Most of the pieces in this collection began life on a shop shelf, made by Nintendo or one of its licensees. This one did not. It is a custom, one-off Game Boy dressed in the colours of Pikachu, and it was never an official product. I have included it on purpose, clearly marked as unofficial, because the story of the Game Boy is not only the story of what Nintendo sold. It is also the story of what fans made. Game Boy Fan Art Box - Special Pikachu Edition A Console That Never Was The Pikachu fan-art Game Boy is a custom-made bundle rather than a factory release. The console wears a Pikachu-inspired Pokemon design, and it comes as a complete set: the themed handheld, four AA batteries, the console manual, and a copy of the original Pokemon Yellow cartridge. It is presented as a single, cohesive Pikachu package, exactly the sort of thing Nintendo might have made, but never did in this form. It matters to be honest about what this is. Nintendo did release official Pokemon-themed hardware over the years, most famously a special yellow Pikachu Game Boy for later systems. But this particular piece is a fan creation, a lovingly customised tribute rather than a licensed product. In a museum, that distinction is important, and it is labelled as such wherever it appears. There is a personal reason too. Part of the joy of building this collection has always been chasing not just the obvious trophies, but the pieces that show how people actually lived with the Game Boy: the worn guides, the throwaway merchandise, and the things fans built for themselves. A custom Pikachu console fits squarely in that last group. It represents nobody's product line and appears in no catalogue, yet it captures something real about how deeply this little machine and its most famous game were loved. Why Include a Fan Piece at All A collection devoted only to official releases would tell an incomplete story. The Game Boy did not become a legend purely because of what came out of Nintendo's factories. It became a legend because of the passion it inspired: the modders, the artists, the tinkerers and the fans who could not stop making things in its image. Pokemon, in particular, generated a tidal wave of fan creativity, and a customised Pikachu console is a small, tangible piece of that wave. Pairing the custom console with Pokemon Yellow is fitting, because Yellow was the game that put Pikachu front and centre, following the player around as a companion in a nod to the wildly popular anime. If any pairing captures the Pokemon craze at its height, it is a Pikachu-yellow Game Boy with Pokemon Yellow slotted inside. It is worth pausing on just how enormous Pokemon was at this moment. By the late 1990s it had grown from a pair of Game Boy cartridges into a global phenomenon spanning an animated series, a trading-card game, films and a mountain of merchandise, with Pikachu as its instantly recognisable mascot. That reach is exactly why fan-made tributes like this one exist. When something is loved that intensely, people do not just consume it, they start making their own versions of it, stitching the thing they adore into objects of their own creation. Unofficial, but full of affection. The Line Between Official and Homemade Custom and modified Game Boys occupy a fascinating grey zone for collectors. On one hand, they are not rare in the way a sealed factory product is; anyone with skill and enthusiasm could make one. On the other, each is unique, a genuine one-off that will never be repeated exactly. Their value is not in scarcity of production, but in the story and craft behind the individual piece. That is why I treat pieces like this differently from the boxed, official hardware. They are not presented as investment-grade rarities. They are here as cultural artefacts, evidence of the affection the Game Boy and Pokemon inspired, and as a reminder that the community around a machine can be just as interesting as the machine itself. Spotting the difference between an official special edition and a custom piece like this is a skill in itself, and an important one for any collector. Factory hardware carries consistent moulding, official model numbers and matching packaging; a custom console, however lovingly made, shows the small tells of hand-finishing and one-off assembly. Being able to read those signs is how you keep a collection honest, and it is why this Pikachu Game Boy is catalogued plainly as the fan creation it is, never dressed up as something Nintendo shipped. A Small Tribute in the Collection This Pikachu Game Boy will never appear in an official Nintendo catalogue, and that is precisely the point. It sits alongside the licensed Pokemon items in the collection as an example of fan culture given physical form, a homemade love letter to two of the most beloved names in gaming. You can find it, and the official Pokemon hardware and games it pays tribute to, across the collection. This piece is part of Pokemon and the Game Boy, the museum's guide to the whole Pokemon corner.

Hold this arrival in your palm and two eras collapse into one. It is a Game Boy shrunk to the size of a keyring, and when you press its buttons it sings the music of Pokemon Red and Green, the games that turned a fading handheld into a worldwide craze. Nostalgia, quite literally, in miniature. What It Is This is a collectible miniature Game Boy from the Pokemon Game Music Collection series. It faithfully replicates the original DMG-01 design, right down to its silhouette, and it plays music and sound effects drawn from Pocket Monsters Red and Green, the Japanese originals of the games the West met as Pokemon Red and Blue. Charizard adorns the packaging, and the piece belongs to a broader line of Pokemon-themed collectibles, several of which sit in the collection. Pokemon Game Music miniature Game Boy DMG-01 collectible Closing the Loop There is a neat circularity to this little object. Pokemon began life on the Game Boy in 1996, arriving late in the console's life and single-handedly reviving its fortunes, selling the handheld all over again to a new generation. Decades later, a collectible like this sells that same partnership back to the grown-up fans of those children, a tiny Game Boy that exists only to remind you of the real one and the games that defined it. The music is the clever part: rather than show you Pokemon, it lets you hear the Game Boy, tapping the powerful, specific nostalgia that a few bars of an old chiptune can unlock. It also belongs to a wider modern craze for miniature consoles and capsule-toy collectibles, especially in Japan, where beautifully made small-scale replicas of classic hardware are a genre unto themselves. These pieces blur the line between toy, ornament and museum artefact, and choosing to build one around sound rather than a working screen is a lovely design decision, a reminder that for many people the Game Boy is remembered as much through its unmistakable bleeps and melodies as through anything they saw. Revive the classic Pokemon Sound Why It Joined the Collection Modern collectibles matter to the collection because they measure the Game Boy's afterlife, the proof that the console is still generating new objects and new affection decades after production ended. This miniature ties two of the console's biggest stories together, its hardware and Pokemon, in one pocket-sized piece, and it joins the collection's other Pokemon-themed items. Keeping it documents how the Game Boy lives on today, sold back to us in loving, shrunken form. The Pokemon Game Music miniature is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. This piece is part of Pokemon and the Game Boy, the museum's guide to the whole Pokemon corner.

By 1998 the original Game Boy was nearly a decade old and should have been fading away. Instead, a small yellow mouse gave it one last, enormous surge of life. This arrival is the Japanese original of Pokemon Yellow, the game that put Pikachu at the player's heels and sold in the millions. A 14-million-seller on a console the industry had already written off. Awkward. What It Is Pokemon Yellow: Special Pikachu Edition was released in Japan in 1998 and elsewhere in 1999 and 2000. This Japanese version is the original release of what the West came to know as Pokemon Yellow, and in Japan alone it sold around 1.549 million copies in 1998, one of that year's biggest hits. Its defining feature was Pikachu following the player around the map and reacting with visible emotions, which gave the game unusual warmth and personality on the monochrome Game Boy. It was marketed alongside the Game Boy Pocket Printer, including a Special Pikachu Edition printer that could print pages of the Pokemon picture book, and it went on to sell 14.64 million copies worldwide. The collection also holds the Pikachu console and the Pikachu Pocket Printer. Far more than just a game - a whole universe The Anime, Made Playable Pokemon Yellow was a special edition for a specific reason: it reshaped the original games to match the wildly popular animated series. Pikachu became your unavoidable starter, just as it is Ash's partner on television, and rather than sit in its ball it walked behind you, its on-screen face shifting between happiness and annoyance depending on how you treated it. That single touch, a creature with feelings trailing at your heels, gave a monochrome role-playing game a startling emotional pull, and it is a large part of why the edition is so fondly remembered. The wider story is even bigger. Pokemon arrived late in the Game Boy's life, in 1996, and single-handedly revived a console the industry had all but written off, driving a second wave of sales that carried the handheld to the end of the decade. Pokemon Yellow was the peak of that revival on the original hardware, and its tie-ins, the Pikachu-yellow console and the Special Pikachu Edition printer that could print your Pokedex, both in the collection, show how completely one franchise took over the Game Boy in its final years. A 14-million-selling game arriving on a supposedly obsolete machine is one of the most remarkable second acts in gaming history. Why It Joined the Collection Few games did more for the original Game Boy's later years than Pokemon Yellow, and holding the Japanese original, the version where it all started, documents that revival at its source. It ties directly to the collection's Pikachu console and Pikachu Pocket Printer, forming a little Pikachu cluster that shows how thoroughly the franchise reshaped the Game Boy. Preserving it keeps hold of the game that gave the console a triumphant final chapter. Pokemon Yellow is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. This piece is part of Pokemon and the Game Boy, the museum's guide to the whole Pokemon corner.

By the start of 1996 the Game Boy looked like a machine living on borrowed time. It was seven years old, its screen still glowed in four shades of grey-green, and the rest of the industry had raced ahead to 32-bit consoles, polygons and CD-ROM. Then a small studio in Tokyo released two cartridges about catching creatures in tall grass, and the ageing handheld suddenly had years of life left in it. The games were Pocket Monsters Red and Green, and the studio was Game Freak. What they began is now one of the largest entertainment franchises on Earth. At the time, though, it was the stubborn passion project of one man who liked bugs. A boy who collected insects Satoshi Tajiri grew up outside Tokyo in the 1960s and 70s, wading through streams and fields to collect insects. As the countryside was paved over for new housing, the ponds and woods where he had hunted beetles disappeared. Years later, when he imagined a game about creatures that children could catch, keep and swap, that childhood was the seed. Two monsters passing down a cable felt, to him, like two kids comparing jars of bugs. Tajiri and his colleagues at Game Freak spent roughly six years building the game. The studio was tiny and repeatedly ran short of money; several staff left, and Tajiri reportedly went without a salary for long stretches. Nintendo backed the project through Creatures Inc., and Shigeru Miyamoto himself mentored the team. Even inside Nintendo, few believed a role-playing game about trading monsters, arriving at the very end of the Game Boy's life, had any chance. Red, Green and the cable nobody used Pocket Monsters Red and Pocket Monsters Green arrived in Japan on 27 February 1996. One mischievous design decision sat right at the centre. There were 151 monsters to collect, but no single cartridge held them all: some species appeared only in Red, others only in Green. To fill the roster you had to find another player, join the two Game Boys with a link cable, and trade. That link cable had existed since 1989, used mostly to play Tetris head to head. Pokemon turned it into something social and essential. Trading was not a bonus feature, it was the whole point. Some creatures would only evolve after being traded, so even completing your own collection meant knocking on a friend's door. A children's game quietly became a network. The two versions also gave rise to a legend. A programmer tucked a final creature, Mew, into leftover memory late in development, and it did not appear in the official guides. Rumours of a hidden monster spread across playgrounds for years, and the mystery only made the games more irresistible. For those who wanted to put their Monster exchange to the extreme Blue, Yellow and Pikachu at your heels Later in 1996 came Pokemon Blue, first offered in Japan as a special edition with redrawn sprites and rewritten text. When the games finally reached the West in 1998, Nintendo used Blue's improved engine but kept the familiar Red and Green line-ups, releasing the pair internationally as Red and Blue. For most players outside Japan, that was the first Pokemon they ever met. Then, in 1998, came the most charming entry of the original run. Pokemon Yellow was tuned to match the wildly popular animated series. Your starter was Pikachu, and rather than sitting in its ball it followed you across the map, its expression changing depending on how you treated it. A small touch, but it turned a menu of statistics into something that felt alive. The little monsters that saved the machine The effect on the Game Boy was extraordinary. A console the industry had written off became the thing every child wanted, and Nintendo kept the hardware alive long enough to launch the Game Boy Color in 1998, with Pokemon leading the way. A franchise that began as one designer's memory of catching beetles went on to sell hundreds of millions of games and spawn an anime, a trading-card craze and a merchandising empire that has never really stopped. It is easy to forget, holding a modern Pokemon game, that all of this started on a monochrome handheld with a green screen and a cable dangling off the side. That is exactly why it belongs here. You can find these cartridges in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series. This piece is part of Pokemon and the Game Boy, the museum's guide to the whole Pokemon corner.

The Game Boy is remembered as a games machine, but it always had a second life in sound. Its audio hardware was almost comically simple: four thin channels, no orchestra, no warmth, just two square waves, a sliver of programmable wave and a channel of noise. And yet that tiny voice set off in two directions at once. It became an instrument that musicians still carry on stage today, and it became a muse that inspired records, tapes and radios out in the wider world. This page is the hub for both journeys, a single doorway into the whole strange story of the Game Boy and music. We have split The Sound of the Game Boy into two features. One looks inward, at the music people make on the console itself. The other looks outward, at the music the console inspired other people to make. They are two sides of the same coin, and you can read them in either order. Together they show just how far four little channels can travel once they escape the plastic shell. Part 1: The Game Boy as an instrument In the first part we hand the Game Boy a cartridge and let it sing. Trackers and sequencers like Nanoloop and Little Sound Dj turn the grey brick into a pocket studio, and a worldwide scene of chiptune artists has been writing, performing and releasing music on real Game Boys for decades. Part 1 explains how the hardware actually makes its sound, how those cartridges coax songs out of it, and why a handheld from 1989 is still taken seriously as an instrument. If you have ever wondered what it means to play the Game Boy rather than play on it, start here. The museum even keeps a Nanoloop NL13 cartridge on the shelves so you can see the tool behind the music. The collection keeps growing with MIDI hardware like the Arduinoboy and the Droneboy cartridge. Part 1: The Game Boy as an instrument The console that made music, then made the charts. Part 2: The Game Boy as a muse The second part turns the machine around. Here the Game Boy is not the player but the inspiration. In the early 1990s its bleeps climbed the UK Singles Chart on novelty hits, from a Tetris single produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber to a Super Mario Land dance record. The console went on to inspire cassette and vinyl oddities, mini players that only hum Pokemon tunes, fresh chiptune vinyl pressed decades later, and even radios built into Game Boy shells. Part 2 tells that story entirely through the records, tapes and players sitting in the collection, following one folk melody as it becomes a game theme, becomes a chart hit, and becomes a collectible all over again. Part 2: The Game Boy as a muse Whichever way you come at it, the Game Boy's sound turns out to be far bigger than its speaker. Pick a side and start reading, then come and explore the collection to hear the rest for yourself. The whole collection, piece by piece The two features above tell the story as a journey, in two directions you can read end to end. What follows is the same music strand laid out as a plain directory, grouped by theme, so you can skip the narrative and go straight to any single piece: the instruments, the makers who build them, the hardware that amplifies them, or the records the console left behind. Playing the grey brick: the tools and the makers The Game Boy as a Musical Instrument: LSDj, nanoloop and the Chiptune Scene: the standalone guide to the two instruments that started it all and the worldwide scene they fed. Meet HobbyChop: The Studio Keeping the Game Boy Singing: the small studio behind the Arduinoboy Pro and Droneboy, and the maker who keeps building new instruments for old hardware. Arduinoboy Pro, the Game Boy Goes MIDI: the open-source interface that wires the console into MIDI, syncs LSDj and nanoloop, and drives the mGB synth cartridge. Droneboy, Endless Tones on a Game Boy: a cartridge that holds notes instead of chasing them, turning the four channels into endless ambient pads. Giving it a voice: the hardware Turn It Up: the Sunsoft Sound Boy and the Nuby Amplifier: two accessories that set out to give the grey brick's thin mono speaker some real volume and bass. On the charts, on vinyl and on tape Doctor Spin, Tetris (1992 7-inch Single): the UK Top Ten novelty single built on the Tetris theme, secretly made by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Nigel Wright. Doctor Spin, Tetris (Cassette Single, CRCPS 4): the same hit in the humble cassette format most people actually carried. Disappearing Lines, Chiptune Music of Tetris: a 2021 vinyl LP of Tetris chiptune by Gamer Boy, a modern tribute pressed decades after the fact.

Three decades after the Game Boy first bleeped its way through Korobeiniki, someone still thought that sound was worth cutting into a slab of vinyl and shipping it out of a pressing plant in the Czech Republic. Disappearing Lines: Chiptune Music of Tetris is proof that the Game Boy's little voice never really stopped singing. This is a modern record, released in 2021 on Enjoy the Ride Records under the catalogue number ETT030. It is not a relic of the nineties. It is a present-day love letter to a sound that refuses to age out. A tribute, not a cash-in It is worth naming the difference between this record and the ones it shares a shelf with. The 1992 novelty singles, the Doctor Spin Tetris among them, were commercial opportunism of the most cheerful kind: take a tune everybody knew, add a beat, and sell it before the fad cooled. Disappearing Lines runs on the opposite impulse. It is a careful, affectionate re-recording of music its makers clearly treasure, made for an audience that already loves the source and wants to hear it done properly. That shift, from cash-in to tribute, tells you how the culture around the Game Boy has changed. What was once a throwaway jingle has become something people restore, re-record and press to heavyweight vinyl. The falling-block music has quietly graduated from novelty to canon. Chiptune, pressed in the Czech Republic, 2021. What is actually on the record The record collects the classic eight-bit Tetris music, re-recorded rather than merely lifted from the game. The A-side pairs the Main Theme with the Tetris Game Boy A-Type music, the Korobeiniki melody most people mean when they hum the Tetris tune. The B-side turns to the game's other moods: the Tetris Game Boy B-Type music and the Tetris Game Boy C-Type music, the alternative tracks that cycled in as you played. Anyone who spent long enough with a Game Boy will recognise all of it in an instant. These were the three musical settings you toggled between while the blocks fell, and hearing them lifted off the tiny speaker and given room to breathe on a full-sized record is a genuinely strange pleasure. The people who made it The music was programmed, mixed and mastered by an artist working as Gamer Boy, whose real name is Dave Marino. The sleeve credits its art direction to Ross Shotland, Michele Kaufman and Steven Wild. These are the marks of a proper release rather than a bootleg: named people, a real label, a catalogue number and a pressing plant, all in service of music that began its life inside a handheld game. It also says something that this exists on vinyl at all. In an age when the same tracks could live as a weightless streaming playlist, choosing to press them onto a physical disc, sleeve them, and ship the result from a plant in the Czech Republic is a deliberate act. It insists that this music deserves an object, in much the same way the 1992 novelty records once did. The long life of eight-bit sound There is a whole chiptune scene behind a record like this, a community of musicians who treat the sound chips of old consoles as instruments in their own right rather than as limitations to be escaped. To them the Game Boy is not a nostalgia object but a living tool, and pressing its music to vinyl is simply giving a real instrument its due. Placed next to its ancestors, Disappearing Lines closes a loop. The Doctor Spin Tetris single, the Ambassadors of Funk MC Mario CD and the Technician 2 vinyl all caught the Game Boy at the moment it first crossed over into pop. This record catches it decades later, still worth pressing and still worth the effort. And underneath all of them sits the same source: the Game Boy version of Tetris and its stubbornly perfect little soundtrack. Disappearing Lines: Chiptune Music of Tetris is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. This piece is part of The Sound of the Game Boy, the museum's full story of the console and music.

For all its charms, the original Game Boy was never going to win awards for its sound. A single small mono speaker gave the console a thin, tinny voice, easily lost on a noisy bus or in a busy living room. Yet the music pouring out of those cartridges was surprisingly rich, and players wanted to hear it properly. Two accessories, one official and one from the busy world of third-party add-ons, set out to fix exactly that. Why the Game Boy Needed a Sound Boost Here is a lovely quirk of the hardware. The Game Boy's built-in speaker is mono, but the console actually generates its music in stereo, which you can only hear through the headphone socket. That little jack is the key: it delivers fuller, louder, two-channel sound than the speaker ever could. Both of the accessories here plug into it, taking that better signal and pushing it through their own amplifier and speakers. The Sunsoft Sound Boy The Sunsoft Sound Boy is the more serious of the two. Licensed by Nintendo, it plugs into the Game Boy's headphone socket and runs the sound through a built-in amplifier and speaker, powered by its own pair of AA batteries. The result is noticeably louder audio with real bass behind it, turning the console's thin chirp into something with body. For a game with a great soundtrack, and the Game Boy had many, it was a genuine upgrade to the experience. You can see the Sunsoft Sound Boy in the collection. The Sunsoft Sound Boy: bolt-on bass and volume for the grey brick. The Nuby Amplifier The Nuby amplifier comes from the other side of the accessory world. Nuby was one of the great third-party makers of the era, turning out a whole range of clip-ons, cases, lights and add-ons for the Game Boy. Its amplifier takes the same approach as the Sound Boy, drawing sound from the headphone jack and pushing it through louder, fuller external speakers, but as part of a cheaper, cheerful lineup rather than an official product. It is a perfect example of how an entire cottage industry grew up around improving Nintendo's handheld. You can see the Nuby amplifier in the collection. The Nuby amplifier, one of many add-ons from the clip-on accessory era. Two Takes on the Same Problem Side by side, the Sound Boy and the Nuby amplifier tell a neat little story about the Game Boy accessory market. Nintendo and its partners offered a polished, licensed solution, while independent brands raced to offer their own cheaper alternatives, each competing for the pocket money of players who wanted a bit more from their console. Neither was essential, and that is exactly why they are such fun to collect: they are pure enthusiasm, gadgets made simply because someone thought the little grey machine deserved to be heard. A Louder Legacy There is a nice irony here. The Game Boy's sound chip, once boosted, is now celebrated in its own right, powering a whole genre of chiptune music made on original hardware. These humble amplifiers were early proof that people always wanted to hear that sound as loudly and richly as possible. Explore more curious add-ons across the collection. This piece is part of The Sound of the Game Boy, the museum's full story of the console and music.

In September 1992 a record crept into the British Top Ten that owed its melody to a nineteenth-century Russian folk song, its pulse to a Nintendo handheld, and its very existence to two men who spent most of their working lives filling West End theatres. The single was called, simply, Tetris. The act was called Doctor Spin. Almost nobody who bought it had any idea who Doctor Spin actually was. The seven-inch record you see here is that single: a small black disc that dragged a video game earworm onto the pop charts at a time when a console soundtrack troubling the Top Forty was very nearly unthinkable. Andrew Lloyd Webber's best-kept secret is on the B-side. A pseudonym with a very famous face Doctor Spin never existed. The name was a mask worn by two people who plainly recognised a hook when they heard one. The first was Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer behind Cats and The Phantom of the Opera and one of the most commercially successful writers of musicals who has ever lived. The second was the record producer Nigel Wright, a regular Lloyd Webber collaborator. Between them they took the Game Boy's most recognisable melody, gave it a four-to-the-floor beat, and released it into the wild as a novelty dance record. It is a genuinely odd thing to hold. The man responsible for some of the most performed theatre music of the twentieth century also has, tucked into his discography under an invented name, a Game Boy cash-in that reached number six. The collection has a habit of attracting footnotes like this one, and few of them are as satisfying. The tune everyone already knew The melody at the centre of the record was written by none of the people involved: not Lloyd Webber, not Wright, and nobody at Nintendo. It is Korobeiniki, a Russian folk song from the nineteenth century, its words drawn from a poem by the writer Nikolai Nekrasov. When the Game Boy version of Tetris needed music, its makers reached into the public domain, and Korobeiniki became the game's most famous tune, the one that keeps marching along under the falling blocks until you can hum it in your sleep. When the Game Boy gatecrashed the UK Singles Chart. By 1992 that melody had been heard on millions of Game Boys, in bedrooms and on buses and under a great many school desks. Doctor Spin did little more than give it a chorus and a drum machine and let recognition do the work. Released on 21 September 1992, the single climbed to number six on the UK Singles Chart. On the B-side sat a track called Play Game Boy, leaning as hard as it possibly could into the gadget that inspired the whole exercise. When the Game Boy gatecrashed the charts Tetris by Doctor Spin belongs to a small and very particular moment. In the early nineties, for a few strange years, video game music briefly escaped the console and turned up on the radio and on Top of the Pops. The Game Boy was at the peak of its cultural reach, Tetris was the game more or less everyone had played, and pop producers were paying attention. A folk melody, a plastic handheld and a theatre impresario in disguise added up to three minutes of chart pop. It did not arrive alone. Around the same time the Game Boy and Super Mario were quietly feeding a cottage industry of novelty records, from the Ambassadors of Funk and their MC Mario CD to the Technician 2 vinyl, each one repackaging a Nintendo property as dancefloor fodder. Placed side by side they form a genre in miniature: the sound of gaming barging its way into pop. The underlying game, the Game Boy version of Tetris, sits in the collection too, and it is worth remembering that all of this noise grew out of one small grey cartridge. A small disc worth keeping As an object the record is modest: a paper sleeve, a labelled disc, the kind of thing that once sat in bargain bins by the hundred. That ordinariness is part of why it matters. Novelty singles were treated as disposable, bought for a laugh and cleared out with the next tidy-up, which is exactly why clean surviving copies have quietly become scarce. A record designed to be forgotten has instead turned into a small piece of evidence: proof that in 1992 the Game Boy was famous enough to sell to people who had never once touched one. Doctor Spin's Tetris is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. This piece is part of The Sound of the Game Boy, the museum's full story of the console and music.

When the Game Boy landed in shops in 1989, Nintendo did not sell it just one way. Over the machine's long life it appeared in a whole family of different boxes, each aimed at a slightly different buyer, a different budget or a different Christmas. Some held nothing but the console. Others were stuffed with two or three games, a carrying bag or a film licence on the lid. For collectors, learning to read these boxes is half the fun, because the outer sleeve often tells you far more than the grey brick inside ever could. Here is a tour through the main kinds of Game Boy box sets, from the bare console to the elaborate multi-game bundles, with examples from the museum's own shelves along the way. The Plain Console Box At the simplest end sits the console-only box: the Game Boy, its earphones, a link cable in some regions, a manual and nothing more. This was the purist's purchase and, later, the budget option once games were sold separately as a matter of course. The original Japanese launch box carried only the hardware and its accessories, and the same idea travelled abroad in plainer regional packaging. You can see both the original Japanese DMG-01 console and the later plain European console box in the collection, and the contrast between the two is a neat lesson in how Nintendo trimmed the presentation as the Game Boy became a household name. A Couple of Game Boy Only Sets Single-Game Sets: The Tetris Effect The set that mattered most was the one packed with a game, and for the Game Boy that game was almost always Tetris. Bundling the puzzle hit with the hardware turned the console into an impulse buy for people who had never touched a video game, and it is widely credited with driving the machine into millions of homes. The European, British and North American versions of this Classic Tetris bundle all show the same trick at work, each with the local box art and pricing but the same irresistible offer inside. A single-game set is the sweet spot for many collectors: complete enough to feel like the real launch experience, but compact enough to display and to store. It is also where box variations between regions become obvious, since the same console shipped under quite different cover designs depending on where it was sold. Example of a single game set - US version with Tetris Dual-Game Sets A step up in generosity came the two-game sets. The Tetris and Super Mario Land pairing combined the console's defining puzzle game with its defining platformer, giving a new owner both halves of the early Game Boy identity in one box. Nintendo also leaned on Mario for value-led bundles like the Super Mario Land 1 and 2 set with a carrying bag, which wrapped two adventures and a way to take them out of the house into a single yellow package. The Gold and Tetris 2 console set shows the same dual-pack thinking applied to a special-coloured machine, where the hardware itself becomes part of the appeal. Two-game sets are where box designers had the most fun, since they had two logos, two heroes and often a themed colour scheme to play with on a single sleeve. Triple-Game Sets: The Star Sets The most lavish factory bundles carried three games, and in Germany these were sold under evocative names. The Super 3 Set, a German-only release from 1994, paired the console with Tetris, Mega Man II and The Amazing Spider-Man: a puzzle classic, an action favourite and a licensed hit all in one box. Its sibling, the Super Star Set, took a first-party route instead, bundling The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening with Super Mario Land 2. Three-game bundles were unusual, and because so much of their value rests on keeping every game with the console and its box, complete examples are genuinely hard to find today. These star sets are the trophies of the box-set world. They were expensive when new, tied to a single market, and easily broken up over the years as the games were sold on one by one, which is exactly why an intact one is such a prize. Rare Super Star Set with Spider Man, Mega Man and Tetris Theme Sets Finally there are the theme sets, built around a licence rather than a price point. The Star Wars bundle dressed the console in film branding to sell the machine to fans of the saga, while the Italian Classic Fire bundle is an example of a regional promotional set with its own distinct identity. These bundles are prized less for their contents than for their packaging, which turns a mass-produced handheld into a themed collectible. A Collector's Guide to Game Boy Box Sets So why does any of this matter once the shrink-wrap is long gone? Because with the Game Boy, the box is the document. A loose console tells you almost nothing, but a complete box set tells you the region it was sold in, the year it was current, the games Nintendo thought would sell it and the market it was chasing. That is why Game Boy box sets, especially the multi-game and theme editions, command such a premium: they are small time capsules, and every intact one is a little harder to find than the last. You can browse the console sets, bundles and star sets side by side in the full collection, where the boxes are photographed from every angle so you can compare how Nintendo sold the very same machine a dozen different ways.

The original Game Boy earned an affectionate nickname over the years: the grey brick. It was blocky, heavy and almost indestructible, and it looked more like a chunk of masonry than a piece of consumer electronics. So there is a delicious circularity to the fact that, in 2025, LEGO rebuilt the grey brick out of actual bricks. The LEGO Game Boy is a toy about a toy, and it is one of the most charming pieces of Game Boy merchandise ever made. The LEGO Game Boy: Bricks Meet the Brick Released on 1 October 2025 as set number 72046, the LEGO Game Boy is a display model aimed squarely at grown-up fans, carrying an 18-and-up recommendation. It is built from 421 pieces and priced at 59.99 US dollars, putting it firmly in LEGO's range of nostalgic adult collector sets rather than its children's toys. This is a model to build carefully and put on a shelf, not to bash around a playground. LEGO Game Boy - The "Grey Brick" made out of bricks What makes it special is the accuracy. The finished model stands about 5.5 inches tall, 3.5 inches wide and just an inch deep, which is close to a one-to-one match with the real 1989 handheld. LEGO recreated the details that made the Game Boy instantly recognisable: the directional pad, the round A and B buttons, the little Start and Select buttons, and even the contrast and volume dials. Hold it next to a genuine DMG-01 and the proportions line up almost exactly. Swappable Cartridges and a Clever Screen The best touches are the cartridges. The set comes with two brick-built Game Paks that slot into the back just like the real thing: Super Mario Land and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, two of the handheld's defining titles. Each cartridge pairs with its own lenticular screen tile that shifts as you tilt it, mimicking the look of the game in motion, and there is a separate Nintendo start-up screen too. Swapping a cartridge and watching the screen change is a small, satisfying echo of how the real machine worked. It is a clever way to solve the problem every static model of a screen-based device faces. A real Game Boy is defined by the moving image on its display, something a solid model can never show. By using lenticular tiles that appear to animate as your viewpoint changes, LEGO gave its motionless handheld a hint of life, and picked two games that instantly signal what the Game Boy meant to a generation. As a display piece it hits a very specific nerve. For anyone who owned a Game Boy in the 1990s, the shape alone is enough to summon a flood of memories: long car journeys, the whine of the link cable rivalry, the endless hunt for fresh AA batteries. A faithful model on a desk turns that memory into an object you can point to, and building it yourself, piece by piece, adds a slow, deliberate pleasure that a mass-produced replica could never match. The Game Boy from all sides The choice of the classic DMG-01 shape, rather than a later Game Boy, is telling too. It is the 1989 original, grey and boxy, that lodged itself in popular memory, and it is that silhouette LEGO chose to immortalise. Decades of slimmer, colourful successors came and went, but when a company wants a shape that instantly says "Game Boy", it still reaches for the humble grey brick that started it all. A Toy About a Toy The Game Boy set is part of a wider partnership between LEGO and Nintendo that has produced some wonderfully nostalgic models, including an earlier brick-built recreation of the Nintendo Entertainment System complete with a working brick television. These sets are not really playsets at all. They are three-dimensional tributes, aimed at the adults who grew up with these machines and now want to build and display a version of a cherished childhood object. The Game Boy, as one of the most beloved gadgets of its era, was an obvious and overdue choice. There is something fitting about celebrating the Game Boy in LEGO of all materials. Both are grey-era classics of clever, simple design; both are famous for being tougher and more enduring than they have any right to be; and both are objects that turned ordinary plastic into something people feel real affection for. A LEGO Game Boy is two icons of childhood engineering meeting in a single model. Nintendo has always been careful about how its characters and hardware are licensed, so an official LEGO version of the Game Boy is not a small thing. It sits alongside the company's other blessed tributes as a sign that Nintendo now sees its own history as something worth celebrating in premium, collector-focused form. For fans, that shift has been a gift, turning beloved old machines into new things to hunt down, build and display. Why It Belongs in a Game Boy Museum A museum devoted to the DMG-01 is not only about the original hardware; it is about the long cultural afterlife of the machine, the way it keeps reappearing in new forms decades after it was discontinued. The LEGO Game Boy is a perfect example, an official, modern tribute that proves the little grey brick is still beloved enough to be reborn, brick by brick, for a whole new audience.

Pick up a copy of Super Mario Land today and the first thing that strikes you is how familiar it looks: a small man in dungarees, running to the right, jumping on enemies. Play it for five minutes and the second thing strikes you: almost nothing is where it should be. There are no Mushroom Kingdoms here, no Princess Peach, no fireballs. Instead there are sphinxes, Moai heads, a submarine, an alien in a flying saucer, and a princess nobody had ever met before. Super Mario Land is the most gloriously strange entry in the whole series, and it was the game that helped a grey plastic brick conquer the world. A Launch Game That Almost Became the Pack-In Super Mario Land was one of the four launch titles for the Game Boy, first released in Japan on 21 April 1989 and in North America that August. It was developed not by Mario's creator Shigeru Miyamoto, but by Nintendo R&D1, the team behind the console itself. Game Boy inventor Gunpei Yokoi produced it, and Satoru Okada, who engineered the handheld, directed. It was the first mainline Mario game made without Miyamoto, and that hands-off distance explains a great deal about how odd the result feels. The plan was for Super Mario Land to be the game bundled with every Game Boy, the way Super Mario Bros. sold the NES. Then a Dutch businessman named Henk Rogers brought a certain falling-block puzzle to Nintendo of America and argued it would reach a far wider audience. Nintendo agreed, and Tetris became the pack-in instead. Mario had to be bought separately, and millions of people did exactly that. Not the Mushroom Kingdom: Welcome to Sarasaland Rather than the usual Mushroom Kingdom, the game unfolds across Sarasaland, a place split into four themed realms. The Birabuto Kingdom is a slice of ancient Egypt, the Muda Kingdom is an underwater world, the Easton Kingdom borrows the giant stone heads of Easter Island, and the Chai Kingdom evokes a storybook ancient China. Mario is not chasing Peach at all. He is racing to rescue Princess Daisy, making her debut here, from an alien tyrant called Tatanga who has hypnotised the population. The whole adventure is only twelve levels long, arranged as four worlds of three, and a determined player can finish it in well under an hour. It is drawn in a clean line-art style to stay legible on the tiny dot-matrix screen, where Mario himself stands barely a dozen pixels tall. Beat the game once and a harder mode unlocks, with more enemies packed into the same levels, plus the option to jump straight to any stage you like. Each realm brings enemies to match its theme, and they are unlike anything elsewhere in the series. Birabuto throws a fire-breathing sphinx-lion at you, Easton is guarded by hopping stone Moai and a boss who hurls the heads at Mario, and the seas of Muda swim with strange fish and seahorses. It is as if the developers, freed from the Mushroom Kingdom rulebook, raided a world atlas and a mythology encyclopedia and dropped the results into a Mario game. The effect is charming and slightly dreamlike, and it is a big part of why the game is remembered as such a singular oddball. Everything Mario, Slightly Wrong The joy of Super Mario Land is in its small heresies. The fire flower is replaced by the Superball flower, which arms Mario with a single bouncing black ball that ricochets around the screen at forty-five degree angles and can even collect coins. Stomp a Koopa Troopa and its shell does not slide, it sits and then explodes like a tiny bomb. Extra lives are hearts rather than green mushrooms. Even the flagpole is gone, swapped for a two-tier exit: reach the higher door and you drop into a ladder-style lottery minigame that hands out one to three extra lives or a power-up. The Shooter Levels Nobody Expected Strangest of all, two of the twelve levels are not platforming at all. They are forced-scrolling shoot-'em-ups in the mould of Gradius. In the Muda Kingdom, Mario pilots a submarine called the Marine Pop; in the finale he flies a small aeroplane, the Sky Pop, firing away at oncoming foes. The Muda boss is Dragonzamasu, a fearsome seahorse creature, and the collection even holds a rare promotional Dragonzamasu boss coin. The last stage has no ordinary exit at all: you must shoot down Tatanga in his airship to free Daisy and finish the game. Hip Tanaka's Pocket Symphony The music deserves its own paragraph. Composed by Hirokazu Tanaka, the Super Mario Land themes are so catchy that they escaped the console entirely. In 1992 the British act Ambassadors of Funk sampled the soundtrack for a novelty single called "Supermarioland" that climbed into the UK top ten, and Nintendo liked it enough to commission a whole album, Super Mario Compact Disco. Few Game Boy soundtracks can claim a genuine pop chart hit. The Numbers and the Legacy Super Mario Land went on to sell more than 25 million copies, making it one of the best-selling Game Boy games of all time and outselling even the standalone Super Mario Bros. 3. Its success spawned a sub-series: Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins arrived in 1992 and introduced a greedy, muscular anti-Mario named Wario, who promptly stole the spotlight and launched his own franchise. Princess Daisy, meanwhile, went from a one-off rescue target to a fixture of Mario's sports and racing games for decades to come. The game has never really gone away. It returned as one of the very first titles on the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console in 2011, complete with an optional green-tinted palette to mimic the original screen, and joined Nintendo Switch Online in 2024 so a new generation could meet Tatanga. The Superball flower even resurfaced decades later as an unlockable item in Super Mario Maker 2, a quiet nod to the strangest power-up Mario ever carried. Super Mario Land in the Collection The museum holds the game in more than one form, from the Western release to the original Japanese cartridge, alongside the Tetris and Super Mario Land console bundle, a period strategy guide and even a themed hard carrying case. Together they tell the story of the little launch game that proved Mario could fit in your pocket without losing his magic.

A console lives and dies by the games you can buy on the day it arrives. Launch software has a hard job: it must show off what the hardware is for, appeal to as many people as possible, and be finished in time. When the Game Boy went on sale in Japan on 21 April 1989, Nintendo answered with a small but carefully balanced set of titles. None of them were epics, yet together they made a quiet, confident argument for what portable gaming could be. Let us look at every one. Game Boy Launch Games (1989) The Game Boy Launch Games in Japan In Japan the Game Boy launched with four cartridges: Super Mario Land, Alleyway, Baseball and Yakuman. It is a telling little group. There is a flagship platformer to give the machine a face, a pick-up-and-play arcade game for quick bursts, a national sport for the mainstream, and a traditional table game aimed squarely at Japanese adults. In one small shelf of games, Nintendo covered children, commuters, sports fans and grandparents. That breadth was the whole point of the Game Boy. Super Mario Land The headline act was Mario's first handheld adventure. Curiously, it was not made by Shigeru Miyamoto's usual team but by Gunpei Yokoi's Nintendo R&D1, the group behind the Game Boy hardware itself, and that different hand shows. Mario travels through the unfamiliar kingdom of Sarasaland, rescues the newly introduced Princess Daisy from the alien villain Tatanga, and even pilots a submarine and a plane. It is a smaller, stranger, slightly off-model Mario, which is exactly why fans treasure it. It also sold in enormous numbers, well over eighteen million copies, proving a proper Mario platformer could live in your pocket. See Super Mario Land in the collection. All Time Classic: Super Mario Land Alleyway Every launch needs a game you can understand in five seconds, and Alleyway was it. A tidy Breakout-style block-breaker, it has you bouncing a ball to clear rows of bricks, ideal for a single stop on the train. Nintendo tied it gently to the family by framing Mario as the pilot of the paddle-ship, a small touch that made a generic genre feel like part of the world. It is pure, moreish arcade comfort food. See Alleyway in the collection. Mario, do not drop the ball! Baseball Baseball brought Japan's favourite sport to the little screen, but its quiet importance was technical. It was one of the first cartridges to show off the Game Boy's link cable, letting two players connect their consoles and face each other head to head. That idea, two handhelds joined for local multiplayer, would go on to shape everything from Tetris duels to Pokemon trades. Baseball planted the seed. See Baseball in the collection. Baseball - Japan's favourite sport on the Game Boy Yakuman The most revealing launch title is the one most Western players have never heard of. Yakuman is a game of Japanese mahjong, named after one of the highest-scoring hands in the game, and it never left Japan. Its presence at launch was a deliberate signal: the Game Boy was not only a children's toy but a companion for adults on the commute, who could enjoy a quick hand of mahjong, and even play against a friend over the link cable. It is the clearest proof of how carefully Nintendo aimed at every kind of buyer. See Yakuman in the collection. Yakuman - The Japanese Mahjong Classic The Western Launch: Tetris and Tennis When the Game Boy reached North America on 31 July 1989, the line-up shifted. Yakuman, so specific to Japanese tastes, was left behind, and two new titles joined the launch: Tennis and, most importantly, Tetris. Super Mario Land, Alleyway and Baseball carried over, giving the West a five-game opening day. Tetris Tetris was the masterstroke. Created by Alexey Pajitnov, the falling-block puzzle was bundled with the console in the West, and the reasoning was sharp: Mario appealed mainly to younger players, but Tetris appealed to absolutely everyone, from schoolchildren to their grandparents. Packing it in the box turned the Game Boy from a kids' toy into a universal habit, and it remains the single biggest reason the handheld became a worldwide phenomenon rather than merely a success. See Tetris in the collection. Tetris - From Russia With Fun! Tennis Rounding out the Western launch was Tennis, a clean, fast and surprisingly deep sports game that also supported two-player matches over the link cable. It hides a lovely piece of trivia: the umpire watching over your match, perched on the referee's chair, is none other than Mario himself. Little cameos like this were Nintendo's way of stitching its young mascot through the whole library, one game at a time. See Tennis in the collection. Game Boy Tennis with Mario as Mascot Why the Launch Line-up Still Matters to Collectors For a collector, the launch titles are the foundation stones of any Game Boy shelf. They are the games that were in the shops on day one, the ones early adopters actually carried home in 1989. Together they tell you what Nintendo believed the Game Boy was: a machine for absolutely everyone, from a child guiding Mario through Sarasaland to a commuter squeezing in a hand of mahjong. Finding them boxed and complete, especially the Japan-only Yakuman, is a satisfying way to anchor a collection in the console's very first moment. You can explore all of them, and much more, across the collection.