We now know that the Game Boy draws everything from small 8 by 8 tiles placed on a grid. In this part we will design our own tiles, load them into the console and use them to draw the playfield for Snake, including a solid wall around the edge of the screen. By the end you will have a real game board sitting on that green screen, ready for a snake to move across. The four tiles we are going to build Designing Your Own Game Boy Tiles A tile is 8 by 8 pixels, and each pixel is one of four shades. In code, a single tile is described by 16 numbers. For our game we only need four tiles: an empty space, the snake's body, a piece of food and a wall. Here is how we describe them. Do not worry about every individual number; the comments tell you which tile is which, and you can tweak them freely later. #include #include // tile numbers, so we can use names instead of bare numbers #define T_EMPTY 0 #define T_BODY 1 #define T_FOOD 2 #define T_WALL 3 // 16 bytes per tile: empty, body (solid), food (diamond), wall (solid) const uint8_t tiles[] = { 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00, 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00, 0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF, 0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF, 0x00,0x00,0x18,0x18,0x3C,0x3C,0x7E,0x7E, 0x7E,0x7E,0x3C,0x3C,0x18,0x18,0x00,0x00, 0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF, 0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF,0xFF }; Here is how to read that block. The two include lines at the top bring in the Game Boy toolkit and the number types we use. The four define lines just give friendly names to the tile slots, so we can write T_FOOD instead of the bare number 2. Then the tiles array holds the actual pictures: sixteen numbers per tile, two for each of the eight rows. A row of 0x00 is completely empty, a row of 0xFF is fully solid (that is how the body and the wall become solid dark blocks), and the food's numbers grow then shrink (0x18, 0x3C, 0x7E, then back down) to trace a diamond. If you would like to see exactly how a row of pixels turns into a number like 0x7E, we walk through that arithmetic step by step in the Level Up series, Part 1. Giving the tiles names with those define lines is a small habit that pays off. Writing T_FOOD later in the code is far clearer than writing the number 2, and if you ever reorder your tiles you only change one line. Loading the Tiles and Turning On the Screen Designing tiles is not enough; we have to copy them into the console's video memory and switch the display on. GBDK-2020 makes this a three-line affair at the start of our program. The first line loads our four tiles, the second tells the Game Boy to show the background layer, and the third turns the screen on. set_bkg_data(0, 4, tiles); // load 4 tiles, starting at slot 0 SHOW_BKG; // show the background layer DISPLAY_ON; // turn the screen on Those three lines are the switch-on sequence. set_bkg_data(0, 4, tiles) copies our artwork into the console's video memory: the 0 means start at tile slot 0, the 4 is how many tiles to load, and tiles is where to copy them from. SHOW_BKG and DISPLAY_ON are simply on switches, the first for the background layer and the second for the screen itself. Run only this much and you would see a blank, lit screen, ready to be drawn on. Drawing the Walls Our playfield is the whole screen, which is 20 tiles wide and 18 tiles tall. We want a solid wall running all the way around the edge, so the snake has something to crash into. We will define the size of the grid as names, then write a small function that places wall tiles along the top, bottom, left and right edges. #define GRID_W 20 // the background is 20 tiles wide #define GRID_H 18 // and 18 tiles tall void draw_walls(void) { uint8_t x, y; for (x = 0; x < GRID_W; x++) { set_bkg_tile_xy(x, 0, T_WALL); // top edge set_bkg_tile_xy(x, GRID_H - 1, T_WALL); // bottom edge } for (y = 0; y < GRID_H; y++) { set_bkg_tile_xy(0, y, T_WALL); // left edge set_bkg_tile_xy(GRID_W - 1, y, T_WALL); // right edge } } If you have not met a for loop before, it is simply a way to repeat something a set number of times. Read for (x = 0; x < GRID_W; x++) as: start with x at 0, keep going as long as x is less than the width, and add one to x each time round. So the first loop runs x across every column, dropping a wall tile on the top row (row 0) and the bottom row each time; the second loop runs y down every row, placing a wall on the left column (column 0) and the right column. Four edges, drawn by two little loops. Read that function slowly and it is quite friendly. The first loop walks across every column and drops a wall tile on the very top row and the very bottom row. The second loop walks down every row and places a wall tile on the far left and far right columns. Together they frame the screen with a tidy border. Seeing It On Screen If you call draw_walls right after loading the tiles and turning on the display, then build the ROM the same way as in Part 1, your emulator will show a clean rectangular arena framed by a solid border. It may not look like much yet, but you are now drawing your own graphics, pixel patterns you designed yourself, on real Game Boy hardware. That is a genuine milestone. Set the game arena Coming Up in Part 4 We have an arena, but nothing moves. In Part 4 we will bring the snake to life: we will store its body in memory, read the player's button presses, and build the game loop that makes it slither around the board one step at a time. This is where it finally starts to feel like a game. The Full Series Part 1: Setting Up Your Workshop · Part 2: How the Game Boy Thinks · Part 3: Drawing Your World (you are here) · 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.

Our snake glides around the arena, but it has nothing to do and no way to lose. In this final building part we add the three things that turn a moving line into a real game: food to chase, growth as a reward, and rules that end the run when you crash. After this, you will have a complete Snake that you can lose, swear at, and immediately play again. Scattering the Food Food should appear at a random empty spot inside the walls. GBDK-2020 provides a random number generator, which we use to pick a column and a row. If the spot we picked is already occupied, by the snake or by a wall, we simply try again until we find an empty cell, then place the food tile there. #include void place_food(void) { uint8_t fx, fy; do { fx = 1 + (rand() % (GRID_W - 2)); // somewhere inside the walls fy = 1 + (rand() % (GRID_H - 2)); } while (get_bkg_tile_xy(fx, fy) != T_EMPTY); set_bkg_tile_xy(fx, fy, T_FOOD); } This little function drops food somewhere valid. rand() asks GBDK for a random number, and the % (remainder) trims it down into range, so rand() % (GRID_W - 2) lands somewhere between the side walls; adding 1 keeps it off the wall itself. The do ... while wrapper means try this, and if the chosen spot is not empty (because the snake or a wall is already there) try again, repeating until it finds a free cell. Only then does it place the food tile. It is a tidy way of saying keep guessing until you find an empty square. Eating, Growing and Crashing Now we upgrade the move function from Part 4 into a full game step. Before moving, we look at the tile the head is about to enter. If it is a wall or part of the snake, the game is over and we report it. If it is food, the snake grows by keeping its old tail instead of erasing it, and we drop a fresh piece of food. Otherwise it is a normal move and we clear the tail as before. // returns 1 if the snake died this step uint8_t step_game(void) { int8_t i; uint8_t nx = snake_x[0] + dir_x; uint8_t ny = snake_y[0] + dir_y; uint8_t hit = get_bkg_tile_xy(nx, ny); if (hit == T_WALL || hit == T_BODY) return 1; // crashed: game over uint8_t tail_x = snake_x[length - 1]; uint8_t tail_y = snake_y[length - 1]; for (i = length - 1; i > 0; i--) { // body follows the head snake_x[i] = snake_x[i - 1]; snake_y[i] = snake_y[i - 1]; } snake_x[0] = nx; snake_y[0] = ny; set_bkg_tile_xy(nx, ny, T_BODY); if (hit == T_FOOD) { // ate food: grow if (length < MAX_LEN) { snake_x[length] = tail_x; snake_y[length] = tail_y; length++; } place_food(); } else { // normal move: clear tail set_bkg_tile_xy(tail_x, tail_y, T_EMPTY); } return 0; } step_game is the Part 4 move function with the rules added, so read it in three beats. First it works out the square the head is about to enter and looks at what is already there, storing that in hit. If hit is a wall or the snake's own body, it returns 1, our agreed signal for game over. If the snake survived, the middle section shuffles the body forward and draws the new head, exactly as before. Then the decision: if hit was food, the snake grows by keeping its old tail segment instead of erasing it, adds one to length, and drops a new piece of food; otherwise it was an ordinary move, so we rub out the tail as usual. Returning 0 at the end means the snake is still alive. That single returned number, 1 or 0, is how the game loop will know whether to carry on. Starting and Restarting We want each game to begin fresh, so we gather the setup into one function that clears the arena, places a new three-segment snake and drops the first food. This is the Part 4 setup with a clean-up sweep and a piece of food added. void init_game(void) { uint8_t x, y, i; for (y = 1; y < GRID_H - 1; y++) // clear the arena for (x = 1; x < GRID_W - 1; x++) set_bkg_tile_xy(x, y, T_EMPTY); length = 3; for (i = 0; i < length; i++) { snake_x[i] = 10 - i; snake_y[i] = 9; set_bkg_tile_xy(snake_x[i], snake_y[i], T_BODY); } dir_x = 1; dir_y = 0; place_food(); } init_game simply resets everything for a fresh run. The two stacked for loops together sweep across every cell inside the walls (one loop for the rows, one nested inside it for the columns) and set each to empty, wiping the old game away. Then, exactly as in Part 4, it lays down a new three-segment snake pointing right, and finally drops the first piece of food with place_food. One small but important detail: a random generator needs a seed, or it produces the same food pattern every time. A neat trick is to wait for the player to press START, count rapidly while the button is held, and use that count as the seed. Because no two people hold the button for exactly the same time, the food lands differently every game. void main(void) { uint8_t timer; uint16_t seed = 0; set_bkg_data(0, 4, tiles); SHOW_BKG; DISPLAY_ON; waitpad(J_START); // wait for the player while (joypad() & J_START) seed++; // count while held initrand(seed); // seed the randomness while (1) { // one game per outer loop draw_walls(); init_game(); timer = 0; while (1) { // the game loop wait_vbl_done(); read_input(); if (++timer >= 6) { timer = 0; if (step_game()) break; // died: leave the loop } } waitpad(J_START); // game over: press START waitpadup(); // wait for release, then restart } } The main function now runs whole games back to back. The first lines load the tiles and switch the screen on. Then comes the seeding trick: waitpad(J_START) freezes until START is pressed, while (joypad() & J_START) seed++ counts rapidly for as long as it is held, and initrand(seed) uses that count so the food falls differently each time. After that, the outer while (1) plays one game per lap: it draws the walls, sets up a fresh board, and runs the inner game loop. That inner loop moves the snake every sixth frame and watches step_game; the moment step_game reports a crash, break jumps out of it. We then wait for START and its release before looping back to start another game. Two loops, one nested inside the other: the inner one is a single game, the outer one lets you play again and again. Finishing the Snake Game Put all the pieces together, the tiles and defines from Part 3, the data and input from Part 4, and the food, growth and game-over logic from this part, and you have a complete Snake game in roughly 150 lines of C. Build it, hold START to begin, and play. The snake eats, grows longer with every bite, and the run ends the moment you clip a wall or your own tail. Press START again and you are straight into a fresh game. Take a moment to appreciate what you have done. You designed graphics, talked to real Game Boy hardware, handled input and wrote game logic, and the result is a genuine cartridge-ready game you made yourself. That is the same craft, in miniature, that built the library this whole collection celebrates. Let's play - the final snake game for your Game Boy Building Your snake.gb File Throughout this series you have built each step the same way you built your very first ROM back in Part 1: with the lcc tool that ships with GBDK-2020. To turn the finished game into a playable file, save the complete program as snake.c, open a terminal in that folder, and run a single command. Adjust the path so that it points at the lcc program inside your GBDK bin folder. lcc -o snake.gb snake.c That produces snake.gb, a real Game Boy ROM. Open it in an emulator such as Emulicious, BGB or SameBoy to play right away, or copy it onto a flash cartridge to run it on a genuine DMG-01. We look at that last step, playing on real hardware, in more detail in Part 6. Download the Game Files Want to skip ahead, or check your work against a finished version? Grab the complete project here: the full snake.c source code, ready to build, together with the compiled snake.gb ROM so you can play it straight away. Coming Up in Part 6 So far we have played in an emulator. In the final part we take the leap that makes it all real: running your game on an actual Game Boy, plus where to go next if you have caught the bug, from friendlier tools to deeper ones and the welcoming community behind them. The Full Series Part 1: Setting Up Your Workshop · Part 2: How the Game Boy Thinks · Part 3: Drawing Your World · Part 4: Taking Control · Part 5: Food, Growth and Game Over (you are here) · Part 6: From Emulator to Cartridge Part of the Write Your Own Game Boy Games 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.

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. See the full feature: the games that made the Game Boy.

Of all the coloured Game Boys Nintendo made, the ones you can see straight through have always held a special fascination. This arrival is the pick of them: the transparent version of the Game Boy from Nintendo's US Play It Loud series, its clear shell turning the console's own guts into the decoration. The Game Boy that turns its own circuit board into the decoration. What It Is This is the see-through model from the US Play It Loud line, whose clear housing reveals the circuit board and components inside, and that visible interior is a large part of why the transparent models are among the most sought-after of all the coloured DMG-01 variants. The Play It Loud range also came in red, green, black, yellow, white and blue, and the collection holds further examples from that colourful family. The clear one, though, is the showpiece: the variant that made a virtue of the very hardware every other Game Boy hid away. Nintendo's mid-90s pitch: the DMG-01 as a fashion object, and a transparent one at that. Why It Joined the Collection The Play It Loud series is a story the collection tells in colour, and it is not complete without its most coveted member. The transparent console is the one collectors chase hardest, both for its rarity and for the simple visual thrill of seeing the machine's insides. Adding it alongside the other Play It Loud shades turns a scattering of coloured Game Boys into a proper set, and lets the collection show the full spread of Nintendo's mid-90s attempt to sell the DMG-01 as a fashion object rather than just a games machine. The transparent Play It Loud Game Boy is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the Play It Loud colours.

Before an algorithm decided what you would play next, Nintendo mailed the future straight to your door. In the years around the Game Boy's launch, the way you discovered what was coming to that little grey handheld was almost always on paper: a glossy fold-out tucked into a box, a club magazine dropped through the letterbox, a price list pinned behind the shop counter. These modest printed pages turn out to be some of the most honest records we have of how the Game Boy was really sold. Country by country, they show exactly which games Nintendo wanted in your hands, and precisely how it wanted you to feel about them. The catalogue habit From the very beginning, Nintendo treated the printed catalogue as a core marketing tool. The trail starts in Japan with the Game Boy Launch Catalogue of 1989, the company's official launch-era booklet presenting the brand-new console, its accessories and its earliest software for the 1989 fiscal year. It appeared just after the Game Boy went on sale in Japan in April 1989, and one small detail gives the game away: it is marked by fiscal year, a sign that Nintendo already planned to publish a fresh catalogue every year. This was not a one-off flyer. It was the opening chapter of a habit. Before the algorithm: this is how you found out what to play next. That habit is exactly why these catalogues matter today. Each one is a primary source, a time capsule that captures which titles Nintendo was pushing in a given year and how it chose to present them. Read them in sequence and you can watch the Game Boy library grow, watch the marketing language evolve, and watch the same console being reintroduced again and again to new audiences in new countries. One console, four languages As the Game Boy conquered Europe, the catalogue habit travelled with it, and Nintendo simply reprinted its pitch in every local language. Germany got its first dedicated booklet with the Nintendo Game Boy Catalogue 1991, the opening entry in a long run of yearly German catalogues. Britain had the Nintendo Game Catalogue 1992, an official UK edition showing the latest games across Nintendo's systems, followed by the combined Nintendo Game Catalogue 1993-1994 that covered two years in a single volume. France ran on the same rhythm. The Nintendo Game Catalogue 1991-1992 gathered two years of French releases into one booklet, and the Nintendo Game Catalogue 1994 carried the tradition forward mid-decade. Line these European editions up beside the Japanese original and the strategy is obvious: one console, one carefully controlled message, translated and re-skinned for each market but always steering the reader toward Nintendo's own hardware and first-party stars. The German News years In Germany the catalogue eventually grew a personality of its own. The 1994 edition arrived under the cheerfully loud banner of Nintendo Game Boy Wow! Big News, trading the plain product-list look for something closer to a mini-magazine. From there the German line settled into an almost newspaper-like format: the Nintendo Game Boy News 1995/1996 and the standalone Nintendo Game Boy News 1996 kept members up to date on the latest games and hardware as the handheld matured. The run closes on a quietly historic note. The Nintendo Game Boy News 1996/1997 is the last German catalogue to feature original Game Boy (DMG-01) content before the line wound down, making it a kind of full stop on the Game Boy Classic era in print. Held together, these German booklets trace the whole later life of the console, from a breathless 'Wow!' to a graceful farewell. Nintendo Power, the American megaphone Catalogues told you what existed. Magazines told you why you should care, and nobody did that louder than Nintendo of America. The Nintendo Power magazine of September/October 1989 used its pages to introduce club members to the newly launched Game Boy, along with its games and accessories. The handheld, designed by Nintendo's Gunpei Yokoi, had reached the United States that July, so this issue effectively captures the American launch moment as it happened. It is one of the earliest publications in the whole collection, and it shows Nintendo Power doing what it did best: turning a product announcement into an event. Nintendo's greatest hits, printed on paper and posted to your door. For a young reader in 1989, a magazine like this was often the very first place the Game Boy felt real: not a rumour or a shop-window curiosity, but a machine with a name, a designer and a lineup you could already start dreaming about. That is the quiet power of the in-house magazine. It does not just list the games, it makes you a fan of them before you have played a single one. Club Nintendo and the members' welcome Europe had its own version of that insider glow, and it was called Club Nintendo. When the Game Boy reached Europe in 1990, Nintendo Germany greeted its members with a Club Nintendo Special Edition, an entire issue built to introduce the console, its games and the available hardware to the club faithful. The Game Boy had launched in Japan in April 1989 and in the US that July before arriving in Europe, so this issue marks the moment the handheld finally landed for German members. It sits at the same point in the story as Nintendo Power's launch issue, only speaking German and aimed at a community that had signed up specifically to hear from Nintendo first. Club Nintendo: the membership card to Game Boy fandom. France got the same treatment in its own accent. The Club Nintendo Magazine 1990/02 devoted a full section to introducing the Game Boy, its games and its accessories to French fans around the European launch, making it the direct counterpart to the German special edition. Between them, these club magazines show the other half of Nintendo's paper strategy: not just selling to shoppers, but rewarding members, building loyalty and making everyone who opened the envelope feel like they were on the inside. Club Nintendo in France - Game Boy Debut Following the trail Taken together, this paper trail is a marketing map of the Game Boy's world tour. From a fiscal-year booklet in Tokyo to a Wow! Big News fold-out in Germany, from Nintendo Power in America to Club Nintendo in France, the same little grey machine was introduced over and over, each time tailored to a new audience yet always singing from Nintendo's own songbook. You can browse every one of these catalogues and magazines, page by page, over at the Game Boy Museum. Come and follow the paper trail for yourself. The Full Series Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books · Part 2: Player's Guides and Strategy Books · Part 3: Catalogues and Club Nintendo (you are here) · Part 4: Fan Magazines and Sticker Albums · Part 5: The Books That Made the Game Boy History Part of the The Paper Trail series.

Not every important game is a spectacular one. This arrival, Game Boy Golf, matters for where it sits in the story rather than for any fireworks: it is one of the original sports foundations of the Game Boy library, a quiet cornerstone from the machine's earliest days. A quiet 1990 cornerstone, descended straight from Nintendo's 1984 Famicom golf. What It Is Released by Nintendo in 1990, Golf is one of the company's earliest handheld sports titles, and a direct descendant of its 1984 Famicom golf game. Its appeal is historical rather than flashy: this is the kind of early, straightforward release that helped establish the Game Boy as more than a machine for action and puzzle games, showing that a whole range of genres could live comfortably on the little green screen. Golf also turns up as a pack-in game in one of the console bundles the collection holds, which speaks to how central these early titles were to selling the system. A gentle round on the little green screen, and a piece of launch-era bedrock. Why It Joined the Collection A collection built around the original Game Boy needs its launch-era bedrock as much as its famous hits, because those early titles are what defined the platform's first impression. Golf is one of them: modest, foundational and directly linked back to Nintendo's Famicom heritage, a thread that ties the handheld to the home console that came before it. It is exactly the sort of quietly significant cartridge that rounds out the picture of the Game Boy's beginnings. Game Boy Golf is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: the games that made the Game Boy.

Most games look forward. Game & Watch Gallery looks back, and that is exactly what makes it special. Released in 1997, near the end of the original Game Boy's life, it is a cartridge that reaches back seventeen years to the little single-game LCD handhelds that made Nintendo a toy giant in the first place. It is, in a real sense, a museum you could fit in your pocket, which is why it feels so at home in ours. A museum of Nintendo's handheld past, in a single cartridge. Before the Game Boy, there was the Game & Watch To understand the Gallery, you have to go back to 1980. That was the year Nintendo released the first Game & Watch, a slim LCD gadget that played a single built-in game and doubled as a clock. It was the brainchild of Gunpei Yokoi, the same engineer who would later design the Game Boy itself. The Game & Watch line sold in enormous numbers and, crucially, gave the world the cross-shaped directional pad, the humble D-pad that every controller has used ever since. The games themselves were tiny marvels of restraint: juggle three balls, catch falling manhole workers, guide a diver past an octopus. Each one did a single thing and did it beautifully, squeezing surprising tension out of a fixed set of LCD segments. The Game Boy is a direct descendant of these devices, so a Game Boy game that celebrates them is a family reunion. Juggle, catch, dodge, repeat: 1980 called and it still holds up. Classic and Modern Game & Watch Gallery is built around a clever two-way idea. In Classic mode, you play faithful recreations of the original Game & Watch games, preserved almost exactly as they were, right down to their stark, segmented look. In Modern mode, the same games are reimagined with fuller graphics, music and Mario-universe characters, so that the diver becomes a familiar face and the juggler picks up a red hat. It is preservation and reinvention on one cartridge, and you can flip between the two to see how far a simple idea can travel. Tying it together is an unlockable gallery. As you play and rack up points, you earn glimpses into Nintendo's handheld history, a reward that is really an invitation to learn where all this came from. Few games of the era were so openly curatorial about their own past, and for a company that usually looks resolutely forward, it was a rare and warm-hearted bit of self-reflection. A sequel, and a small series The idea proved popular enough to continue. A sequel followed on the Game Boy, adding more of the classic games in the same Classic-and-Modern format, and the concept carried on to the Game Boy Color afterwards. The naming across regions is a famously tangled affair, with different territories numbering the games differently, but the spirit never changed: keep the old games alive, and dress a few of them up for a new audience. The Sequel - Game & Watch Gallery 2 That is what makes these cartridges quietly moving to hold. They are the Game Boy tipping its cap to the machines that made it possible, and to the engineer who designed both. A collection like ours could hardly ask for a more fitting artefact. You can find Game & Watch Gallery and its sequel in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.

Walk into any serious video-game collection today and you will spot them: cartridges and boxes sealed inside clear, hard plastic cases, each stamped with a certificate and a number. To a newcomer it can look a little strange, almost like putting a comic book behind museum glass. Yet those numbers carry a whole vocabulary, and once you learn to read it, a graded game tells you a surprising amount about the object inside. This entry in The Collector's Handbook is a plain-language guide to how video-game grading works. It is educational and nothing more. We will not tell you what to buy, and we will not predict what anything is worth, because the market moves and grading always involves a degree of human judgement. The goal here is simply to help you read the label. Why grade a game Grading is the process of having an independent company inspect a game, judge its condition against a published standard, and seal it in a protective case. That case is usually called a slab: a tamper-evident, UV-resistant acrylic shell that protects the item and displays a printed label with the assigned grade. Once a game is slabbed, opening it breaks the certification, so from that point on the grade and the object travel together. Collectors value this for a few reasons. A consistent grade gives two strangers a shared language for condition, which makes buying and selling far less of a guessing game. The sealed case also preserves fragile paper and plastic that would otherwise wear with every handling. Grading of this kind is still fairly young. The first dedicated company appeared around 2008, and interest grew sharply from 2018 onward, borrowing much of its visual style from the older world of comic-book grading. There is also a documentary value to it. Every slab carries a unique certification number, and the grading company logs the item, so a graded game becomes a small recorded artefact rather than an anonymous copy. For a museum that quiet record-keeping is genuinely useful, because it ties an object to a date, a standard and an independent opinion. The companies: WATA, CGC, VGA Three names come up most often. WATA Games, founded in 2018, helped popularise the modern format and is widely associated with the headline auction sales that pulled grading into the mainstream. CGC, the Certified Guaranty Company, is a long-established grader of comics and other collectibles that extended its work to video games. VGA, the Video Game Authority, is the oldest of the three and is respected among long-term collectors for keeping its standards consistent over many years. Their scales are not identical, which is worth knowing before you compare two slabs side by side. WATA and CGC both use a ten-point numeric scale, where a grade such as 9.0 sits high on that range without being a perfect 10. VGA has traditionally used a different scale, so a VGA number and a WATA number are not directly interchangeable. Each company also keeps its detailed methodology partly in-house, and none of them claims that grading is a pure science. Choosing between them is less about which is best and more about what a collector values. Some prioritise the name recognition of the market leader, others the long consistency of an older grader. Turnaround times, fees and even the look of the case all differ, and preferences shift as the field matures. For our purposes the important point is simpler: a grade only means something once you know which company issued it and on what scale. Reading the label Most graded games fall into one of three broad categories, and the label reflects which one you are looking at. A sealed game is still in its original factory shrink-wrap and has never been opened. A complete-in-box game, often shortened to CIB, has been opened but still has its box, manual and inserts. A loose game is the cartridge or disc on its own, without the packaging. Sealed games carry an extra piece of information: a separate seal rating. Because the wrap itself can be original, resealed or damaged, graders assess it on its own scale, commonly running from lower letters up to marks like A++ for a near-perfect original seal. So a sealed title can show two things at once: a numeric grade for the box and contents, and a letter grade for the seal. Reading both together tells you more than either mark alone. Beyond the category and the grade, a label also records the basics: the game's title, the platform it ran on, and that unique certification number. It is designed to be read at a glance and verified in detail, which is exactly what you want from a small paper record sealed next to the object it describes. The museum's graded pieces The museum keeps a small number of graded pieces, and they make useful, real examples. One is a complete-in-box copy of Super Mario Land, graded CGC 9.0. The 9.0 places it high on CGC's ten-point scale, with the box at 9.0, the cartridge at 9.8 and the manual at 8.0, which is a neat illustration of how a single overall grade can sit on top of several component grades. The slab lets us display the game while keeping the original box and cartridge protected. Another is the InfoGenius Personal Organizer, graded by WATA. It is a good reminder that grading is not only for famous games. This was a productivity accessory for the Game Boy rather than a blockbuster title, yet it sits in a WATA slab all the same. Together the two pieces show the same idea from two angles: an independent grade and a sealed case, applied to very different objects. The case for and against Grading has clear benefits. It protects delicate items, it creates a shared standard that strangers can trust, and it makes an object's condition and provenance easier to document. For a collection meant to be preserved and shown rather than played, those are real advantages. It also has honest limits. Grading is partly subjective: two experienced graders can look at the same box and land a fraction apart, and published standards can shift over time. The market for graded games has been volatile as well, with prices rising and falling in ways that nobody reliably predicts. None of this is financial advice, and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything. A grade describes condition. It does not promise value. That is the short version of what a grade really means: a careful, independent read of condition, sealed alongside the object so the two can never drift apart. If you would like to see how these pieces sit next to the rest of the collection, you are always welcome to explore the Game Boy Museum. We are always glad to share what we have learned along the way. The Full Series Part 1: What a Grade Really Means (you are here) · Part 2: Storing and Preserving Your Game Boys · Part 3: Cleaning a Game Boy Without Ruining It

Some games seem physically impossible on the Game Boy, and Lemmings is one of them. It was built for a computer mouse and a big, detailed screen, and it asks you to manage dozens of tiny creatures at once. Then someone squeezed it onto a handheld with four buttons and a screen barely bigger than a matchbox. That it works at all is a small miracle. That it is genuinely good is a testament to the craft of porting. The march of the lemmings Lemmings began life in 1991, made by the Scottish studio DMA Design, and it was an instant sensation on home computers like the Amiga. The premise is beautifully cruel. A stream of little green-haired creatures pours into each level and starts walking, mindlessly, straight ahead. They will march off cliffs, into water and into traps without a flicker of self-preservation. Your job is to get a set number of them safely to the exit before time runs out. Lemmings - Climbers, floaters, blockers, bashers: assign wisely. You do this by handing out jobs. Turn one lemming into a blocker to stop the crowd, another into a basher to tunnel through a wall, a digger to burrow down, a builder to bridge a gap, a floater to survive a long fall. Each level is a logic puzzle dressed as a rescue mission, and the tension comes from the fact that the crowd never stops moving while you think. It is equal parts strategy and mild panic. An unlikely handheld The publisher Ocean, a British house that specialised in bringing big computer games to every machine going, took on the job of shrinking Lemmings down to the Game Boy. The problems were obvious. There was no mouse to point with, so a cursor had to be driven around the screen with the D-pad. The levels were far wider than the little display, so the view had to scroll. And a busy, colourful playfield full of individual creatures had to be redrawn in four shades of grey, small enough to fit yet clear enough to read. Somehow it came together. Moving a cursor with a directional pad will never be as quick as a mouse, but the pacing was tuned so that you had time to think, select a lemming and assign its job before disaster struck. The tiny sprites stayed legible, the levels were carefully adapted, and the essential loop of watch, plan, intervene survived the shrink intact. The art of the impossible port The Game Boy is full of these against-the-odds conversions, games that seemed to belong to bigger, more powerful machines and were somehow talked onto the handheld anyway. The arcade blaster Space Invaders made the trip, and even the notorious laserdisc cartoon Dragon's Lair was attempted. Lemmings stands out among them because it did not just survive the journey, it remained properly playable, a real strategy game you could carry in a coat pocket. The franchise went on to become one of the most ported games in history, appearing on seemingly every platform ever built. The Game Boy version rarely gets top billing among them, but it may be the most impressive, precisely because it had the least to work with. You can find Lemmings in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.

Collecting the original Game Boy is one of the most rewarding corners of retro gaming. The hardware is affordable enough to start on a modest budget, deep enough to spend a lifetime on, and full of regional quirks, colour variants and one-off oddities that keep the hunt interesting long after the common games are ticked off. This guide gathers the essentials, drawn from a collection of more than 330 catalogued DMG-01 items, and links out to the full detail on each topic. Whether you are buying your first boxed console or chasing the last rarity on your list, start here. Collecting the Original Game Boy - Where to start Where to Start The best first purchase is a working console and a game or two you actually want to play. An original DMG-01 in good cosmetic condition is still inexpensive, so there is no need to rush at a bargain that will not power on. When buying, check that the screen shows all its lines without gaps, that the sound works, that the buttons feel crisp and that the battery contacts are clean rather than corroded. A tested console and a loose game will teach you more about what good condition feels like than any guide, and from there you can decide where your interest really lies. What to Collect: Finding Your Focus Few people collect everything, and the ones who last tend to pick a focus. Some chase the games, from the common classics to the Japan-only oddities; some collect the hardware, the colour variants and the regional editions; others specialise in accessories, in boxes, or in a single theme such as Pokemon. There is no wrong answer, and the museum's own shelves hold all of these at once. If you are still deciding, browsing the colour variants, the regional differences and the accessory catalogue is a good way to find the corner that grabs you. What Makes One Valuable Three things drive value above all others: condition, completeness and rarity. A console that is clean, unyellowed and fully working is worth far more than a tired one; a game complete in its box with manual and inserts beats a loose cartridge many times over; and a scarce regional edition or limited colour can multiply both. Read what makes a Game Boy valuable for the collector's full perspective, and our editorial on sealed and slabbed versus complete-in-box, the thinking behind why this collection chose CIB. Spotting Fakes and Reproductions As prices have risen, so has the number of fakes, and the most faked games of all are the ones everyone wants, the Pokemon titles above the rest. A reproduction often gives itself away under a close look: a label that is slightly too glossy, too flat or printed at the wrong resolution, a shell whose texture or shade is a touch off, a board inside with the wrong fonts or a suspiciously modern chip, or a save battery that looks far newer than the game. Buying from sellers who show clear photos of the cartridge, the label and the board, and who will answer questions, is the single best protection. Our guide Real or Fake: Spotting Game Boy Reproductions walks through the tells in detail. Condition, Grading and Care Once a piece is in your hands, keeping it in good condition is part of the hobby. Grading, whether through a professional service or simply your own honest eye, is about describing condition consistently, and our Collector's Handbook explains how collectors think about it. Day to day, a few habits go a long way: clean dirty cartridge contacts gently rather than forcing a game that will not boot, replace the long-dead save batteries inside older cartridges so your saves survive, and keep everything out of direct sunlight and damp, which yellow the plastic and warp the boxes. See how to clean a Game Boy without ruining it and how to store and preserve your collection for the full method. Reading the Box and the Code Half of collecting is knowing exactly what you are looking at. Learn to decode the DMG model numbers and the abbreviations every collector should know, from DMG and CGB to the region tags that tell you where a copy was sold. Box Sets and Bundles Nintendo boxed the Game Boy a dozen ways, and the box is often the real prize. Our guide to Game Boy box sets covers console-only, single-game, dual-game, triple-game star sets and theme bundles, and you can see standouts like the Star Wars console bundle and the classic Tetris bundle that built an empire. Chasing the Rarities The deep end is where it gets addictive. The complete Japanese boxed accessory line is one of the hardest sets to finish, a developer prototype like the Loopz cartridge almost never reaches collectors, and even a one-off fan-art console has a place in a serious archive. Building a Collection Finally, the long game. Read the lessons from building a complete DMG-01 archive and, for the pure joy of it, what is really inside an original 1989 box. Explore the Full Collection Every item referenced here is documented, photographed and catalogued in the Game Boy Master Collection, which is also available for acquisition as a whole. Read more behind the Game Boy Museum.