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.

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.

Not everything in the collection is old. This arrival is thoroughly modern, a pair of Bluetooth glasses that borrow the unmistakable look of the Game Boy Classic. It is here precisely because it is new, a reminder that the console's design language did not retire in the 1990s but has become shorthand for a whole era, still cool enough to sell present-day gadgets. The Game Boy look, now available for your face and your playlist. What It Is Made by Mutrics, these are audio smart glasses styled after the Game Boy. Small speakers and a microphone are built into the arms, so they handle hands-free calls and music directly on your face, and the lenses can be swapped out as needed. The nod to the Game Boy is in the styling rather than any shared function, but it is unmistakable, the grey palette and the familiar visual cues doing the work. It is a genuinely useful modern device wearing a very deliberate retro costume. Proof that the Game Boy's design outlived the Game Boy by decades. Why It Joined the Collection A collection about the Game Boy is really a collection about the Game Boy's cultural life, and that life is very much ongoing. Items like these glasses trace how the console's image keeps being reused decades after the hardware itself became obsolete: it has moved from being a product to being an aesthetic. Set beside the vintage merchandise, a modern piece like this makes the point better than any argument could, that the Game Boy's influence did not end when the last one left the factory. It sits happily among the collection's other modern Game Boy-inspired tech. The Smart Gaming Glasses are documented, with photographs, on their own page in the collection. More on this in the complete accessories guide.

For its first five years the Game Boy came in exactly one colour: a sensible, unremarkable grey. Then, in the mid-nineties, Nintendo decided the machine should have some attitude, and out came consoles like this one, a bold red Game Boy from the Play It Loud line, in its Spanish-market version. Red Play It Loud Game Boy from Spain (DMG-S-RA-ESP) What It Is Underneath the colour it is a standard original Game Boy, the DMG-01: a directional pad, A and B buttons, Start and Select, a monochrome green screen with no backlight, all running on four AA batteries. What sets it apart is the shell. This is the red entry in Nintendo's Play It Loud series, which dressed the same hardware in red, green, black, yellow, white, blue and a coveted transparent finish. The example here carries the Spanish market code DMG-S-RA-ESP, marking it out as the version sold in Spain, and coloured regional variants like this are exactly what console collectors chase. The Play It Loud Story Play It Loud was as much an advertising campaign as a product line. By 1994 the Game Boy was five years old and facing colourful, backlit rivals, so Nintendo repositioned it not on technology, which it could not win on, but on personality, with a run of loud television and print adverts and a rainbow of shells that turned the console into a fashion statement. It was a canny move: rather than pretend the ageing hardware was cutting-edge, Nintendo sold it as cool, and it worked, extending the original Game Boy's life for years. A red unit like this is a physical piece of that strategy, the moment a grey brick decided to have a personality. The colours also make the series a natural collecting challenge, because the various shades were rolled out differently across regions, so hunting down each one, market by market, becomes a small treasure hunt. The clear version is the trophy, prized for showing the circuit board inside, but the solid colours have their own devoted following, and the Spanish red is a handsome, less common entry in the set. Gathered together, the Play It Loud consoles tell the story of a machine that refused to grow old quietly. Why It Joined the Collection The Play It Loud line is a story the collection tells in colour, and each regional shade fills in another square of the picture. This Spanish red deepens that set and documents how Nintendo's mid-90s reinvention of the Game Boy played out market by market across Europe. Set beside the collection's other Play It Loud consoles, it helps show the full spread of Nintendo's attempt to sell the DMG-01 as a lifestyle object rather than merely a games machine. The red Play It Loud console is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: the Play It Loud colours.

The best measure of how famous a product has become is when companies that have nothing to do with it start borrowing its shine. This new arrival is a small, delightful proof of that: an Italian advertisement in which the Game Boy is the prize in a draw run not by a games company at all, but by the well-known beverage brand San Pellegrino. What It Is The page ties the Game Boy to a consumer prize promotion, using the console as the desirable reward that draws people to a completely unrelated product. It is a clear sign of how thoroughly the handheld had entered popular culture: by this point the Game Boy was recognisable and wanted enough that a drinks company could put it at the centre of its own marketing and expect shoppers to respond. As a piece of advertising it is unusual precisely because Nintendo is not really the one doing the selling. Why It Joined the Collection Cross-brand marketing like this is easy to miss and hard to keep, yet it says something official advertising never can: it shows the console from the outside, as the wider world saw it. An advert placed by Nintendo tells you how Nintendo wanted the Game Boy to be seen; an advert placed by a drinks company tells you how far the machine's fame had spread beyond gaming altogether. That outside-in view is exactly why this page belongs among the collection's other period advertisements, an unusual example that broadens the whole picture. This Italian advertisement is documented, with a full scan, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: Game Boy advertising.

Advertising Star Wars in Japan There is a particular thrill in seeing a galaxy far, far away squeezed onto a screen the size of a matchbox. This arrival is a Japanese advertisement for the Star Wars Game Boy game, and it makes the pitch with a straight face: the biggest film franchise on Earth, now in the palm of your hand, in four shades of grey. What It Is This Japanese advert pairs original film imagery with promotion for the handheld game, listing Micro World as the title's local Japanese publisher. Luke, Leia and Han Solo anchor the advert firmly in the film's universe, while smaller screenshots showcase the actual Game Boy action. It is a neat example of early-nineties marketing that sold Game Boy titles as extensions of major cinema franchises, leaning on the movie's stars to carry a monochrome game. The American advertisement for the same title and the game itself are also held in the collection. Hollywood on a Handheld The Star Wars Game Boy game was developed by Capcom, a studio with a real gift for turning licences into genuinely good action games, and the result was one of the more respected film tie-ins on the platform. That matters, because the era was awash with cynical movie cash-ins, and an advert like this had to promise more than a famous logo. Placing photographs of the film's heroes beside gameplay screenshots is a careful balancing act: reassure the fan that this really is Star Wars, while quietly proving there is a playable game underneath the branding. There is a nice regional side-story in the publisher credit. In Japan the game was handled by a local publisher, Micro World, a reminder that Western franchises often reached Japanese shelves through a chain of licensing deals invisible to the player. Comparing this Japanese advert with its American counterpart, both in the collection, shows how the very same game was dressed up for two utterly different audiences, the imagery and emphasis shifting to suit each market's tastes. Why It Joined the Collection Advertising is where the Game Boy meets the wider culture it borrowed from, and film tie-ins are a vivid part of that. This Japanese Star Wars advert documents how a blockbuster licence was sold to Japanese players, and it forms a small trio with the collection's American advert and the game itself, letting the marketing and the product be studied together across two regions. Preserving the paper keeps the pitch alongside the plastic. The Japanese Star Wars advert is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: Game Boy advertising.

Hard to find: The Naki Master Pak all-in-one Game Boy accessory set The original Game Boy left a lot of room for improvement, and a whole industry rushed to fill it. Most makers sold their fixes one at a time. Naki had a bolder idea: put nearly all of them in a single box. This arrival, the Naki Master Pak, is one of the most comprehensive accessory sets the Game Boy ever had. What It Is The Master Pak gathers a small army of add-ons under one lid: an adjustable magnifying glass with a built-in light (the Brite Beam), a cleaning kit (the Eliminator), an AC adapter, a shoulder bag (the Pro Pouch), a battery pack (the Action Pak) and a replacement decorative screen cover (the Cool Screen). It is essentially a starter kit for taking the Game Boy seriously, everything a keen player might buy over months, sold in one go. Several of those Naki pieces, including the Cool Screen and the Action Pak, are also catalogued individually in the collection, which makes the complete set a satisfying centrepiece for them. The Third-Party Gold Rush The Master Pak only makes sense against the backdrop of the early-nineties accessory boom. The Game Boy's very shortcomings, its dim, unlit screen, its hunger for batteries, its tiny display, created an enormous market for third-party makers, and companies like Naki, Nuby and Joyplus competed to solve the same handful of problems in ever more elaborate ways. Naki's answer was to stop making the customer choose: rather than sell a light, or a magnifier, or a battery pack, it sold all of them at once. The playful sub-brand names, Brite Beam, Eliminator, Pro Pouch, Action Pak, are pure period marketing, each mundane accessory given a superhero-style title. Complete boxed sets like this are far harder to find than the individual parts, precisely because they were meant to be broken open and split up: the light lived on the console, the bag went travelling, the cleaning kit ended up in a drawer. An intact Master Pak, with all its oddly named components still together, is a rare survivor and a perfect snapshot of an era when the accessories for a Game Boy could cost as much as the Game Boy itself. Why It Joined the Collection The third-party accessory scene is one of the richest and most overlooked parts of the Game Boy story, and the Master Pak captures it in a single object. It also anchors a little cluster in the collection, tying together the individual Naki pieces already catalogued and showing how a maker packaged its whole range. Keeping a complete set preserves not just the hardware but the ambition behind it, one company's attempt to sell the entire Game Boy experience in one confident box. The Naki Master Pak is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the complete accessories guide.

Most Game Boy cartridges are content to sit still and wait for your thumbs. This latest arrival is different: it can feel which way you tip it. The Tilt Sensor Game Pack is one of the more unusual pieces of official Nintendo hardware, a cartridge with a genuine motion sensor built in, and it earns its place in the collection for a reason that has as much to do with history as with the game inside. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble Tilt Sensor What It Is Inside the cartridge is an accelerometer, a small component that senses the console's position and how quickly it is being moved. That is not something a normal Game Boy game ever needed, because the machine's only inputs were meant to be its buttons. Here, the tilt of the whole console becomes a control in its own right. The pack was made for one game in particular, Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, in which you guide Kirby by physically leaning and tilting the Game Boy rather than pressing a direction on the pad. It is a small, self-contained experiment in motion control, years before such things became commonplace. A Curious Footnote in the DMG Numbering There is a wrinkle that makes this piece especially interesting to a collector focused on the original Game Boy. The Tilt Sensor Game Pack only actually works on the Game Boy Color, yet it carries a DMG number, DMG-20, tying it by its code to the original 1989 hardware family. More than that, it is the last item ever to follow the original DMG coding scheme. Every product Nintendo released for the platform had been catalogued under that system, and this cartridge sits right at the end of the line, quietly closing a numbering convention that had run since the beginning. For anyone documenting the DMG-01 and its family, that gives it a significance out of all proportion to its size. DMG-20 but for Game Boy Color Why It Joined the Collection Two threads made this one an easy decision. The first is the technology: a cartridge that reads movement is a lovely example of how far makers were willing to push a machine built around four grey shades and a handful of buttons. The second is that quiet record it holds as the final DMG-numbered product, a bookend to the whole coding story the collection tries to document. Together they turn what could look like an offbeat Kirby accessory into a genuinely meaningful piece, one that speaks both to the platform's inventiveness and to the tidy way its history was catalogued. The Tilt Sensor Game Pack is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the complete accessories guide.

Not every arrival earns its place by being good. Some earn it by being gloriously, memorably bad. This one carries one of gaming's most glamorous names and one of the Game Boy's most fearsome reputations: Dragon's Lair, a game as notorious for its difficulty as its brand is celebrated. Dirk - A hero on the wrong platform What It Is Dragon's Lair: The Legend is often listed among the most notoriously difficult and lowest-rated games in the entire Game Boy library, and that reputation is exactly what makes it memorable. Despite the famous Dragon's Lair name, the Game Boy release is not a LaserDisc-style reaction game but a side-scrolling platformer, and one that many players found punishing to the point of real frustration. The gulf between the legendary arcade brand and the harsh handheld gameplay has turned it into a genuine curiosity for collectors. A Famous Name, a Different Game To understand why this cartridge is such an oddity, you have to know what Dragon's Lair meant. The original 1983 arcade machine was a sensation, a game that looked like a Don Bluth cartoon, its hand-drawn animation stored on LaserDisc, where players tapped inputs at the right instant to steer the hero Dirk through a fairytale castle. It was unlike anything else, and its name carried real prestige. Slapping that name on a conventional, and brutally hard, monochrome platformer was a classic case of a licence promising one experience and delivering something completely different. Dragon's Lair - Notoriously Difficult and Unfair This is where collecting gets interesting, because a game's badness can be as historically valuable as another's brilliance. Notoriously difficult and poorly received titles are part of the honest record of any platform; they show the misfires, the cynical licences and the design misjudgements alongside the classics. Dragon's Lair on the Game Boy has become a cult object precisely because of its reputation, the kind of game collectors seek out to experience its infamous difficulty for themselves. A collection that kept only the acclaimed games would be telling a flattering half-truth; keeping this one tells the whole story. Why It Joined the Collection An honest archive documents the flops as faithfully as the classics, and Dragon's Lair is one of the Game Boy's most famous flops. Its notorious difficulty and its wide gap between brand and reality have made it a cult curiosity, and preserving it keeps a genuinely infamous cartridge on the shelf. Sometimes the most memorable pieces are the ones players remember for all the wrong reasons. Dragon's Lair is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: the games that made the Game Boy.