-clock chases, all in search of the long-lost treasure. It is a modern homebrew title sold as a proper boxed cartridge, and like the other Broke Studio games in the collection it runs on the original 1989 Game Boy, the DMG-01, as well as the Color and the Advance. The Treasure That Was Actually Real Here is where it gets good. The Treasure of Lima was real. In 1820, as the wars of independence closed in on Spanish Peru, the church treasure of Lima, gold and silver, jewelled candlesticks and two life-size solid-gold statues of the Virgin and Child, was loaded onto a merchant ship, the Mary Dear, to be carried to safety in Mexico. The captain entrusted with it, William Thompson, made a different decision. He and his crew turned pirate, killed the guards and priests on board, and sailed instead to Cocos Island off Costa Rica, where they are said to have buried the lot. Thompson was soon captured. To save his neck he offered to lead the Spanish to the treasure, then slipped away into the island's jungle and was never seen again. The hoard, worth something like 160 million pounds in today's money, has never been recovered. A brand-new 2024 Game Boy cartridge, pressed by hand in France. That has not stopped people trying. Cocos Island has drawn hundreds of expeditions over the past century and a half, among them the German adventurer August Gissler, who lived on the island for nearly twenty years hunting for it, the explorer Frank Worsley of Shackleton's Antarctic voyage, and even the American gangster Bugsy Siegel. Every one of them went home empty-handed, which is exactly what makes the legend such good material for a game. From Legend to Cartridge There is a local footnote too. This is the very game the museum watched being manufactured for its piece on Broke Studio's Homebrew Factory, the workshop in rural France that presses new Game Boy cartridges by hand. If you want to see how a game like this goes from raw code to a shrink-wrapped box, that story is told in the article on the factory. You can find Lost Treasure of Lima in the collection, where it is fully catalogued, sitting on the shelf beside its Broke Studio stablemates Fortified Zone 2 and Inspector Waffles: Early Days.

Film noir is not the first thing the Game Boy's little green screen brings to mind, but Inspector Waffles: Early Days makes a surprisingly good case for it. This brand-new 2024 cartridge casts you as a rookie cat detective in a grimy city of cats and dogs, and it plays like a pocket-sized point-and-click mystery. A hard-boiled cat detective, running on a 1989 Game Boy. What It Is Published by Broke Studio and developed by Goloso Games, Early Days is a top-down detective adventure. You play the young Inspector Waffles in his first days on the job in Cat Town, notepad in paw, hunting for clues and questioning the witnesses and suspects, trying to work out who the real culprit is. Like Broke Studio's other releases in the collection it is a proper boxed cartridge that runs on the original DMG-01, the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance. A Prequel That Lives on Two Handhelds The name is not new. Inspector Waffles began life as a modern noir point-and-click adventure, released on Steam and GOG in 2021, a loving pastiche of classic detective games starring a deadpan cat gumshoe. Early Days is a prequel to that game, and rather than a straight port it was built as a genuine handheld title in its own right. The same sleuth also stars on Panic's Playdate: one game, two tiny handhelds. The really charming part is where it landed. As well as this Game Boy cartridge, Early Days was released for Panic's Playdate, the tiny yellow 2022 handheld with a hand crank on the side. So the same feline detective now headlines two of the most characterful small screens in gaming, one from 1989 and one from more than thirty years later. Very few modern indie games can claim to run on both. A Broke Studio Cartridge Like Lost Treasure of Lima, this cartridge comes from Broke Studio, whose French workshop presses brand-new Game Boy games by hand. The story of that factory is told here in the Journal. You can find Inspector Waffles: Early Days in the collection, fully catalogued, alongside its Broke Studio siblings Lost Treasure of Lima and Fortified Zone 2.

Somewhere in the hills of the Auvergne, in rural France, there is a workshop that presses brand-new Game Boy cartridges. Not reproductions of old games, not bootlegs. Genuinely new titles, boxed and shrink-wrapped, for a console the industry stopped making in 2003. The workshop belongs to Broke Studio, and it is quietly one of the reasons the Game Boy still has a future as well as a past. Antoine Gohin and Julien "Fei" Boisseau of Broke Studio, the French makers behind Homebrew Factory From One NES Game to a Cartridge Workshop Broke Studio was founded in 2017 by Antoine Gohin, initially just to release a single game: Twin Dragons, a platformer for the NES. But making a physical cartridge properly turns out to be a craft in itself, and Broke Studio ended up learning all of it - the PCB design, the shells, the boxes, the manuals, the packaging - and doing every step in-house. Along the way the studio has sold more than fifteen thousand physical copies of its games, which is an extraordinary number for a scene most people assume is a handful of hobbyists trading ROMs. Homebrew made in France - That's Broke Studio That hard-won expertise is the foundation for the studio's most interesting move, and the reason it belongs in a museum's Journal. A Factory That Lets Anyone Make a Cartridge The move is called Homebrew Factory, and it is essentially a printing press for retro games. If you are an independent developer with a finished game for the Game Boy, the NES or the Mega Drive, Homebrew Factory lets you configure your cartridge, set your price, run a pre-order campaign, and go to production - while Broke Studio handles the manufacturing, the stock, the worldwide shipping and the fulfilment. In other words, it removes the single hardest part of releasing a new Game Boy game in 2026: turning the code into a real, physical object you can hold. Antoine Gohin assembling a game cartridge by hand at Broke Studio The effect is easy to underestimate. For most of the Game Boy's life, getting your game onto an actual cartridge meant either a licensing deal with Nintendo or a garage full of parts and a lot of soldering. Homebrew Factory turns that into something closer to publishing a book. It is one of the main reasons the flow of new boxed Game Boy games has turned from a trickle into a steady stream - and why makers like Dr. Ludos can put releases such as Dangerous Demolition into proper boxes at all. The Production Process It is one thing to say a cartridge is made in-house, and quite another to watch it happen. Broke Studio let me follow one of their Game Boy releases, Lost Treasure of Lima, through the whole process. Five pictures, and at the end of them a brand-new Game Boy game exists that did not exist before. A Gift to the Museum There is a postscript to this story that I did not see coming. After our conversation, Broke Studio handed a game over to the museum as a gift: a copy of Fortified Zone 2, given for the collection rather than sold. That is a generous thing for a small studio to do with stock it could easily sell instead, and it says something about how this scene treats the people trying to document it. My sincere thanks to Antoine and Fei. The cartridge is joining the collection, and it earns its place twice over, because there is a genuinely good story behind this particular game, one I am not going to spoil here. If you want the full background, along with all the trivia about how it came to exist, you will find it in the dedicated article about the game itself. Why a Manufacturer Belongs in a Museum of the Object This is a museum obsessed with the physical object: the box, the insert, the manual, the cartridge as it was actually sold and held. Homebrew Factory is, in a very real sense, where a whole new generation of those objects is being born. The complete-in-box Game Boy releases that collectors will be chasing in 2050 are being pressed today, in a workshop in the French countryside, by people who care about getting the packaging right. You can see how the original article of that faith - the 1989 DMG-01 - was made and sold in our complete DMG-01 guide. A museum is often imagined as the place a technology goes when it is finished. Broke Studio is a standing rebuttal. It is not preserving the Game Boy so much as keeping its production line open, one small run at a time. Every cartridge that leaves that workshop is a new object for the record, and a small, stubborn insistence that the grey handheld from 1989 is not history yet. That is exactly the kind of thing this museum loves to document, and exactly why the story deserves a place here. Two of the studio's Game Boy games are now catalogued in the collection: the detective adventure Inspector Waffles: Early Days, and the treasure hunt Lost Treasure of Lima.

Console bundles are how a great many people first met the Game Boy, and some of those bundles have become rarities in their own right. This arrival is one of them: the Super 3 Set, a German-only Game Boy package from 1994 and one of the harder console sets of its kind to find complete. A distinctly German three-game deal that never appeared anywhere else. What It Is As the name promises, the Super 3 Set paired the console with three popular games of the period: Tetris, Mega Man II and The Amazing Spider-Man. Three-game bundles were unusual, most sets shipped with one pack-in title if any, which is part of what makes this one stand out. The catch, for collectors, is that its value lives in completeness: the set only really counts as a Super 3 Set if all three games are still with the console and the box. That is a tall order thirty years on, and it is why intact examples are difficult to come by. Why It Joined the Collection Region-specific bundles are a favourite thread of this collection, because they show how Nintendo packaged and sold the same console differently from country to country. The Super 3 Set is a distinctly German answer to that question, a locally devised three-game deal that never appeared elsewhere. Keeping a complete example preserves not just three good cartridges but a small piece of how the Game Boy was marketed in one particular corner of Europe, and it sits naturally beside the collection's other regional consoles and bundles. The Super 3 Set is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Just when you think the Game Boy licence reached everywhere, along comes the bathroom. This arrival is one of the more delightfully strange novelties the collection has taken in: an officially licensed bath and shower foam, styled as a Game Boy, released by Takara in 1997. 1997 Takara decided the console belonged in the bathroom cabinet, and here we are. What It Is It is exactly what it sounds like, a container of children's bath foam dressed up in the shape and livery of the console, but with a charming twist: it even includes a little skill game, where the aim is to guide Yoshi's eggs into his belly. So the object is part toiletry, part toy, wrapping a genuine play element around what is, at bottom, a bottle of soap. That combination of everyday product and Nintendo branding is precisely what makes it such a period curiosity. Why It Joined the Collection The far reaches of the Game Boy licence are one of the most entertaining things to document, because they show just how completely the console had entered daily life: not only in bags and on desks, but in the bathroom cabinet. Consumable novelties like this were used up and thrown away, so surviving examples are surprisingly scarce. Keeping one here holds on to the sheer, slightly absurd breadth of Game Boy merchandising, and it sits happily among the collection's other unusual licensed oddities. The Game Boy bath and shower foam is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

In the spring of 1998, an art student in Hamburg walked into a club in Cologne and made music on a Nintendo Game Boy. The venue was hosting a "lo-fi contest", the machine was a grey handheld most people still thought of as a toy, and the software running on it was his exam project. Twenty-five years later, that same software is still being made, sold and played all over the world. It is called nanoloop, and it is one of the most quietly influential things ever to run on the Game Boy. The Student and the Idea nanoloop is the work of Oliver Wittchow, who studied at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. The seed was planted in 1997, when Wittchow and a fellow student, Sebastian Burdach, began tinkering with music software for the Game Boy. Burdach wrote a bare-bones sequencer in Game Boy BASIC over the course of three nights. The following year Wittchow switched to programming the console in C, and nanoloop took shape as his pre-diploma project at the art school. nanoloop, the music sequencer cartridge for the original Game Boy That origin matters, because nanoloop has never really felt like a piece of engineering. It feels like a piece of design. It was made by an artist, for a reason an artist would understand: not to squeeze the most notes out of the hardware, but to make the act of composing feel direct, physical and beautiful. Music in Two Dimensions The tagline Wittchow still uses is "music in two dimensions", and it is the perfect description. Where most music software asks you to type notes, or stack them on a timeline, nanoloop hands you a grid. You sculpt sound by moving marks around a square: the position of a dot or a dash sets a sound's pitch, its volume, its decay. Under the hood it is driving the Game Boy's built-in four-channel sound chip, two square waves, a custom four-bit wave and a noise channel, but you never really think in those terms. You think in shapes. The result is an instrument that a complete beginner can make something lovely on within minutes, and that an expert can spend years mastering. That balance, easy to start and hard to exhaust, is the mark of a genuinely good design, and it is a large part of why nanoloop has outlived almost every music tool of its era. One Idea, Many Machines What began as a single Game Boy cartridge has grown into a small family, all maintained by the same person across a quarter of a century. The current version for the original hardware is nanoloop one, a sequencer and synthesizer cartridge that runs on the Game Boy, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance and even the modern Analogue Pocket. It is full of small, thoughtful touches: a 3.5mm jack that syncs and transfers files with an ordinary audio cable, no link cable or adaptors required, and a circuit board deliberately covered in an eight-millimetre grid of plastic tiles, so you can reskin it with LEGO and other compatible bricks. Alongside it sits nanoloop two, built for the Game Boy Advance and its very different FM synthesis, and newer experiments like nanoloop q and a fresh tool called the naive tracker, plus mobile versions that carried the idea onto phones. It is a rare thing in software: a single, coherent vision, refined patiently by one author since 1998, rather than handed off, rebooted or abandoned. An art student's exam project, still turning the Game Boy into an instrument. Why It Belongs in a Game Boy Museum This museum is built around the idea that the Game Boy was far more than a games machine, and nanoloop is one of the clearest proofs of that. In the right hands the little grey box is not a console at all. It is a synthesizer, a sketchpad, a stage instrument, and it has been exactly that for musicians all over the world for decades, from bedroom producers to festival stages. The machine it all runs on is documented in full in our complete DMG-01 guide. There is also something fitting about nanoloop in particular. A museum tries to keep an old machine meaningful long after the industry has moved on. nanoloop has been doing the same thing from the inside, one grid at a time, since it was an art student's exam. You can find all of it, and buy the current cartridge new, at nanoloop.com. The Game Boy learned to sing in 1998, and thanks to one patient designer in Hamburg, it has never stopped.