The Game Boy was built to be played in the palm of your hand, so there is something quietly wonderful about an official device whose whole purpose was to put its games on the living-room television. This arrival is that device: the Game Boy Player, the last piece of official Nintendo hardware made to run original Game Boy cartridges on a home console. Game Boy Games on the Nintendo GameCube What It Is The Game Boy Player plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games through the Nintendo GameCube. The unit, catalogued as DOL-017, clips onto the high-speed port on the underside of the GameCube and is driven by a boot disc (DOL-006) that you load like an ordinary game. Crucially, it does not emulate the Game Boy at all: inside, it contains hardware almost identical to a Game Boy Advance, so the games run on real silicon rather than software imitation. It joins the Super Game Boy and the Transfer Pak in the collection's small family of cross-console adapters. The End of a Lineage Nintendo had form for this. Back in 1994 the Super Game Boy let players run Game Boy cartridges through the Super NES and see them on a television, in colour borders no less. The Game Boy Player is the last chapter of that same idea, arriving nearly a decade later on the GameCube, and it is the final time Nintendo officially built dedicated hardware to bridge its handheld and home worlds. The choice to pack in real Game Boy Advance hardware rather than emulate is telling: Nintendo wanted the games to look and feel exactly right, not merely close, a small point of pride at the end of a long line. The boot-disc quirk is a nice piece of trivia in itself: the adapter is useless without its little DOL-006 disc, so complete, working setups depend on a small optical disc surviving alongside the hardware, which is exactly the sort of thing that gets separated and lost. That fragility is part of what makes a full Game Boy Player setup satisfying to document. It represents the moment the original Game Boy's games made their last officially sanctioned jump onto the big screen. DOL-006 - The Software Piece for the Adapter Why It Joined the Collection The ways people connected the Game Boy to other machines are a fascinating strand of its story, and the Game Boy Player closes that strand with a full stop. Set alongside the Super Game Boy and the Transfer Pak, it completes the collection's picture of how Nintendo repeatedly bridged its handheld and console lines. Preserving it, ideally with its boot disc, keeps the final official chapter of that idea intact. The Game Boy Player is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: playing Game Boy games on your TV.

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

Some of the collection's most touching objects are also its smallest and cheapest. This arrival cost fifty yen when it was new, a handful of loose change, and it was never meant to outlive a school term: a little Super Mario Land cap eraser, handed to Japanese Mario fans around the game's launch in 1989. What It Is Around the release of the hit game Super Mario Land, Nintendo offered these cute cap erasers to Mario fans in Japan for fifty yen each. Small promotional trinkets like this, produced in 1989, are the definition of ephemeral, cheap, plentiful and completely disposable, which is exactly why so few survive. A surviving example is a charming piece of very early Game Boy merchandise, and it joins the collection's other Super Mario Land curiosities. 1989 Super Mario Land cap eraser Japan promo The World of the Keshigomu There is a whole culture behind an object like this. In Japan, the character eraser, the keshigomu, was a playground institution: cheap moulded rubber figures of popular characters that children collected, traded and occasionally even used to rub out a mistake. Nintendo, alert as ever to its youngest fans, folded Mario into that world, turning a fifty-yen impulse buy into another small thread connecting children to the games they loved. The eraser was merchandising at its most grassroots, not a pricey statue for adults but pocket-money joy for kids. The timing is what gives it real weight. Nineteen eighty-nine was the Game Boy's birth year, and Super Mario Land was one of the games that launched it. To hold a piece of merchandise from that exact moment, however humble, is to hold a fragment of the Game Boy's very first wave of cultural impact, before anyone knew how big it would all become. That the survivor is a fifty-yen eraser rather than something grand only makes it more evocative, a reminder that the phenomenon began with children and their pocket money. Why It Joined the Collection The most disposable objects are often the hardest to preserve and the most revealing to keep, and this eraser is a perfect example. It documents the everyday, pocket-money side of the Game Boy phenomenon at its very beginning, and it sits among the collection's other Super Mario Land pieces as one of the earliest. Keeping it holds on to a scrap of 1989 that was never supposed to last. The Super Mario Land cap eraser is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: the wild world of Game Boy merchandise.

A Game Boy that plays nothing and just tells the time. Peak 1995 logic. The Game Boy's silhouette is so iconic that companies have spent decades stamping it onto things that have nothing to do with games. This arrival is a charming early example: a tiny Game Boy that hangs from your keys and, instead of playing anything, simply tells you the time. What It Is The Time Boy is a Nintendo-licensed miniature replica of the Game Boy that works as a keychain clock with an alarm function. Mani Industries offered it in a range of colours from 1995, turning the console's shape into a small, wearable gadget. The same maker also produced the Calculator Boy, a matching miniature that turns the Game Boy into a working calculator, and which is catalogued alongside it in the collection. The Game Boy as a Shape What the Time Boy really demonstrates is how quickly the Game Boy stopped being just a console and became a recognisable form, an outline so familiar that it could carry any function at all. A clock, a calculator, a keychain: the actual purpose barely matters, because the whole appeal is that it looks like a Game Boy. As early as 1995, while the real console was still selling strongly, its design had already become a piece of pop-culture shorthand that other products could borrow to feel fun and current. Does everything a Game Boy does, except the games. But it is adorable. The pairing with the Calculator Boy is the delightful part. Together they form a tiny family of Game Boy-shaped gadgets that do everything except play games, a little joke about a games machine repurposed for the most mundane office tasks. Small novelties like these, made to dangle from a keyring and take daily knocks, rarely survive in good condition, so a clean example with its colour intact is a nice, and genuinely uncommon, find. It is a miniature monument to the moment the Game Boy became a design icon. Why It Joined the Collection Novelty items that borrow the Game Boy's shape document how completely the console entered popular culture, and the Time Boy is a lovely 1995 example. It pairs directly with the Calculator Boy from the same maker to form a small set of Game Boy-shaped gadgets, and preserving it keeps a charming, easily-lost piece of the console's rise from games machine to design icon. The Time Boy is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: the Game Boy in disguise.

When a console launches in a new territory, the first thing many people read about it is not a review but the maker's own magazine. This arrival is one of those: issue 1990/02 of Club Nintendo, the French edition, capturing the moment Nintendo introduced the Game Boy to its fan community around the European launch. French Club Nintendo magazine 1990/02 Game Boy feature What It Is Nintendo France gave over a full section of this Club Nintendo issue to the Game Boy, presenting the console, its early games and its accessories to French readers as the handheld arrived in Europe. Club Nintendo magazines were official, fan-facing publications, so this is not third-party coverage but Nintendo speaking directly to its own audience, setting the tone for how the Game Boy would be understood in that market. It is the French counterpart to the German special edition already held in the collection, the same launch moment seen through another country's pages. Why It Joined the Collection Launch-era publications are among the most valuable documents a collection can hold, because they freeze a first impression in print, before anyone knew how the story would end. Pairing the French issue with its German sibling builds a small comparative record of how Nintendo introduced the same machine to different European audiences at the same time. That is exactly the kind of cross-market detail this collection tries to preserve, and a period magazine, dated and official, does the job beautifully. Club Nintendo 1990/02 is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: the Game Boy in print.

The collection has a whole shelf of devices for playing Game Boy games somewhere other than a Game Boy, but this arrival does something none of the others quite dared: it carries the handheld's library onto a rival's machine. The Innovation Super GB Booster is a small adapter that let owners of the original PlayStation play Game Boy games on their television. Unofficial, a little cheeky, and all the more fun for it. What It Is Made by Innovation Technologies, the Booster supports both original Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles, and it even includes a built-in cheat device that works with most games. In practice it turned Sony's grey console into a Game Boy player, projecting the handheld's tiny screen onto a full-size TV by way of a machine Nintendo would certainly never have chosen for the job. It is an unofficial, slightly cheeky piece of engineering, and all the more interesting for it. Why It Joined the Collection What makes the Booster stand out among the collection's cross-console adapters is the boundary it crosses. The others, like the official Super Game Boy and the N64 Power Flash, all kept the Game Boy comfortably inside the Nintendo family, moving its games onto other Nintendo hardware. This one leaves that family entirely and lands on a competitor's console, which is exactly why it is worth documenting: it is proof of just how much demand there was to keep playing Game Boy games, on any screen at all, even one belonging to the opposition. The Innovation Super GB Booster is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: the complete accessories guide.

Some of the most evocative Game Boy memorabilia never went near a cartridge slot. This arrival is a case in point: a licensed sticker set sold by Merlin in 1992, from the same wave of Nintendo licensing that put the console's characters onto every kind of childhood object. 276 stickers of NES and Game Boy heroes, straight from the playground trading floor. What It Is The set holds two hundred and seventy-six stickers featuring characters and screenshots from the NES and Game Boy games of the day. It is the kind of thing children pored over and traded in the playground, and it belongs to the same 1992 licensing push as the Merlin sticker album already held in the collection. Together the two are a small window onto how Nintendo's properties saturated everyday life in the early nineties, spilling far beyond the games themselves. Why It Joined the Collection Merchandise like this documents the Game Boy's cultural reach as vividly as any console. Stickers, by their nature, were meant to be peeled and used up, so a complete, unstuck set is genuinely uncommon and quietly precious. Pairing this collection with the matching album builds out a little Merlin cluster, and it keeps the softer, more ephemeral side of the Game Boy's story, the part made of paper and playground trades, part of the record rather than lost to it. The Merlin sticker collection is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: the sticker and trading card craze.

A boxed bundle is a fragile thing. The moment it reaches a living room it tends to fall apart: the console goes in a bag, the games migrate to a shelf, the outer box is flattened for recycling. That everyday scattering is exactly why this arrival is uncommon, a UK Game Boy bundle that pairs the grey handheld with two cartridges, Tetris 2 and Golf, still together in one boxed set. UK Bundle: Game Boy Golf and Tetris 2 bundle box What It Is This is a British market bundle from around 1994, built around the original Game Boy and two games chosen to show off its range: Tetris 2, the sequel to the puzzle game that defined the console, and Golf, one of Nintendo's earliest handheld sports titles. Sets like this were assembled for a particular region or a seasonal push, often the run-up to Christmas, and sold as a ready-made gift. Their value to a collector lies precisely in staying whole: the specific pairing of games and the original packaging are the whole point, and both are the first things to be split up and lost over thirty years. The Story Behind the Bundle There is a good reason a Game Boy bundle so often has Tetris on the label. When Nintendo of America was preparing the console's Western launch, it was Minoru Arakawa's team that pushed to pack in Tetris rather than a Mario title, betting that a simple, endlessly replayable puzzle game would sell the hardware to absolutely everyone, not just children. The bet paid off spectacularly: Tetris and the Game Boy became inseparable, and the puzzle game is widely credited with turning the handheld into a mass-market phenomenon that adults on commuter trains bought as readily as kids. Bundling a Tetris game with the console, as here, was Nintendo leaning on that same instinct years later. The other cartridge, Golf, is a quieter kind of landmark. It descends directly from Nintendo's 1984 Famicom golf game and was one of the titles that proved the Game Boy could host a whole spread of genres, not just action and puzzles. Pairing a proven crowd-pleaser with a solid everyday sports game is classic bundle logic: one title to excite, one to broaden the appeal. It is a small snapshot of how Nintendo thought about selling the machine in Europe in the mid-nineties. Why It Joined the Collection Region-specific bundles are one of the collection's favourite threads, because they show how the same console was packaged and sold differently from country to country. A complete, intact British set is far harder to find than the loose console or the loose games, since the whole thing was designed to be taken apart on Christmas morning. Keeping it whole preserves a small, very ordinary piece of how the Game Boy was actually marketed and gifted in the United Kingdom, the box, the pairing and the promise all still together. The Golf & Tetris 2 bundle is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in collecting box sets and bundles.

Few things capture the flavour of early-90s Game Boy mania quite so literally as this. The latest arrival is a set of Nintendo-licensed Game Boy trading cards from 1993, released by Amurol and hidden inside little chewing-gum boxes shaped, of course, like a Game Boy. What It Is There were ninety-six cards in total, spread across four series, which kept children and collectors alike hunting for the ones they were missing. Each card pictured an iconic Game Boy title, Super Mario Land, Metroid or Kirby's Dream Land among them, with a short game tip printed on the back, so the set doubled as a scrap of strategy guidance as well as a collectable. The gum was the hook; the cards were the point. Unsurprisingly, they quickly gained cult status, and they remain coveted today as a small, sugary time capsule of the 8-bit era. Trading cards hidden inside gum boxes shaped, of course, like a Game Boy. Why It Joined the Collection Licensed novelties like these are the connective tissue between the Game Boy and the wider childhood culture of the time, and they are exactly what a collection about the console's cultural life should preserve. Being consumable, gum and paper both, they were never meant to survive, which makes clean examples genuinely hard to find. Keeping them on the shelf holds on to the everyday, playground side of the Game Boy phenomenon, the part that was as much about collecting and trading as it was about playing. The Amurol Game Boy bubble gum and cards are documented, with photographs, on their own page in the collection. Read the full story: the sticker and trading card craze.

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

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

Some games are loved far more than they ever sold, and this arrival is one of them. Mario's Picross is one of the Game Boy's great cult puzzle titles, the game that introduced Nintendo's Picross series to Western players, and the copy joining the collection is the original German-market release. Mario's Picross - German Version (NOE) What It Is Picross is the addictive picture-logic puzzle in which you reveal a hidden image by working out which squares in a grid to fill in, guided by number clues. Mario's Picross, released in 1995, brought that idea to the Game Boy with Nintendo's polish and its most famous mascot on the box. It was, by common consent, an excellent game. Yet despite the quality it sold poorly outside Japan, poorly enough that its immediate sequels stayed Japan-exclusive for years, leaving Western fans to discover the series properly only much later. The original Japanese version of Mario's Picross Why It Joined the Collection This German NOE version is a lovely regional piece, Nintendo's own original release, into a market, of a game that would only be fully appreciated internationally much later. The collection already holds the Japanese original, Mario no Picross, so having the German edition alongside it captures both ends of the game's uneven journey: a hit at home, a quiet miss abroad, and a cult favourite in hindsight. A game whose commercial story is as interesting as its puzzles is exactly the kind that rewards being documented rather than merely owned. Mario's Picross is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the games that made the Game Boy.