A 1989 handheld was never supposed to end up patched into a modern studio, blinking in time with a laptop and a rack of synthesizers. Nobody at Nintendo drew that on a whiteboard. Yet here it is on the bench: a Game Boy, a five-pin MIDI cable, and a small black box that quietly makes the two speak the same language. The box is an Arduinoboy Pro, and it is the newest music curiosity to join the collection. The Arduinoboy Pro is an open-source interface that connects the Game Boy to MIDI, and it turns the grey brick into something it was never sold as: a real, syncable instrument that slots into a rig full of gear built decades later. The link cable dreamed of this: a Game Boy that answers to MIDI clock. From a link cable to a MIDI cable The whole trick starts at the link port, the little connector on the side of the Game Boy that Nintendo intended for two-player Tetris. The Arduinoboy plugs into that port and can even draw its power from the console, so there is no wall wart and no extra battery to babysit. On the other side sits a standard five-pin DIN MIDI socket, the same connector that has tied studios together since the early 1980s. Between the two lives an Arduino, the open hardware platform that gives the device its name. The concept is the work of Timothy Lamb, better known in chiptune circles as trash80. Because the whole design is open source, it has been built, tweaked and re-boxed by makers all over the world for years, which is part of why it has become a small standard in the Game Boy music scene. Yes, it syncs. No, it will not apologize for the square waves. One button, several modes A single push button cycles the Arduinoboy through its modes, and each one teaches the Game Boy a different trick. In the most common one it slaves a Game Boy running Little Sound Dj, the legendary tracker better known as LSDj, to an external MIDI clock or a DAW. That means the handheld starts, stops and stays in time with everything else on the session, with control over the sync resolution and over MIDI start and stop. There is a dedicated LSDj MIDIMAP mode as well, and a mode that syncs Nanoloop, the other great Game Boy music tool. Nanoloop players can point the same box at their cartridge, and if you want to see where that software lineage leads, the museum already documents the pocket-sized Nanoloop NL13 elsewhere in the hardware guide. There are several modes in all, around seven depending on how you count them, and the beauty is that switching between them is a matter of one thumb and a blinking light rather than a menu dive. mGB: the Game Boy as a synth The mode that tends to make people lean in is mGB. mGB is a Game Boy cartridge program, also written by trash80, that turns the console into a MIDI-controlled sound module. Load the cartridge, connect the Arduinoboy, and the Game Boy stops being a self-contained music box and becomes a voice you play from a keyboard, a sequencer or a DAW. It hands you full control of the console's sound hardware: the two pulse channels, the wavetable channel and the noise channel that together define the Game Boy's voice. mGB mode: hold my juice box, I am a synthesizer now. There is even a poly mode that lets you play the Game Boy like a synthesizer, chords and all, rather than one line at a time. It is a strange and lovely thing to hear a machine designed for bleeps and bloops answer a full-sized MIDI controller. The HobbyChop Pro build This particular unit is the Pro build from HobbyChop, finished in black, and it is the fullest version of the package. It ships with the five-pin DIN MIDI socket and an mGB cartridge in the box, so it is ready to sync and ready to play as a sound module straight away. 1989 called. It wants to be in your DAW now. HobbyChop is a maker of chiptune and retro-music hardware, and the Arduinoboy sits in a catalogue that also includes YM2149F and MT32 sound devices, a MIDI-Pi and the Sega-flavoured GenMDM. The firmware on the Arduinoboy is USB-upgradeable and configurable with a small Mac or PC editor, so the unit is not frozen in time. It works across the family too, from the original DMG to the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance and SP. Why a MIDI box belongs in a Game Boy museum A collection like this is usually about what a machine was. Devices like the Arduinoboy are about what a machine became. Long after Nintendo moved on, musicians decided the Game Boy's four humble channels had a sound worth keeping, and they built the bridges needed to fold that sound into modern music. That story is the whole reason the museum runs its ongoing series The Sound of the Game Boy, and the Arduinoboy Pro is a natural exhibit for it: proof that a 1989 handheld can still hold its own place in a modern studio. If the idea of a Game Boy taking orders from a MIDI clock makes you grin, there is a whole wing of the collection waiting. Come wander the rest of the Game Boy Museum and see what else the little grey brick has been talked into doing.

Line up a shelf of early Game Boy boxes and one face keeps grinning back at you. Mario headlines his own adventures, naturally, but he also turns up again and again on the covers of games that have little or nothing to do with him: sports titles, puzzle games, block-bashers and retro compilations. He was not just a character; he was Nintendo's mascot, a friendly, instantly recognisable guarantee of quality that could be printed onto almost any box to help it sell. This is a tour of Mario's cameo career on Game Boy cover art, told through the games in the collection. Mario the Sportsman Some of the earliest Game Boy games had the plainest possible names, and Mario was drafted in to give them personality. On the cover of Baseball he takes to the field among the players, and on Golf he is the little golfer in red mid-swing. Tennis puts him courtside overseeing the match. None of these games needed a mascot to function, but a generic box marked simply "Golf" is far more tempting when Mario is the one holding the club. Mario at the Controls Two more early titles borrow Mario as their friendly pilot. Alleyway, a launch-window take on the old block-breaking arcade formula, sticks Mario in a little spacecraft on the cover, steering the paddle through a starfield, which is a far warmer image than a bare bat and ball. And in Donkey Kong, the brilliant 1994 reinvention of the original arcade classic, Mario is very much the hero, chasing the big ape across a cover packed with ladders, barrels and mischief. Mario the Puzzle Master Nintendo leaned on Mario hardest when it needed to sell a puzzle game, a genre with no natural hero of its own. Dr. Mario reimagined him as a lab-coated physician flinging vitamins at viruses, turning an abstract falling-block game into a character piece. Mario & Yoshi, the European name for the Yoshi puzzle game, pairs him with his dinosaur friend on the box, and the picture-logic games Mario's Picross and Mario's Picross 2 cast him as a pickaxe-wielding archaeologist to make a Japanese nonogram puzzle feel like an adventure. Mario the Host By the late 1990s Mario had become the face Nintendo used to reintroduce its own history. The Game & Watch Gallery and its sequel, released in Japan as Game Boy Gallery 2, are collections of the simple LCD Game & Watch classics that Gunpei Yokoi had pioneered in the early 1980s. To make those decades-old games appealing to a new audience, Nintendo dropped Mario and friends into them and put the whole cast front and centre on the box, letting the mascot vouch for the museum piece. Mario in His Own Right Amid all the guest appearances, the collection of course holds the games where Mario is unambiguously the star. Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins are his own Game Boy platformers, and their covers put him exactly where you expect: leading the adventure. Seen next to all the cameos, they are a useful reminder of the difference between a game built around Mario and a game simply wearing him on its sleeve. It is worth noticing how many of these are launch-window and early titles. In 1989 and 1990 the Game Boy needed a library fast, and a lot of it was made of simple, universal games: sports, block-breakers, puzzles. Those games had no characters of their own to sell them, so Nintendo reached for the one it already had. Mario's face on an early box was doing real commercial work, lending an unknown quantity the warmth and familiarity of the company's biggest star at the exact moment the handheld most needed to make a good first impression. Why Mario Was Everywhere There is a simple, powerful logic to all of this. In the Game Boy era Mario was already one of the most recognisable characters on earth, and his presence on a box worked like a seal of approval. A shopper who had never heard of Alleyway or a nervous parent choosing a birthday present could see that cheerful red-capped figure and know, instantly, that this was a proper Nintendo game and probably a good one. Mario was reassurance you could print in colour. It is also a small lesson in how mascots work. Sport, puzzles, block games and retro compilations have almost nothing in common, yet a single familiar face ties them all into one family and makes each feel a little friendlier and more trustworthy. Long before anyone spoke of brand ambassadors, Mario was quietly doing the job, one Game Boy cover at a time. Gathered together, these boxes turn into a game of their own: spot the plumber, edition after edition, region after region, from an American Golf to a Japanese Picross to a European Dr. Mario. It is one of the most charming ways to see just how central Mario was to the whole Game Boy story. You can browse all of these titles, and the rest of the DMG-01 world, across the collection.

The entire genius of the Game Boy was that it fit in your pocket. Gunpei Yokoi's grey brick took gaming off the living-room table and made it portable, private and personal. So there is something gloriously, wonderfully absurd about a small family of accessories that set out to do the exact opposite: to bolt the humble handheld into a great big, speaker-laden, joystick-wielding arcade machine that you most certainly could not carry anywhere. The collection holds all four of these curious contraptions, and together they make one of the funniest and most endearing corners of the whole Game Boy story. The Konami HyperBoy: The Licensed Original The best known of the group is the Konami HyperBoy. Unlike most of these oddities it was an officially licensed product, made by Konami, which gives it a certain respectability the others lack. The Game Boy slots into a cockpit-like housing that adds a proper arcade stick, a large screen magnifier and built-in speakers, transforming the tiny handheld into a miniature stand-up cabinet for the tabletop. It was promoted in Japan with its own advertising, and as the licensed template for the whole idea it is the piece every other unit here was chasing. The official arcade solution - the Konami Hyperboy The Saitek BoosterBoy: The Biggest of Them All If the HyperBoy is the respectable one, the Saitek BoosterBoy is the monster. It is probably the largest and most unusual accessory ever made for the Game Boy, a sprawling arcade unit that piles on lighting, powerful stereo speakers, a screen magnifier, an arcade stick and even built-in storage for your games and headphones. It runs on four C batteries, which can also power the docked Game Boy, so the whole ludicrous rig is technically portable, in the sense that a small suitcase is portable. Made by Saitek, it is the accessory that took the arcade idea to its gloriously over-engineered extreme. The Monster - Saiteks Booster Boy The Top Boy: The Unbranded Rival Where there is a hit product, there is an imitator, and the Top Boy is exactly that. A giant of an accessory that swallows the console whole, it copies the HyperBoy formula closely, with powerful stereo speakers, a magnifier, front lights and an arcade stick, all running on two chunky D batteries. The twist is that it is unbranded, an apparently unlicensed, Chinese-made rival with no maker named anywhere on the device. That anonymity is part of its charm: it is a glimpse of the shadow market of clones that trailed every successful Nintendo product, built to ride the same wave without paying for the licence. Chinese-Made Rival - The Top Boy The Handy Boy: The Clever Hybrid The fourth member is the odd one out, and the most practical. The Joyplus Handy Boy is a hybrid: rather than a huge stationary cabinet, it is an all-in-one unit that clips directly onto the Game Boy and travels with it. It answers the handheld's three most common complaints in one go, adding a magnifying lens for the small screen, two little lamps to make up for the missing backlight, and stereo sound through a pair of built-in speakers. Cleverest of all, it needs no batteries of its own, drawing power straight from the Game Boy through a cable. It is the arcade dream shrunk back down to something you could actually put in a bag. Handy Boy - The Lightweight Why Anyone Made These It is tempting to laugh at the whole idea, and you should, but there is real logic buried in it. The original Game Boy had three genuine weaknesses: a tiny screen, no backlight, and a single small speaker. Every one of these accessories is an attempt to fix all three at once, adding magnification, light and big sound. The arcade stick and cabinet styling were the showmanship on top, turning a practical fix into a fantasy: the chance to feel, just for a moment, like you were playing a real arcade machine rather than squinting at a green rectangle. They also belong to a wider phenomenon. The Game Boy inspired an enormous third-party ecosystem of clip-on lights, magnifiers, amplifiers and cases, an entire cottage industry built around improving, protecting and accessorising Nintendo's handheld. The arcade cabinets are simply the most extravagant expression of that impulse, the point where a sensible clip-on light grew delusions of grandeur and became a stand-up machine. There is a period charm to how these were sold, too. The HyperBoy in particular was pushed with its own Japanese advertising, presenting the docked handheld as a genuine home-arcade experience rather than the slightly comical object we see today. That marketing is a reminder that, in the early 1990s, the fantasy was sincere: for a child who could not have a real arcade cabinet at home, a plastic shell with a joystick and loud speakers really could make the Game Boy feel like the machines down at the amusement arcade. The Arcade Units in the Collection What makes these pieces so collectible now is exactly what made them impractical then. They are large, fragile and were produced in modest numbers, so complete, boxed examples are genuinely hard to find, and having all four together, the licensed HyperBoy, the giant BoosterBoy, the unbranded Top Boy and the neat little Handy Boy, is a real rarity. Seen side by side they tell a delightful story about a pocket console that some people, against all common sense, simply wanted to make enormous. You can explore all four, and the rest of the DMG-01 world, across the collection.

Few objects have shaped modern entertainment as quietly, and as completely, as the Nintendo Game Boy. Officially designated the DMG-01, short for Dot Matrix Game, it arrived in 1989 as an unassuming grey box with a greenish screen. It did not have color. It did not have power. What it had was an idea so well executed that it outsold every rival of its generation and turned handheld gaming from a novelty into a global habit. This is the story of how one machine changed the way the world plays. A Bold Idea Built on Withered Technology The Game Boy was designed by Nintendo Research and Development 1, the team led by Gunpei Yokoi alongside Satoru Okada. Yokoi is remembered for a design philosophy he called lateral thinking with withered technology. Rather than chase the newest and most expensive components, he favored mature, inexpensive, reliable parts used in clever ways. The result was a handheld that was cheap to make, sipped battery power, and survived being carried everywhere. Inside the original DMG-01 console sat a custom chip that Nintendo called the DMG-CPU and Sharp manufactured as the LR35902. The screen was a 160 by 144 pixel reflective LCD capable of four shades, rendered in the famous pea green that an entire generation still recognizes instantly. On paper, competitors were more advanced. In the real world, the Game Boy ran for many hours on a handful of AA batteries while the others drained in a fraction of the time. Launch Day, 1989 The Game Boy went on sale in Japan on April 21, 1989, priced at 12,500 yen. Its initial run of 300,000 units sold out almost immediately. North America followed on July 31, 1989, and Europe received the system on September 28, 1990. From the very first day, demand outpaced expectation, and the little grey handheld began its march across living rooms, schoolyards, and long car journeys around the world. The Competition That Could Not Keep Up The Game Boy did not arrive unopposed. The Atari Lynx launched the same year with a backlit color screen, and the Sega Game Gear followed in 1990, also in full color. On a store shelf they looked like the future, and next to them the Game Boy looked modest. Yet color came at a steep cost. Both rivals were heavier, more expensive, and notoriously hungry for batteries, often lasting only a few hours before they went dark. The Game Boy asked for less, gave more playtime, and cost less to own. Backed by a deeper library, it outsold both rivals so decisively that the contest was effectively over before it began. The Tetris Effect Hardware alone does not create a phenomenon. The Game Boy had a secret weapon, and its name was Tetris. Henk Rogers, who had secured the rights to the puzzle game, persuaded Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa to bundle it with the console instead of Super Mario Land. His argument was simple and brilliant. Mario appealed mainly to younger players, but Tetris appealed to everyone. As a result, Tetris shipped in the box in every region except Japan, and it pulled the Game Boy into the hands of commuters, parents, and grandparents who had never touched a video game before. Built to Last The Game Boy earned a reputation for near indestructibility. The most famous example is a unit that survived a barracks fire during the Gulf War. Scorched and blistered, it still powers on and still plays Tetris, and Nintendo has kept it on display in its New York store for years. That durability was not an accident. It was the direct payoff of Yokoi's insistence on simple, robust engineering over fragile cutting edge parts. A Platform That Kept Evolving What kept the DMG-01 alive for more than a decade was a remarkable ecosystem. The Super Game Boy let players enjoy their handheld library on a television through the Super Nintendo. The Game Boy Camera turned the console into one of the first digital cameras many families ever owned. Later, Nintendo refreshed the brand with the colorful Play It Loud series, trading the conservative grey for bold transparent and primary colored shells. Then came the moment that secured the platform's legend. The arrival of Pokemon late in the system's life sent sales soaring all over again and introduced the Game Boy to a brand new generation. A console that might have faded gracefully instead enjoyed a second golden age. Why the DMG-01 Still Matters By the time the monochrome Game Boy line and the Game Boy Color were discontinued in 2003, they had sold a combined 118.69 million units worldwide. That number tells only part of the story. The DMG-01 proved that accessibility beats raw power, that the right game can define a platform, and that thoughtful engineering ages far better than spec sheets. Its design language echoes through every handheld that followed, from later Nintendo systems to the portable consoles of today. For collectors, the DMG-01 is where it all began, and its world is wonderfully deep. Beyond the console itself there are regional variants, special editions, rare bundles, peripherals, and printed ephemera, each with its own history. You can explore the full collection or dive into the DMG-01 hardware reference to see how the pieces fit together. The grey box that started everything still has plenty of stories left to tell.

They hung from school bags and key rings all over the world: tiny LCD games, each one shaped like a shrunken Game Boy. For many children of the late 1990s, a Nintendo Mini Classic was their first taste of owning a Nintendo, even if it was not quite the real thing. Cheap, charming and surprisingly faithful, they deserve a place in any Game Boy collection. What Are Nintendo Mini Classics? The Nintendo Mini Classics are a series of small, single-game LCD handhelds licensed by Nintendo from 1998. Most are reissues of classic Game & Watch titles, though the line later stretched to outside properties too. Each unit is styled to look like a miniaturised Game Boy, complete with a little screen and controls, and a removable keychain clipped to the top corner so you could carry it everywhere. Game & Watch in Your Pocket The first wave in 1998 included Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong Junior, Fire and Parachute. In one sense this was the Game & Watch coming full circle: the simple, single-game LCD format that Gunpei Yokoi pioneered in the early 1980s, reborn for a new generation, now wearing the silhouette of the handheld it had helped inspire. Not Quite a Game Boy It is worth being clear, because collectors sometimes are not: a Mini Classic is not a Game Boy and does not play cartridges. Each one is a fixed, self-contained LCD game in a Game Boy-shaped case. They were produced by the company Stadlbauer and sold through a range of distributors in different countries, which is why you will find the same little units under various names and packaging around the world. A Whole Series to Collect The line grew well beyond that first handful. Beyond the Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong Junior units, the collection also holds Mario's Cement Factory, another Game & Watch classic reborn in miniature. Over the years the range spanned many titles, mixing Nintendo's own back catalogue with other licensed games, so building a full set became a rewarding little quest in itself. Because the same units were sold through different distributors under slightly different names and packaging around the world, there is real variety for a collector to chase: regional boxes, colour variations and label differences all exist. It is exactly the kind of low-cost, high-charm corner of collecting where completeness is achievable and the hunt stays fun rather than ruinous. Why Nintendo Mini Classics Are Fun to Collect There are many Nintendo Mini Classics titles to chase, they are usually affordable, and they capture the exact moment the Game Boy shape became pop-culture shorthand for handheld fun. As a set they make a colourful, nostalgic display and a gentle entry point into collecting. Explore more Game Boy merchandise in the Knowledge Base.

Most Game Boy music tools are in a hurry. Trackers and step sequencers chop time into tiny cells and race through them, and the classic Game Boy sound is all rattle and arpeggio. Droneboy does the opposite. It presses a note and lets it hang there, endlessly, and in doing so it finds a side of the console almost nobody hears. The newest music cartridge in the collection is Droneboy, a drone-music cartridge for the Game Boy built by Purefunktion and sold by the chiptune hardware maker HobbyChop. Little Sound Dj sequences notes. Droneboy just holds the note. Forever. What a drone machine does Where a tracker asks you to place notes on a grid, Droneboy asks you to shape a sound and hold it. It generates endless sustained tones and drones across all four of the Game Boy's sound channels: the two pulse channels, the wavetable channel and the noise channel. You reach in and shape each one by hand, adjusting volume, the duty cycle that gives a pulse its character, and frequency. From there you can play chords or set them to sequence, stacking the four voices into slow, shifting pads. Ambient music for a machine that fits in your pocket. It is a different musical use of the same hardware that powers Little Sound Dj or Nanoloop. Those are step sequencers built for rhythm and melody. Droneboy is a specialist, tuned for ambient pads, textures and the kind of long sustained tones that fill a room rather than tap out a beat. The museum documents Nanoloop in its own right, including the pocket Nanoloop NL13, and Droneboy makes a lovely counterpoint to it: the same four channels, an entirely different intent. Version 1.09 This is version 1.09, and the version number matters, because Droneboy has grown up over its releases. This one adds new navigation to move around the interface, a dedicated BPM page, and a chord sequencer for arranging those held chords into slowly evolving progressions. It also introduces lower-sounding wave types, which push the drones down into deeper, warmer territory than the Game Boy usually reaches. Press start. Then never press stop. Most importantly for a music room, 1.09 adds MIDI support and is MIDI-enabled for use with an Arduinoboy. That single feature lifts Droneboy out of its own little world and lets it join a larger rig, syncing and talking to other instruments instead of humming away on its own. A perfect partner for the Arduinoboy That last point is why Droneboy did not arrive alone. It pairs naturally with the museum's Arduinoboy Pro, the open-source box that connects the Game Boy to MIDI. Put the two together and a cartridge designed for endless tones can be folded into a studio: clocked, sequenced and layered under other sounds, its drones stretched across a full arrangement rather than a single handheld. One machine holds the note, the other hands it to the rest of the room. Why it belongs here Droneboy is a reminder that the Game Boy's sound chip is a genuine instrument, not just a nostalgia generator. Hand it to someone who wants rhythm and you get chiptune. Hand it to someone who wants stillness and you get drones. That range is exactly what the museum's series The Sound of the Game Boy sets out to trace, and a cartridge devoted entirely to sustained tones is one of its quieter, stranger chapters. If a Game Boy that never stops humming sounds like your kind of instrument, there is plenty more to explore. Wander the rest of the Game Boy Museum and hear what else those four little channels can do.

Not every great Game Boy game was made for the Game Boy. Some of the handheld's most important titles started life somewhere else, in an arcade cabinet, on a home computer, or on a bigger console, and were then squeezed down onto the little grey screen. Far from being second-class, these ports include some of the best-selling and best-loved cartridges the platform ever produced. The Game Boy, it turned out, was a superb home for games from elsewhere. Here is a tour of the most successful ports in the collection, and why they worked so well on hardware they were never designed for. Tetris: The Greatest Port of All The single most important game the Game Boy ever received was a port. Tetris began on Soviet computers in the mid-1980s and had already spread across arcades and home machines before Nintendo bundled it with the handheld in the West. Stripped to its essentials on the small screen, it lost nothing and gained everything: portability turned the perfect puzzle into the perfect travel companion. No port in gaming history has ever paid off more handsomely. Game of the Games for the Game Boy Space Invaders: The Arcade in Your Pocket If Tetris proved a computer game could thrive on the handheld, Space Invaders did the same for the arcade. One of the founding titles of the entire medium, it made the jump to the Game Boy with its simple, relentless appeal fully intact, and it even offered enhanced features when played through the Super Game Boy. Carrying a genuine piece of arcade history in your pocket was a small marvel, and it showed how naturally the classics translated to the format. Lemmings: A Computer Classic, Shrunk Some ports were genuine technical feats. Lemmings came from home computers, where its screens teemed with dozens of the little creatures marching to their doom unless you saved them, and getting that busy, brain-bending puzzle action onto the Game Boy's modest hardware was no small achievement. That it plays as well as it does is a testament to how much careful work went into bringing a big-screen computer hit down to a handheld. Pocket Bomberman and the Console Crossovers The Game Boy also drew from other consoles. Pocket Bomberman brought the beloved maze-and-bombs formula, a fixture on home systems, into a pocket-sized form, proving that a series built around multiplayer mayhem could also work as a compact solo and link-up experience. It is a good example of how the handheld absorbed ideas from every corner of gaming and made them its own. Why the Game Boy Was a Great Home for Ports There is a clear reason so many ports flourished here. The games that translate best to a small monochrome screen and short play sessions are the timeless, mechanically pure ones: puzzles, arcade classics and pick-up-and-play designs that never depended on spectacle in the first place. Those are exactly the games that had already proved themselves in arcades and on computers, so the Game Boy became a natural second home for the medium's most durable ideas. Portability then added something the originals never had, turning a great game you played in one place into a great game you could play anywhere. For a collector, the ports shelf is a reminder that the Game Boy sat at a crossroads of gaming history. Its cartridges carry the DNA of the arcade, the home computer and the living-room console, all funnelled onto a single handheld. Owning them is owning a portable anthology of the games the whole industry agreed were worth keeping. Every ported game named here is documented, with its packaging where complete, in the collection.

Tetris and Pokemon get the headlines, but the Game Boy library runs far deeper than its greatest hits. Hidden behind the blockbusters is a whole shelf of underrated Game Boy games that reward anyone willing to look past the obvious. Here are three that belong in any thoughtful collection. Donkey Kong 94: A Brilliant Bait and Switch Donkey Kong for the Game Boy, released in 1994 and often called DK 94, opens by recreating the original 1981 arcade game and then pulls the rug out: after those familiar first stages it explodes into roughly a hundred inventive puzzle-platforming levels. It was also the first game in the Super Mario family built to use the Super Game Boy's colour, even framing the screen with a border shaped like the original arcade cabinet. Critics now rank it among the very best Game Boy games. Mario's Picross: A Cult Puzzle Classic Mario's Picross, from 1995, is a quietly addictive collection of nonogram logic puzzles, where you chip away at a grid to reveal a hidden picture. It sold well in Japan but slipped under the radar in English-speaking markets, which is exactly why it has become a cult classic that collectors now seek out. Dr. Mario and the Puzzle Boom The Game Boy was a natural home for puzzle games, and Dr. Mario is one of its finest. Matching coloured pills to clear viruses is simple to learn and almost impossible to put down, and its two-player link mode made it a playground favourite. It is proof that some of the platform's most enduring games were never about graphics at all. Why These Underrated Game Boy Games Matter Seeking out underrated Game Boy games is one of the real joys of collecting the DMG-01. They are often more affordable than the famous hits, yet they reveal the surprising range of a so-called simple handheld, from clever platformers to brain-teasing puzzles. Explore the full library in the collection.

Sergio Leone's classic western gave us a perfect shorthand for the full range of quality: the good, the bad and the ugly. Any large game library contains all three, and the Game Boy, with a catalogue of well over a thousand titles, is no exception. Its shelves run from genuine masterpieces to cynical cash-ins to games so notorious that collectors now hunt them down precisely because they are bad. So rather than yet another list of the usual beloved classics, here are three games from the collection chosen to sit at each extreme of that range. Consider it a short, honest tour of the heights and the depths of the grey brick's library, and a small argument for why all three ends of the spectrum are worth caring about. The Good: Donkey Kong The 1994 Donkey Kong, often called DK '94, is widely regarded as one of the finest games ever made for the system. It opens by faithfully recreating the original 1981 arcade game, four familiar screens and all, and just as you think you know exactly what you are getting, it pulls a delightful trick: the game expands into around a hundred inventive puzzle-platforming levels that ask you to think as much as jump, introducing new moves and mechanics at a generous pace. It was also one of the first titles built to take advantage of the Super Game Boy, adding colour and a decorative border when played through that adapter. Smart, generous and endlessly clever, it is the Game Boy operating at the very top of its game, and a standing reminder that tight hardware constraints often produce the most disciplined and inventive design. The Good - Donkey Kong (1994) The Bad: Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly At the other end sits a very familiar type of release: the licensed cash-in. Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly arrived to ride the enormous global popularity of The Simpsons, and like a great many licensed games of its era it is remembered as competent at best and forgettable at worst. It is not broken, and it is not offensive; it is simply unremarkable, the kind of middle-of-the-road platformer that filled shop shelves whenever a hot television brand needed a game bolted to its name. That is exactly why it belongs here. Every large library has a vast grey middle of games that nobody hated and nobody quite remembers, churned out to catch a trend, and this is a perfectly honest representative of it. Pretending a collection is all masterpieces would be a kind of lie; the ordinary games are the truth of what filled the shelves. The Bad: Bart Simpson - Escape from Camp Deadly (1991) The Ugly: Dragon's Lair Then there is the game collectors love to hate. Dragon's Lair shares its name with one of the most beautiful arcade games ever made, a lavish, hand-animated laserdisc spectacle that dazzled players in the early 1980s and looked like nothing else in the arcade. Squeezed onto the tiny green screen of the Game Boy, it became something else entirely: punishingly difficult, unfair in its design and a world away from the arcade original in everything but the title. Its fearsome reputation has, with a nice irony, made it genuinely sought-after, the ugly duckling that collectors want on the shelf precisely because of its legend. A game can earn its place in history by being notorious just as surely as by being great. The Ugly:- Dragon's Lair - The Legend (1991) Three Kinds of Value It is worth noticing that these three games are collectible for three completely different reasons, and that is part of the point. The good game is wanted because it is genuinely excellent and everyone agrees on it. The bad game is wanted because it is representative, an honest specimen of the ordinary releases that made up most of the shelf. And the ugly game is wanted because it is infamous, its poor reputation transformed over time into a badge of curiosity. A thoughtful collection needs all three kinds of value, because a shelf that only chases greatness ends up telling a flattering but incomplete story. Why the Extremes Are Worth Collecting A great collection is not only a shrine to the classics. The forgettable and the infamous matter just as much, because together the three tell the whole truth about a platform: what it aspired to at its best, what it settled for in the vast middle, and what went gloriously wrong at the edges. Lining up the good, the bad and the ugly side by side is one of the quiet pleasures of collecting, and a healthy corrective to nostalgia, which has a stubborn habit of remembering only the highlight reel. It is also, frankly, more interesting. The masterpieces are celebrated everywhere; the honest account of a console is the one that also makes room for the also-rans and the disasters. Set these three cartridges next to each other and you have a more complete portrait of the Game Boy than any list of ten favourites could give you, because you can see the full range the machine was capable of, for better and for worse. All three games, boxed and catalogued, can be found in the collection.

Nintendo built the Game Boy, but it deliberately left it plain: no light, a hungry appetite for batteries, a small screen, no way to back up a save and nothing to carry it in. Where Nintendo saw acceptable trade-offs, a whole industry saw opportunity. This is the first part of a series profiling the third-party hardware makers behind that industry, one maker at a time, drawn entirely from the collection. We begin with the big names, the brands whose products defined the accessory aisle. Nuby No brand is more synonymous with Game Boy add-ons than Nuby, whose colourful packaging hung in every toy shop. The collection holds a broad sweep of their range: the flexible-neck Game Light Plus for the unlit screen, a magnifier to enlarge the display, a Power Pak against battery drain, an amplifier to boost the sound, a rugged holster and even a car adaptor. Nuby had an answer for every complaint anyone ever made about the hardware. Joyplus If Nuby sold you one fix at a time, Joyplus sold them all at once. The centrepiece is the Handy Boy, the all-in-one contraption that clamped around the console to add a light, a magnifier, speakers and extended controls in a single chunky unit. Around it Joyplus built a whole ecosystem, and the collection holds the Handy Power I and Handy Power II, a Handy Plug, a Handy Tray and a matching carry case. Gloriously over-engineered, and unforgettable. ASCII / ASCIIware Japan's ASCII, trading as ASCIIware in the West, built genuinely serious, well-made gear rather than gimmicks. The collection holds their Carry-All Soft-Case and the deluxe Portable Carry-All Organizer, and, most notably, the Turbo File GB, an external memory unit that let players back up cartridge save files, solving the real anxiety of a fading in-cart battery. ASCII is where third-party hardware grew up. Naki Naki specialised in the practical fixes players actually reached for. The collection holds the Naki Action Pak+, a bundle of essentials, the Master Pack, and the Cool Screen. Their gear sat squarely in the sweet spot of the market: affordable, sensible answers to the console's light, screen and power shortcomings, sold by the shelf-full. Beeshu Beeshu made seeing and hearing the Game Boy better into an art. The collection holds the MagniLight and Clear View screen aids, which combined magnification and illumination, plus the delightful GameTunes Stereo FM Tuner, which turned the handheld into a pocket radio. Beeshu is a perfect example of a maker finding a niche and filling it with flair. Saitek The idea of the do-everything enhancer reached its peak with Saitek. The collection holds the Saitek BoosterBoy, an enhancer unit that wrapped the Game Boy in extra features, part of the same ambitious family as Konami's Hyperboy. These devices treated the bare handheld almost as a component to be upgraded, and they represent the most confident end of the accessory market. Saitek Booster Boy - The all-in-one gadget for the Game Boy Datel Datel were the specialists in reaching deep into the hardware. Best known for cheating, they are represented by the Action Replay Pro, the famous cheat cartridge that let players pour in codes for infinite lives and beyond, alongside their Power Flash. Datel's devices are catnip for collectors who enjoy the slightly subversive end of the hobby, where third-party makers went further than Nintendo ever intended. InterAct InterAct ranged across the whole market. For saving progress there is the Mega Memory Card, an external store for game saves; for connecting there is the Handy Plug Plus; and for carrying it all there is the Scooba Bag Deluxe. InterAct is the archetype of the broad-line accessory brand, with a product for every corner of Game Boy ownership. The Series Continues That covers the big names, but the third-party world runs far deeper. Part two turns to the makers of power and connectivity, the battery packs, chargers and link cables that kept the Game Boy running and connected, and part three gathers the cases, screens, controllers and the modern makers still building for the console today. Every accessory named here is documented, with photos, in the collection.

Across part one and part two we met the big accessory names and the makers of power and connectivity. This final part gathers the rest: the companies that helped you carry the Game Boy, see its screen and control it, and the modern makers who are still building for the console decades later. As before, a maker's home base is noted where it is known. A.L.S. Industries Carrying a console designed to travel was its own small industry, and A.L.S. Industries built for it. The collection holds an A.L.S. Game Boy Storage Case and a Carrying Case, the sturdy, practical cases that protected the machine and its cartridges in a schoolbag. Unglamorous but essential, cases like these took the daily punishment so the console did not have to, which is exactly why so few survive in good shape. Pelican The American maker Pelican brought a touch of showmanship to storage with its GB Game Tower, a display-and-storage stand for a growing cartridge library. It is a lovely example of an accessory that treated a game collection as something to show off rather than hide away, an idea very much in tune with how collectors think today. nYko Nyko, the well-known Los Angeles accessory house, is represented by the Game Tote 4, a carrying solution from a brand that would become a household name across later console generations. Its presence here shows how many of gaming's enduring accessory makers cut their teeth on the Game Boy. Recoton The American company Recoton, a long-established electronics accessory maker, offered the Recoton Accessory Kit, a bundle of the essentials in one box. Kits like this were aimed at the gift market and the newcomer, packaging several small solutions together, and they are a neat snapshot of what a maker considered the must-have extras of the day. Gamester The British budget brand Gamester kept things cheap and cheerful. The collection holds its Light Magnifier, a combination unit that lit and enlarged the screen at once. Value gear like this was bought and battered by the thousand at pocket-money prices, which makes surviving boxed examples surprisingly scarce despite how common they once were. Xtend Xtend addressed the perennial screen problem with its Light Master, another of the illumination aids that tried to solve the Game Boy's most notorious shortcoming, the unlit display. It sits among a crowded field of worm lights and clip-on lamps, each maker convinced it had the best answer to playing after dark. Hori From Japan comes Hori, one of the most respected names in controllers even today. The collection holds its SGB Commander, a control pad made for use with the Super Game Boy on the television, bringing a proper, comfortable controller to Game Boy games played on the big screen. Hori's reputation for quality control gear reaches all the way back to pieces like this. krikzz: The Modern Maker The third-party story did not end in the nineties. Today a new generation keeps the platform alive, chief among them krikzz, the Ukrainian maker whose EverDrive GB X7 flash cartridge lets a single card hold an entire library and run homebrew on original hardware. It is the direct descendant of the old accessory industry: an independent maker solving a real need for Game Boy owners, decades after Nintendo moved on. Why the Third-Party Makers Matter Taken together across all three parts, these makers tell a story Nintendo could not tell on its own. Each product answered a genuine need or wish, a missing light, a fading battery, a save worth protecting, a game worth showing off, and together they map exactly what it was like to live with a Game Boy. From global names like ASCII, Mad Catz and Hori to one-product outfits that made a single cable, they turned a plain grey machine into a whole ecosystem, and they did it from workshops on several continents. For a collector, the third-party shelves are the hardest to complete and among the most rewarding, precisely because there is no official checklist and so little survived. Assembling a real cross-section of these makers captures the Game Boy phenomenon from the one angle Nintendo never controlled: the market that grew up around it. Every accessory named across this series is documented, with photos, in the collection.

Spend five minutes in any Game Boy forum or listing and you will drown in letters. DMG, MGB, CGB, SGB, CIB, and on it goes. This shorthand is second nature to seasoned collectors, but baffling to newcomers, and it hides some genuinely useful information. Here is a friendly, plain-English guide to the abbreviations that matter most, so you always know exactly what you are looking at. The Game Boy Abbreviations for the Hardware Itself Most of the console names are really model codes stamped on the hardware. DMG / DMG-01 means Dot Matrix Game. It is the original 1989 Game Boy, the grey brick that started everything. MGB is the Game Boy Pocket of 1996, taken from its model number MGB-001. It is the smaller, sleeker redesign with a sharper screen. MGL is the Game Boy Light, a Japan-only 1998 model and the only classic Game Boy with a proper backlit screen. CGB is the Game Boy Color, and AGB is the later Game Boy Advance, with AGS being the Advance SP. You will see these codes in cartridge names too, marking which system a game is for. SGB / SGB2 is the Super Game Boy, the adapter that let you play Game Boy games on a television through the Super Nintendo, and its Japan-only sequel. Cartridge Codes and Region Suffixes Every official game carries a code on the cartridge and box, and it tells a small story. Game codes usually start with the system, so a code like DMG-TR identifies the specific game, in this case Tetris, on the original Game Boy. Region suffixes are the tags on the end of a code that show the market a copy was made for. The two most common are JPN for Japan and USA for the United States and wider North America. Europe is a patchwork of its own: UKV is the United Kingdom, NOE is Nintendo of Europe, the general Germany-issued European code, along with its variant NNOE, while EUR and NEU mark broader pan-European releases. Individual countries have their own tags too, including FAH and FRA for France, HOL for the Netherlands, ITA for Italy, ESP for Spain, and SCN for Scandinavia. Further afield you will also meet AUS for Australia and ASI for Asia. They are the quickest way to tell exactly where a copy was sold. DMG = Dot Matrix Game | TR = Tetris | NOE = Nintendo of Europe The Language of Condition CIB means Complete In Box: the game with its outer box, manual, inserts and cartridge all present. It is the condition this museum favours, because it is complete yet still openable and playable. Loose means the cartridge only, with no box or manual. Sealed means a game still in its untouched factory wrapping. Repro / bootleg describes an unofficial reproduction cartridge rather than a genuine Nintendo release, something every collector learns to spot. Words from the Tech and Homebrew Side ROM means Read-Only Memory. In everyday use it refers to the game's data, or a game file, the exact contents a cartridge holds. GBDK is the Game Boy Development Kit, the free toolkit modern makers use to program their own games in C, as we do in our build-your-own-game series. Why the Shorthand Is Worth Learning Once these letters click into place, listings and conversations suddenly make sense: you can tell a Japanese Game Boy Light from a European Pocket, or a complete-in-box Tetris from a loose cartridge, at a glance. It is a small vocabulary that unlocks a big hobby. To put the names to faces, browse the original DMG-01 console and the Super Game Boy in the collection.