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

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

Long before USB-C battery mods, at least one company tried to give the Game Boy a proper home charging dock. This arrival is that ambitious, and ultimately ill-fated, attempt: the PowerBase, a docking station for the Game Boy combined with a rechargeable battery system. Clever, all-in-one, and a total commercial flop, which is exactly why it is rare. What It Is At the heart of the set is a rechargeable pack that fits directly into the battery compartment in place of the usual AA cells. Around it comes a mains adapter and a charging base that either recharges the pack at home or powers the console directly, with an LED to show the charge status and room in the base for up to four cartridges. It was a genuinely clever, all-in-one idea, made by LMP under its Gamester brand, and yet it never caught on, which is why surviving examples are scarce and it is remembered as something of a commercial flop. The Game Boy's failures are often more interesting to collect than its hits. Why It Joined the Collection The Game Boy's failures are often more interesting to collect than its hits, and the PowerBase is a perfect case: a thoughtful accessory that simply did not sell, which is exactly why it is rare today. It also deepens the collection's LMP Gamester cluster, sitting beside the Zip-Bag and the maker's other power products as evidence of one company's determined effort to solve the console's battery problem. Read against the modern USB-C power pack elsewhere in the collection, it shows how old that ambition really is, and how much better it works today. The LMP PowerBase is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: powering the Game Boy.

The Game Boy's accessory boom was not confined to Japan and America; it followed the console into every market it entered. This arrival is proof from southern Europe: an Italian magazine advertisement for Naki, one of the era's best-known makers of Game Boy add-ons. Lights, magnifiers and cases, dressed up for Italian readers. What It Is This is an Italian print advertisement from Naki, a well-known third-party accessory maker whose products, lights, magnifiers, cases and more, turned up wherever the Game Boy was sold. It sits among the collection's third-party accessory ads, alongside those from Nuby and Joyplus, and it complements the several Naki accessories catalogued individually, including the comprehensive Naki Master Pak. Where the products show what Naki made, this advert shows how the brand spoke to Italian buyers. One Brand, Many Borders What makes an Italian Naki advert interesting is precisely that it exists. The same third-party makers who competed for shelf space in America and Britain also ran localised campaigns across continental Europe, adapting their pitch to each language and market. Seeing Naki advertise in Italian is a small reminder that the accessory trade was a genuinely international business, chasing the Game Boy's audience across borders with the same lights, magnifiers and cases dressed up for local readers. The collection's ability to place an American Nuby ad, an Italian Naki ad and a Japanese campaign side by side turns a pile of paper into a map of the console's global reach. There is a preservation angle, as always with advertising. Italian gaming magazines of the period were as disposable as any other, and localised third-party ads were valued by nobody at the time, so surviving isolated examples are genuinely uncommon. Keeping this one adds another country and another language to the collection's picture of the Game Boy's after-market, and helps document a European accessory scene that is easily overlooked in a story so often told through Japanese and American eyes. Why It Joined the Collection Documenting the Game Boy's world means following it into every market, and the accessory trade is a big, under-told part of that world. This Italian Naki advert broadens the collection's gallery of third-party marketing beyond the usual Japanese and American examples, and pairs with the Naki products already catalogued. Preserving it keeps a fragile piece of the European accessory scene, and another language, in the record. The Italian Naki advert is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: Game Boy advertising.

It is easy to forget that some people genuinely tried to sell the Game Boy as an office tool. This arrival is a monument to that earnest, slightly hopeless ambition: a 1991 cartridge that turned Nintendo's games machine into a pocket spell checker and calculator. A dictionary, a calculator and zero boss fights, bravely crammed into a games cartridge. What It Is Spell Checker and Calculator is part of the InfoGenius series, a line that presented the Game Boy as a practical everyday tool rather than a toy. It combines a large built-in dictionary with basic calculator functions, all running from a single cartridge. It is one of several non-gaming productivity titles in the collection, sitting alongside the Frommer's Travel Guide and the Berlitz French Translator from the same broad family of reference cartridges. The Game Boy as Office Assistant The InfoGenius line, published by GameTek, is one of the most endearing dead ends in the Game Boy's history. In an age before smartphones, the idea of carrying a dictionary, a translator or a travel guide in your pocket was genuinely appealing, and the Game Boy was the pocket computer millions of people already owned. The logic was sound; the execution ran headlong into reality. Spell-checking a word by thumbing through menus on a directional pad, with no keyboard and no backlight, was slower and clumsier than simply using a paper dictionary, and the series never found much of an audience. Can the Game Boy improve your spelling? A heroic, hopeless no. That commercial failure is exactly what makes these cartridges so collectable now. Because they sold poorly, they are relatively scarce, and because they are so wonderfully at odds with what the Game Boy was actually good at, they are irresistible curiosities. Spell Checker and Calculator joins the collection's other InfoGenius and productivity titles to map this whole optimistic, doomed corner of the library, the moment when people looked at the best-selling handheld in the world and asked whether it might also help you with your spelling. The answer was no, but the attempt is a delight. Why It Joined the Collection The Game Boy's productivity software is one of its most charming and least-understood corners, and the InfoGenius line is its clearest expression. This Spell Checker and Calculator joins the collection's Frommer's Travel Guide, Berlitz translator and other non-game cartridges to document the attempt to turn a toy into a tool. Preserving it keeps a lovable failed experiment, and a very pre-smartphone dream, on the shelf. The InfoGenius Spell Checker and Calculator is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the Game Boy as a serious tool.

Advertisements are the fossil record of a product's world. Long after the accessories themselves have been lost, the adverts that sold them survive in the back pages of old magazines, and they tell you what people were promised and how. This arrival is one such fossil: a United States magazine advert from Nuby, one of the best-known makers of Game Boy accessories of the era. Nuby - The King of Game Boy Accessories What It Is This is a period print advertisement for Nuby's line of Game Boy add-ons, the kind of full-page pitch that ran in gaming and general-interest magazines to reach the console's enormous audience. It is one of several third-party accessory ads in the collection, sitting alongside campaigns from Naki and Joyplus, and it complements the many Nuby accessories that are catalogued individually. Where the products show what was made, the advert shows how it was sold. Selling the Fixes Nuby was one of the giants of the accessory trade, a name that turned up on light-magnifiers, carry cases, battery packs and every other gadget a Game Boy owner might want. Its advertising had a job to do that Nintendo's never did: it had to convince you that the console you already owned was not quite complete, that it needed a light to be seen, a magnifier to be enjoyed, a case to be carried. Reading these ads now, you can watch the entire logic of the third-party market laid bare, each one gently insisting that the real Game Boy experience was one upgrade away. There is a preservation twist to advertising, too. Ads were the most disposable print of all, bound into magazines that were themselves thrown away, so a clean, isolated example is surprisingly hard to come by. Yet they are among the best evidence we have of which accessories existed, how they were priced and how they were marketed, sometimes the only surviving record of a product that itself did not last. As a set, the collection's accessory adverts from Nuby, Naki and Joyplus form a small gallery of how the Game Boy's after-market talked to its customers. Why It Joined the Collection Documenting the Game Boy properly means documenting how it was sold, not only what was sold, and advertising is the clearest window onto that. This Nuby advert pairs with the collection's Nuby products and its other accessory ads to tell both halves of the story at once: the object and the pitch. Keeping the paper alongside the hardware preserves a fuller, more honest picture of the busy commercial world that grew up around the little grey machine. The Nuby advertisement is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: Game Boy advertising.

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

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

The original Game Boy had a well-known list of shortcomings: a small screen, no backlight and tinny mono sound. This arrival tried to fix all of them at once. The Joyplus Handy Boy is one of the most curious accessories the console ever had, an all-in-one answer to the machine's most common complaints. Small screen, no backlight, tinny sound: solved in a single clip-on unit. What It Is The unit clips onto the console and bundles three fixes into one housing: a magnifying lens to enlarge the small screen, two lamps to make up for the missing backlight, and stereo sound through a pair of built-in speakers. Cleverly, it needs no batteries of its own, drawing power directly from the Game Boy through a neat cable connection. It is the kitchen-sink approach to accessorising, everything a player might want, strapped on at once, and boxed examples have become genuinely hard to find, which makes it a notable piece for accessory collectors. Boxed and complete, which for an all-in-one this ambitious is a genuine find. Why It Joined the Collection Accessories that try to answer every one of the Game Boy's limitations at the same time are a small, delightful category, and the Handy Boy is one of its stars. It captures an era of restless invention, when third-party makers competed to bolt light, magnification and sound onto a machine that had none, and it does so with more ambition than most. A boxed, complete example is a real find, and it sits proudly among the collection's other light, lens and power add-ons as one of the most fully featured of them all. The Joyplus Handy Boy is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the complete accessories guide.

Most guide books are content to be rectangles of paper. This one wanted to be a Game Boy. The latest arrival is the Game Boy Victory Book, a Japan-only hint book from the console's early years, designed in the unmistakable shape of the original hardware itself. Game Boy Victory Book Japanese guide shaped like the console What It Is The Victory Book is a strategy and hint book published by ASCII and Famitsu, two of the biggest names in Japanese games media. It gathers gameplay tips, hidden secrets and game information into a single, highly stylised volume, and its stand-out feature is its form: it is moulded to resemble the original Game Boy, screen, buttons and all. It captures the era when printed guides and companion books were an essential part of playing games, and it is one of several Japanese guide books held in the collection. When the Guide Was Half the Game It is hard to overstate how important printed guides were before the internet. If you were stuck on a level, there was no video to look up and no forum to ask; you bought a book, or you stayed stuck. In Japan this created a whole publishing industry of strategy volumes, and companies competed not just on the quality of their tips but on presentation, which is where a novelty like a Game Boy-shaped book comes in. Its playful design was a selling point in a crowded market, a guide you would want on the shelf as much for how it looked as for what it told you. That the publishers were ASCII and Famitsu matters, because it signals real editorial weight behind the novelty shape, this was not a cheap cash-in but a product from the heart of Japanese games journalism. Books like this were made to be used, dog-eared and eventually discarded once their secrets were exhausted, so a clean surviving copy, especially one with such an unusual form, is genuinely uncommon. It is a delightful reminder of a time when the guide could be almost as characterful as the games it explained. Why It Joined the Collection Guide books are part of how the Game Boy was actually played, and the Japanese ones are especially rich in character. The Victory Book, with its console-shaped design, is one of the most charming examples, and it joins the collection's other Japanese guides to document the printed culture that grew up around the handheld. Preserving it keeps a small, playful piece of the pre-internet gaming world, back when the answer to a tough level lived on a bookshelf. The Game Boy Victory Book is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: Nintendo's player's guides.

Somewhere inside almost every old Game Boy cartridge is a tiny coin battery, and it is slowly running down. When it finally dies it takes your save with it: the Pokemon team you raised for a hundred hours, the high scores, the ranking you fought for. The Flash Boy exists to get ahead of that moment. It is a small USB device that connects a Game Boy cartridge to a modern computer and lets you copy everything off it, the game and the save alike, before time does the copying for you. It can also do the reverse, writing a game onto a blank cartridge, though as we will see that last trick is the fussiest of the lot. What the Flash Boy is The unit in the collection is a Flash Boy made by Backlight Engineering Lab, a small maker that put the board in a clear acrylic case and labelled it, plainly, a cartridge flasher and dumper. The label is worth reading closely, because it tells you exactly what the device is for: it works as a dumper for original Nintendo DMG, CGB and MGB cartridges, meaning the original Game Boy, the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Pocket, and as a flasher only for its own Flash Boy cartridges. In other words it will read almost anything, but it will write to only a narrow, specific set of carts. That distinction is the single most important thing to understand about it. The little USB bridge between a thirty-year-old cartridge and a modern PC The hardware itself is simple and honest. A single cartridge slot sits on top, a USB-B port on the side carries both power and data to the computer, and a small switch selects between 3.3 volts and 5 volts so the board can match the cartridge it is talking to. There are no drivers to fight with and nothing to configure on the device; all the intelligence lives in the software on the PC. It belongs to a long and well-understood family of homebrew cartridge tools rather than to any one commercial ecosystem, which is exactly why it is dependable once you know how to drive it. What it can do In practice the Flash Boy does four jobs. It can dump the ROM, reading the game itself and saving a perfect copy as a file on your computer. It can back up the save data, lifting the contents of that failing battery-backed memory onto the PC where it is safe from the dying battery. It can write a save back onto a cartridge, which is how you restore a backup or move a save from one cart to another. And it can flash a game onto a compatible blank cartridge, turning a rewritable cart into a working copy of whatever ROM you send it. There is a lovely side effect of the save-backup feature. A Game Boy Camera keeps its photographs in exactly that battery-backed save memory, so backing up a Game Boy Camera cartridge captures the pictures too, ready to be opened in a separate photo viewer and rescued as ordinary image files. For a collector, though, the headline is the plain save rescue: a battery that has already died cannot be recovered, but a Flash Boy used in time turns a decades-old save into a file that will outlive the cartridge itself. The software it needs The board is only half of it; the Flash Boy is driven by a small Windows program called GameBoy Cart Flasher, usually shortened to GBCF. It is free, it has been around for many years, and it is the reference tool for this whole family of flashers. The workflow is straightforward: install the program, connect the Flash Boy over USB, insert a cartridge, open Cart Info to set or confirm the flash and RAM type for that cartridge, and then choose your action, backup ROM, backup save, write save, or write ROM. The device's 3.3 and 5 volt switch is set to suit the cartridge in the slot, and the manual that ships with the software explains the details. One warning saves a lot of confusion. There is a completely different product also sold under the Flash Boy name, the Flash Boy Cyclone, which is a clone of the popular GBxCart RW reader and is driven by other software such as FlashGBX. That software is excellent, but it is meant for the Cyclone and GBxCart hardware, not for this Backlight board. If you own the Backlight Flash Boy, GameBoy Cart Flasher is the program you want; if you try to pair it with the wrong tool you will simply chase errors. Which cartridges it reads For reading and dumping, the Flash Boy is happy with the vast majority of original Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges, the Game Boy Pocket titles included, since they are all electrically the same family. Reading is the easy half of the job, because the device only has to make sense of what is already there: it walks through the cartridge's memory and copies it out. Backing up the ROM and lifting the save off a genuine Pokemon cartridge, a Zelda, a Tetris, is precisely the sort of everyday task it was built for, and it does it reliably. Which cartridges it can write Writing is where people are most often caught out, so it is worth being precise. You cannot flash an ordinary retail cartridge; a real Nintendo game is a fixed mask ROM and can only be read. Flashing needs a rewritable cartridge, and not just any rewritable cartridge. The Flash Boy and its GameBoy Cart Flasher software speak to a specific type of flash chip, the classic AMD-style parallel flash used in the original homebrew cart designs: the AM29F016 for a 2 megabyte cart and the AM29F032 for a 4 megabyte one, paired with a genuine Nintendo memory-bank controller chip such as an MBC1, MBC3 or MBC5. That combination, an AM29F flash plus a real MBC, is exactly what the maker's own Flash Boy cartridges use, and it is the only kind the board knows how to program. Modern Flash Cartridges This is where a very common misunderstanding lives. It is tempting to assume that any MBC5 cartridge from an online marketplace will flash, but MBC5 describes the mapper, the chip that handles memory banking, and says nothing about the flash chip underneath. Many inexpensive modern flash carts are built around a small programmable-logic chip, a CPLD such as an Altera EPM240, standing in for the mapper and driving a flash chip that expects a different programming sequence entirely. Those CPLD-based carts are made for the GBxCart RW and FlashGBX world, and the Flash Boy cannot write to them, even though it can usually still read a game that is already on one. If you want to flash your own games with the Flash Boy, look specifically for a cartridge built on an AM29F016 or AM29F032 with a real MBC, not a generic CPLD board. Preservation, not piracy A device that copies games sits in a grey area, and it is worth being honest about that. The same tool that rescues a dying save can also duplicate a game, which is why backup devices have always lived on the edge of what publishers were comfortable with. In a collection like this one the Flash Boy earns its place firmly on the preservation side of the line. Its real value is keeping the fragile parts of these cartridges alive, the saves and the data that no factory will ever press again, and letting a curator verify exactly what is on a cartridge without wearing out the original by playing it. It is a modern instrument built for an old and quiet problem: the slow ticking of a thirty-year-old battery. To see the Flash Boy among the other backup and homebrew devices in the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.

The original Game Boy had one famous weakness: its appetite for AA batteries. That single problem spawned a whole cottage industry of power solutions, and this new arrival is one of the neatest of them. The Joyplus Handy Power II is a rechargeable pack that does away with the loose cells entirely. What It Is External power banks of the era were often criticised for being bulky, hanging off the console on a cable, so some makers took a tidier approach: build the rechargeable cells into a pack shaped to drop straight into the Game Boy's own battery compartment. The Handy Power II is exactly that. It replaces the four AA cells with a single rechargeable unit and gives up to around eight hours of play before needing a top-up. No trailing wires, no fistful of disposables, just a self-contained swap that keeps the console's clean silhouette intact. The Game Boy's battery appetite, finally satisfied without a fistful of AAs. Why It Joined the Collection The many ways people tried to keep the Game Boy running are a small, revealing theme in the collection, and the Handy Power II adds another chapter. It joins its own predecessor, the Handy Power I, a quick-charge external pack that is also catalogued here, so the two together show one maker iterating on the very problem that defined the handheld's daily use. Accessories like this rarely get remembered, yet they are precisely the objects that made the console livable, and documenting them keeps that everyday reality in view. The Joyplus Handy Power II is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: powering the Game Boy.