The console fits in a pocket. The paperwork needs a shelf. We tend to remember the Game Boy as plastic and glass: the grey brick, the pea-green screen, the buttons worn smooth by a thousand hours of Tetris. But the machine generated an astonishing amount of paper. Before you ever pressed start, a catalogue had already sold the thing to you. While you played, a comic gave the cast a life off-screen and a Player's Guide sat open beside your elbow. Around it all, fan magazines argued about the best games, and decades later, hardback books put the same little console behind glass and called it design history. A museum keeps the paper trail because the paper is where the story lives. Hardware tells you what the Game Boy was. The print around it tells you what people thought it was, what they wanted it to be, and how that changed across thirty-odd years. This is the hub for that trail. Five articles, five kinds of paper, one handheld. Follow whichever thread you like. The comic books In 1990 the Game Boy earned its own comic, and Valiant printed exactly four issues before the run ended. Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books tells the story of that short, strange series and the collector's game of telling a 1990 first print from its 1991 reprint. For the wider history of Nintendo handing a handheld its own comic, our feature The Game Boy Comics goes deeper. Player's Guides and strategy books Long before an online walkthrough existed, finishing a tough game often meant buying a book. Part 2: Player's Guides and Strategy Books walks the shelf from Nintendo's 1991 US guide to the Game Boy-shaped Victory Book, and the games they helped you finish. For the deeper history of Nintendo's official line, see our feature The Game Boy Game Guide. Catalogues and Club Nintendo The Game Boy was sold on paper first. Part 3: Catalogues and Club Nintendo follows Nintendo's own sales catalogues, Nintendo Power and Club Nintendo from Japan to Germany, the UK and France, the glossy paper that turned a grey brick into something you had to have. Fan magazines and sticker albums Not everything printed came from Nintendo. Part 4: Fan Magazines and Sticker Albums runs from a UK newsstand to a Tokyo bookshop, taking in the independent magazines, the Famicom Tsushin supplements and the sticker album the Game Boy inspired outside the official channels. The books that made it history Decades after it launched as a toy, the Game Boy became a subject for serious hardbacks. Part 5: The Books That Made the Game Boy History gathers the coffee-table books, reference guides and logbooks that treated the little console as history and art rather than a plaything. Five kinds of paper, one handheld, and a story that outlasted the battery. If you have a Game Boy comic, guide, catalogue, magazine or book that belongs on this trail, or you simply want to see more of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum. The paper trail is still growing.

Every so often a game comes along that its maker adores, promotes relentlessly, and simply cannot convince people to buy. Mario Picross is one of those games. Nintendo believed in it, put Mario's face on the box, and pushed it across the West in 1995. Players politely declined. Three decades on, it is quietly regarded as one of the finest puzzle games on the Game Boy, which makes its commercial flop one of the handheld's great injustices. Mario the archaeologist, chiselling pictures out of numbers. Numbers that hide a picture Picross is short for picture crossword, and the puzzle is also known as a nonogram. You are given a blank grid with numbers running along the top and down the side. Those numbers tell you how many cells in each row and column are filled, and in what runs. Chip away the right squares and a picture slowly emerges: a fish, a boot, a little umbrella. Guess wrong and you are penalised with lost time. It is logic, not luck, and once it clicks it is fiercely moreish. GBuddy's GB Treasure Hunt Nintendo dressed this austere logic puzzle in the friendliest costume it had. Mario appears as a kind of archaeologist, chiselling and hammering the picture out of the grid, cheering when you solve one and wincing when you make a mistake. The Game Boy's tiny screen was actually well suited to the format, since a monochrome grid needs no colour to be read. All you need is the discipline to trust the numbers. A hard sell in the West The Japanese edition of Mario Picross landed in 1995, and the PAL release followed for Europe. Nintendo genuinely got behind it, giving it prominent coverage in its own magazines and marketing. The problem was not quality, it was familiarity. In Japan, nonogram puzzles were already a known pastime in newspapers and magazines. In Britain, Germany or the United States, most shoppers had no idea what a picross even was, and a puzzle you cannot explain in one line of box copy is a puzzle that stays on the shelf. The best Game Boy game a lot of people never heard of. So it undersold. Not disastrously, but enough to make Nintendo cautious about the West's appetite for the genre. That single commercial decision would shape everything that followed for the series outside Japan. The sequels that stayed home Because the first game had struggled abroad, its successors never left Japan. Mario Picross 2 arrived on the Game Boy for Japanese players only, expanding the formula with larger, tougher puzzles and even handing some duties to Wario. Western fans who had fallen for the first game had no official way to buy the follow-up, and importing a Japanese cartridge was the only route. For a puzzle that needs no translation to play, that was a particular shame. The sequels stayed in Japan. Now you know why importers exist. Vindicated in the end The story has a happy ending. The picross idea refused to die, and Nintendo kept returning to it, eventually building a long-running series on later handhelds that found the audience the Game Boy original never quite reached. Today the genre has fans worldwide, and Sudoku has made grid logic mainstream in exactly the way that might have saved Mario Picross had it arrived a decade later. That is why the cartridge is such a rewarding thing to revisit. It was a great game that showed up a little too early for its own market, and the passage of time has done nothing but prove it right. You can find both the Western and Japanese versions in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.

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.

Warning: contains princesses, pirates, Pokemon and at least one apocalypse. Every Game Boy cartridge was a tiny grey box, but inside each one lived a whole story. Long before high-definition cutscenes and voice acting, developers told their tales with a handful of sprites, a few lines of text and a great deal of imagination, and somehow it worked. A child holding the console under a bedsheet did not see four shades of green. They saw kingdoms, castles, monsters and heroes. Great Game Stories is a series that gives those adventures back their storybook shape, retelling twelve of them exactly the way they always felt. Each entry takes one game from the museum's collection and tells its story from once upon a time to the end. We keep the wonder, the villains and the strange dream logic of these little worlds. And because a fairy tale is nothing without its ending, every article closes with a clearly marked Spoiler Alert, so you can stop before the final page if you would rather reach it yourself with the cartridge in hand. Here are the twelve tales, grouped by the worlds they belong to. Twelve Great Game Storylines The Mushroom Kingdom on the move No. 1: Super Mario Land: the plumber's very first handheld outing sends him through four unfamiliar kingdoms to rescue a princess who is not the one you are thinking of. No. 2: Super Mario Land 2: Mario comes home to find his own castle stolen by a jealous newcomer, and must gather six golden coins just to get back through his front door. No. 3: Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3: that jealous newcomer gets his own adventure, raiding a pirate island for enough treasure to build a castle to rival Mario's. No. 4: Wario Land 2: Wario wakes up robbed and furious, in an adventure where he cannot actually die and every hidden door branches the tale toward another ending. Kongs and kidnappings No. 5: Donkey Kong: what looks like the old arcade climb turns into a hundred-room chase, as Mario pursues a lovelorn ape across nine sprawling lands. No. 6: Donkey Kong Land: a grumpy old ape's boast becomes a wager, sending Donkey and Diddy Kong across a whole Game Boy world to win back their stolen banana hoard. A pocket full of monsters No. 7: Pokemon Kanto: a child leaves a small town with a single creature and a promise, then sets out across the region that started a global obsession to catch them all. Other worlds in your pocket No. 8: The Rescue of Princess Blobette: a boy and his shape-shifting blob climb a tower of traps on a faraway planet to free a captured princess, one jellybean at a time. No. 9: Star Wars: a galaxy far, far away squeezed into four shades of grey, retelling the tale of a farm boy, a smuggler and a very large space station. No. 10: Dragon's Lair: not the dragon-and-princess cartoon people remember from the arcades, but a punishing Game Boy platformer in which a knight gathers the pieces of a shattered star. No. 11: Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly: Bart and Lisa are shipped off to a summer camp with no way home, run by a villain who answers to Mr. Burns. No. 12: Deadeus: a modern homebrew tale in which a boy dreams that a god will end his village in three days, with eleven different ways for the story to close. Pick a cartridge, open its story and read on to the end, or stop just before the Spoiler Alert and go play it the way its makers intended. Either way, there are more tales waiting on the shelves, so come and explore the rest of the collection at the Game Boy Museum.

Once upon a time, in a small and quiet village, a boy fell asleep and dreamed a terrible dream. This is the story of Deadeus, a homebrew horror game built for the original Game Boy and released on real cartridges by Incube8 Games. It is a dark fairy tale told in four shades of grey, the kind the Brothers Grimm might have whispered around a dying fire, and it plays by rules entirely its own. Here there is no princess to save and no dragon to slay, only a village, a clock, and a very difficult question. A homebrew horror where the Game Boy remembers how to be frightening. The Characters Our hero is a young boy, ordinary in every possible way but one: in his sleep he has been shown the future, and it is a future of ashes. The vast and looming presence over the entire tale is Deadeus itself, a god or entity said to dwell at the bottom of a deep pit beneath the village, patient and enormous and not in the slightest bit kind. It is less a monster to be fought than a fate to be reckoned with. Around the boy lives a whole village of ordinary souls whose lives now hang in the balance because of his dream. There is a girl he cares for, the folk who keep the little coffee shop, a village doctor, a strange prisoner who does nothing all day but count under his breath, and, moving through the shadows, a secretive cult called the Sons of Deadeus. They worship the thing in the pit as a god, and they have kept it fed with sacrifices, children among them, once every fifteen years. It is a small village with a great many buried secrets. The World The whole of the story unfolds within one small village and its surrounding dark, rendered in the plain, flickering black and white of a handheld first sold in 1989. It is a deliberately humble little stage, a cluster of houses, a shop, a well, a pit, and that very smallness is what makes the horror seeping through it feel so uncomfortably close. Everyone knows everyone here, which means everyone has something to hide. Time itself is the cruel engine that drives the whole tale forward. The boy has exactly three in-game days before the prophecy of his dream is due to come true, and the clock does not slow or stop for anyone, least of all for him. Every hour he spends knocking on doors and digging up secrets is an hour that can never be spent again, and the village's promised doom draws steadily, silently nearer with every single choice he makes. The Adventure The dream is blunt and merciless in its warning: in three days a god will rise and destroy the village, and every last person the boy knows and loves will die with it. Waking in a cold sweat, he sets out at once to learn whether such a nightmare can somehow be stopped, or whether, in truth, it can be stopped at all. The Brothers Grimm would have approved. And been slightly disturbed. There is no single golden path laid out neatly for him to follow. Instead he wanders from house to house and from person to person, asking questions, prying into corners, digging up the ugly and secret things his neighbours would far rather keep buried forever. Some doors will open only at certain hours of certain days; some fleeting chances, once missed, are gone for good and cannot be won back. Every action the boy takes bends his story quietly down a different road, and the game trusts the player, unnervingly, to decide for themselves what a good ending would even look like. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends There is no single ending to Deadeus, and that unsettling fact is the whole dreadful point of it. The game is documented as having eleven different endings in all, and no two players need ever reach the same one. Some are quiet, some are shockingly violent, and almost none of them are what you could honestly call comfortable. In the proper spirit of a true and cruel fairy tale, here are just a few of the paths that players have recorded, told only in the broadest of strokes so as to spoil nothing precisely. In one, the boy simply chooses to leave, turning his back and walking away from the village to save himself and abandon all the rest to their fate. In another, gentler and far more sorrowful, he sits down beside the girl he loves to watch the end of the world arrive together, the two of them making a quiet peace with the fact that nothing at all can be done. In a stranger, almost holy ending, he casts himself down into the pit as a willing sacrifice, and the entity below, moved despite itself by such selfless courage, chooses to spare humankind for the moment and remakes the boy as the new Deadeus. Darker roads wind through the village too. There is a grim path in which the boy turns on his own neighbours, and one especially bleak ending set in the coffee shop that finishes in poison and quiet death. There is even a haunting finale in which, having become the very last soul left alive, he wanders on forever repeating a single number under his breath, thirty-seven, exactly as a certain mad prisoner once did before him. So which of all these is the true ending? Deadeus flatly refuses to say. It simply hands you the three days, the frightened village and the terrible choice, and then leaves the moral of the whole story entirely in your own trembling hands. Homebrew tales like this one prove that the humble Game Boy still has brand new stories left to whisper in the dark. Explore more of them over at the Game Boy Museum, where the little grey machine keeps on finding fresh and surprising ways to unsettle and delight us.

Once upon a summer, two children were packed off to camp, as children so often are in stories that are about to go horribly wrong. This is the tale of Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly, released for the Game Boy by Acclaim in 1991, and the very first time Springfield's finest troublemaker was ever shrunk down to fit inside a Nintendo handheld. It is a fairy tale of a wicked warden, a captured sister and a boy who simply refuses to be miserable on command. Summer camp, but make it a survival story. Cowabunga. The Characters Our hero is Bart Simpson, ten years old and armed chiefly with attitude and quick reflexes. Where a fairy-tale knight might carry an enchanted sword, Bart makes do with dodging, ducking, jumping and stubbornly refusing to be made unhappy, which turns out to be exactly the wrong thing to do at this particular camp. He is the spirit of mischief itself, dropped into a place designed to crush every last drop of fun out of him. His clever little sister Lisa comes along on the trip too, and before very long she becomes the captive at the heart of the story, the princess in the tower who must be found and freed before the tale can end. The villain of the piece is Ironfist Burns, a nephew of Springfield's own miserly Mr. Burns and every bit as rotten as his infamous uncle. He runs Camp Deadly with a single guiding ambition: to make certain the children suffer, have as little fun as is humanly possible, and are not permitted to leave until they are thoroughly, gloriously wretched. Standing between Bart and freedom is a whole rogues' gallery of camp counselors and two particularly dedicated bullies, Blindside Bill and Rebound Rodney, who chase and harry our hero at every single turn. They are the goblins of this fairy tale, forever underfoot, forever spoiling for trouble. The World Camp Deadly is no ordinary summer retreat, and the game makes that clear from its very first screen. It begins in a forest, where the morning's supposedly cheerful activity, a friendly game of capture the flag, has been quietly turned into a gauntlet of angry, swarming bees, hostile counselors and lurking, grinning bullies. Fun here is a trap, and every meadow hides a sting. UK Version Complete in Box What makes Camp Deadly such a wickedly good setting is that it takes every warm and familiar thing about summer camp and quietly poisons it. The games are traps, the meals are ambushes, the counselors are jailers and the cheerful painted signs promising fun read like grim little jokes. It is a child's-eye vision of the worst holiday imaginable, and Ironfist Burns has engineered every last detail of it purely to break the spirits of the youngsters in his charge. From the woods the tale moves indoors to the mess hall at lunchtime, a dining room straight out of a nightmare, where the counselors fling knives and forks clean across the room at any child unwise enough to feel hungry. Beyond the camp itself rises Mount Deadly, a whole mountain to be climbed and crossed, and on its far side waits another stretch of shadowed forest and, humming ominously in the distance, a lonely power station. The Adventure Bart's ordeal plays out as a series of narrow escapes, each nastier than the last. First he must survive the forest game of capture the flag, threading his way through the swarming bees and past the taunts and shoves of Blindside Bill and Rebound Rodney. Then comes the dreaded lunch break, and a desperate dash through the mess hall while cutlery whistles past his ears like arrows. Along the way the game never lets Bart forget where he is. The bees do not tire, the bullies do not quit, and the counselors patrol their stations with grim devotion to the cause of childhood misery. Each stage is a fresh test of timing and nerve, a small obstacle course dressed up as a summer activity, and clearing one only earns Bart the right to face the next indignity Camp Deadly has prepared for him. It is a platformer, yes, but one wearing the costume of the holiday from the underworld. Together the children hatch a plan to flee, climbing up and over the great bulk of Mount Deadly toward the promise of freedom on the far side. But partway through the escape the story suddenly darkens. Ironfist Burns snatches poor Lisa away into captivity, and in an instant Bart's cheeky romp becomes something far more serious: a genuine rescue mission, with his own sister as the prize. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends Bart tracks his kidnapped sister and her captor all the way to the power station that keeps the whole of Camp Deadly running. There, in the story's final confrontation, he faces Ironfist Burns head on, defeats the scheming nephew at last and frees Lisa from his grasping clutches. The tyrant of the camp is beaten by a ten-year-old with a slingshot's worth of nerve. Reunited, brother and sister then do the single most satisfying thing imaginable. Together they find a great switch inside the station and throw it, cutting the power to the entire rotten camp in one glorious stroke and bringing their miserable summer stay to an abrupt and triumphant end. The lights of Camp Deadly flicker and die, the gates fall open, the children go free, and Bart Simpson, for once in his mischievous life, is unambiguously and completely the hero. Happily ever after, Springfield style. Fancy meeting the cartridge that sent Bart off to the worst summer camp in all of gaming? Visit the Game Boy Museum and find it waiting among the shelves of handheld history, ready to tell its story all over again.

Once upon a time there was a famous legend about a brave knight, a captured princess and a fire-breathing dragon in a wizard's castle. This is not quite that legend. This is Dragon's Lair, the 1992 Game Boy cartridge from Sony Imagesoft, and it is a curious, honest little side-scrolling platformer that shares almost nothing with the glorious hand-drawn arcade machine whose name it borrows. So rather than pretend, let us tell the story it truly tells, which turns out to be stranger than the legend. Dirk the Daring: a knight with no sword and a great deal of optimism. The Characters Our hero is Dirk the Daring, a knight of great courage and, in this particular telling, almost no equipment whatsoever. He cannot swing a sword. He cannot cast a spell. He can walk, and he can jump, and with those two humble talents alone he must set the whole world right. It is the fairy tale of the underdog stripped right down to the bone, a champion armed with nothing but nerve and a good pair of boots. Far away waits Princess Daphne, taken captive and longing to be rescued, the damsel at the centre of the tale. The long shadow over the land is cast by Mordroc, an evil lord hungry for power, whose barbaric army did a terrible thing at the very start of the story. And sleeping somewhere beyond the mountains lies a Dormant Knight, a slumbering champion whose awakening, curiously, turns out to be the true prize of the whole quest. Now a word of honesty for anyone who loves the old arcade legend, and it is an important one. Singe, the famous fire-breathing dragon of the laserdisc cartoon, never once appears in this cartridge. There is no wizard's castle to storm, no dragon to slay and no flaming lair to escape. This Game Boy tale marches to an entirely different drum, and it is kinder to the player to say so plainly than to promise a dragon that never comes. Princess Daphne, waiting in another castle. Sound familiar? The World The kingdom of this game is a land of platforms, ledges and gentle peril that scrolls quietly past as Dirk journeys onward. Most strikingly of all, it is a world almost entirely without monsters. There are no enemies to fight, and no weapons with which to fight them even if there were. The only true adversary is the geography itself: the gaps that must be leapt, the heights that must be climbed, the careful footing of a knight who lives or dies by his nimbleness rather than his steel. Across all of this scattered landscape lie hundreds of glittering fragments, waiting from one end of the realm to the other. There are said to be 194 of them in total, a small galaxy of shards spread over hill and hollow and hidden ledge, and the patient gathering of them is Dirk's entire purpose in life. It is less a war than a very long, very careful treasure hunt across a beautiful and lonely country. The Adventure The tale begins, as the best ones do, with a treasure and a betrayal. Princess Daphne's caravan was carrying the mythical Life Stone, an ancient relic rumoured to grant its owner limitless power and eternal life. A traitor whispered this precious secret into the ear of Mordroc, whose army promptly fell upon the caravan, slew nearly everyone in it and carried the princess away into captivity. It is worth pausing on how lonely a quest this really is. Dirk has no map, no guide and no companion at his shoulder, only the endless promise of one more shard glinting on the next ledge. He climbs and drops and doubles back across the same beautiful, empty country, and the game asks of him the plainest and hardest of virtues: not strength, not cunning, but sheer stubborn persistence. In a genre built on slaying things, here is a knight whose greatest heroism is simply refusing to give up and go home. But in the last desperate moments before the ambush struck, a quick-thinking maid used what small sorcery she possessed and shattered the Life Stone into hundreds of pieces, flinging them far and wide across the length of the land so that no villain could ever hold its terrible power whole again. And so Dirk's long and lonely errand is set for him: to walk and to leap the entire breadth of the kingdom, patiently gathering up every last glinting shard of the broken stone before darkness can claim them. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends Here is where the story turns genuinely strange, and honesty demands we tell it straight. Once Dirk has finally collected every last Life Stone in the realm, he travels over the mountains to one final screen, and there he awakens the Dormant Knight, calling the sleeping champion back into life. And then the cartridge simply stops. That, remarkably, is the ending. Dirk never confronts Mordroc. There is no dragon, no duel, no fiery cavern and no triumphant slaying. He does not, in the end, actually rescue Princess Daphne at all, and she remains a captive as the tale quietly closes. It is a cliffhanger in chainmail, a fairy tale that dutifully gathers every one of its pieces and then declines to finish its own sentence. Whether that makes it a charming curiosity or a small heartbreak is left entirely for the player to decide, but it is, at the very least, the true and complete story that this odd little cartridge actually has to tell. Curious to meet this strange, gentle, sword-less knight for yourself? Step into the Game Boy Museum and find the cartridge in person, cliffhanger ending and all. Some of the best stories are the ones that surprise you.

Once upon a time, on a desert world with two suns, a farm boy dreamed of adventure and got rather more than he bargained for. This is the tale told by Star Wars, the little Game Boy cartridge Capcom released in 1992, which dares to squeeze the whole of the 1977 film onto a screen the size of a biscuit. It should not work at all. That it works even a little is its own kind of magic. A whole galaxy squeezed into four shades of grey. George Lucas, eat your heart out. The Characters Our hero is Luke Skywalker, a restless young man blessed with the most precious gift a video game can offer: many lives. Where his companions each get a single fragile chance, Luke may fall and rise again and again, which is rather convenient for a boy about to pick a fight with an entire Empire. He is the spine of the whole adventure, the one the player steers through sand and steel alike. At his side gathers a fellowship of the faithful. Obi-Wan Kenobi, the old hermit of the wastes, carries a strange and gentle magic: he can raise a fallen friend from the dead, up to five times, like a wizard who keeps spare heroes tucked in his sleeve. Han Solo the smuggler and Princess Leia may each take Luke's place at the controls, bringing their own strengths, though both walk a tightrope with only one life to lose. Choose to play as them and every step carries a delicious extra dread. Two loyal droids round out the party, and cleverly, each one is a tool as much as a friend. R2-D2 unrolls a map of the enemy fortress whenever the corridors grow into a maze, and prim golden C-3PO leans in to explain what on earth is happening and what must be done next. Chewbacca, the loyal Wookiee, waits patiently in the wings for a single shining moment at the very end of the tale. And the villain? Darth Vader, dark lord of the Sith, is treated by this cartridge as something almost too dangerous to show. He appears in exactly one place in the entire game: the Game Over screen. To look upon his mask is to know you have already failed. It is a small, sly touch, turning the story's greatest terror into the face of defeat itself. The World The story opens on Tatooine, a sun-baked hub of sand and danger that serves as the adventure's beating heart. Luke tears across the dunes in his landspeeder, the one machine that can make a Game Boy feel genuinely quick, weaving past lumbering Tusken Raiders, scuttling Jawas and the ever-present stormtroopers of the Empire, who seem to sprout from the sand itself. Scattered through these desert levels are pieces of shielding, quiet little treasures that Luke must gather so that his getaway ship can survive what is coming. There is a rusting Sandcrawler to raid, a lonely hermit's cave up in the hills, and the wretched hive of the Mos Eisley spaceport, whose famous cantina here is blessedly free of any musical interruption. Every corner of the desert hides either a friend to recruit or a fragment to collect. Beyond the sand lies the cold black void. The tale then lifts off into a first-person view of space, where the Millennium Falcon must thread a churning, deadly asteroid field, and finally into the metal belly of the Death Star itself, the moon-sized fortress at the dark centre of the whole story. Three worlds, then: the open desert, the perilous stars, and the iron labyrinth, each demanding a different kind of courage. The Adventure The quest unfolds like a proper fairy tale of gathering, the sort where the hero cannot win alone and must first assemble his companions. Luke sets out across Tatooine to find them one by one: R2-D2 hidden away aboard the crawling Sandcrawler, wise old Obi-Wan waiting in his cave, and the roguish Han Solo lurking in the Mos Eisley bar with a blaster and an attitude. Only once the whole band is assembled, and enough precious shielding has been gathered from the dunes, may the journey leave the planet behind. Then comes the flight, and the game changes shape entirely. Guiding the Falcon through a hail of tumbling rock in tense first-person, our heroes reach the Death Star and slip inside its guts. Deep in those grey corridors two great deeds await. First they must silence the tractor beam that holds their ship captive, the invisible chain binding them to the enemy. Then they must find and free Princess Leia, locked away in the detention block at the fortress's heart, the captive whose rescue turns a daring raid into a rebellion. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends With the princess freed and the tractor beam dead, only one task remains, the grandest of them all. Luke joins the rebel fighters and turns their guns on the Death Star itself, and the great steel moon is undone in a blossom of fire, exactly as the old legend demands. The little grey screen delivers, in its humble way, the destruction of a planet-killer. Here the cartridge grants its one sweet reward. Chewbacca, who has waited the whole adventure long, finally strides into view for a closing cameo, the loyal Wookiee taking his bow at last. It is only honest to admit that Darth Vader never gets his lightsaber duel in this telling; he haunts only the Game Over screen, the face of failure rather than a final foe to be beaten. The instruction manual even whispers a lovely detail: should Han Solo perish along the way, it is Chewie who flies the Millennium Falcon home in his place. A small tale, then, but a complete and satisfying one, with the farm boy victorious, the princess free and a faraway star reduced to sparks. Want to see the actual cartridge that pulled off this impossible trick? Wander into the Game Boy Museum and browse the shelves at your leisure. Every grey plastic time capsule in there has a story just like this one, waiting patiently to be told.

The Characters The hero of this gentle tale is simply a boy, a small and ordinary child with an extraordinary friend. That friend is the blob, a soft, shape-shifting creature from another world who follows the boy everywhere and can become almost anything, provided it is offered the right snack. Their story is told in The Rescue of Princess Blobette, a quiet little Game Boy adventure with a very big heart. The reason for the whole journey is the blob’s sweetheart, the lovely Princess Blobette, who has been locked away in a tower and is waiting to be freed. And every tower needs a villain to fill it: here it is the Alchemist, a scheming and dangerous sort who has taken the princess prisoner and filled his castle with cruel traps to keep any would-be rescuers away. Princess Blobette, waiting patiently in the highest tower, as princesses in fairy tales tend to do. The World The adventure carries the boy and his blob far from home, all the way to Blobolonia, the strange and distant planet the blob calls home. There, rising against the sky, stands the great Royal Castle, and it is a maze from top to bottom. Passages twist, floors stack upon floors, and somewhere at the very summit, in the highest tower of all, the princess waits. It is a beautiful place, but it is far from safe. The castle bristles with hazards for a small and fragile boy: sudden gouts of flame, deep and deadly falls, and serpents lurking in the drains below. Our hero cannot jump and cannot swim, so every room must be crossed by wits alone rather than by daring leaps. The Adventure The magic of this tale lies entirely in a humble bag of jellybeans. The boy carries beans of many flavours, tangerine, vanilla, apple and more, and each flavour, when fed to the hungry blob, transforms the creature into a different helpful tool. A tangerine bean turns the blob into a bouncy trampoline, so the boy can spring up to a ledge he could never otherwise reach. Another flavour shapes the blob into a key to slip through a locked door, and so on through the whole tasty rainbow. So the adventure becomes a long and thoughtful puzzle. In each room the boy must look carefully, decide which treat will make which tool, and feed his blob at exactly the right moment to build a path forward. Along the way there are rewards for the curious: extra sacks of jellybeans to refill the bag, glittering treasures tucked into hidden corners, and peppermints to gather, for collecting five of them grants a precious extra life. Step by careful step, snack by clever snack, the boy and his blob climb ever higher through the castle toward the tower where Blobette is held. A boy, a blob, and a bag of jellybeans: the least likely rescue party ever assembled. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends After all the traps are dodged and all the puzzles are solved, the boy and his faithful blob reach the very top of the castle, the highest tower where the Alchemist has hidden his prisoner. There, at last, is Princess Blobette, caged and waiting. With one final act of teamwork the pair set her free, and the long climb is rewarded. It is a small and tender ending, exactly as a story like this deserves. There are no grand armies and no thunderous battles, only a boy, his loyal blob and a bag of sweets, proving that cleverness and friendship can open any locked door and reach any lonely tower. The blob is reunited with the one it loves, the boy has kept his promise to his friend, and the three of them can leave the Alchemist’s cold castle behind for good. Curious to meet this odd and charming little cartridge for yourself? Visit the Game Boy Museum and browse our full catalogue, where even the quietest Game Boy games keep their stories safe.

The Characters Our hero is a quiet young trainer from the sleepy little village of Pallet Town, setting out on the very first morning of a very large life. Their guide is the kindly and famously forgetful Professor Oak, the region’s great scholar of these pocket monsters, who dreams of a book that records every last one of them. He is the one who sets the whole journey in motion in Pokemon Red, and in its sister tales the Green, Blue and Yellow editions. No hero is complete without a rival, and this one is close to home: Oak’s own grandson, a cocky and gifted young trainer who always seems to be one town ahead, one badge richer and one smug remark ready. Along the road wait eight Gym Leaders, each a master of their craft, and a shadowy gang of thieves called Team Rocket, led by the cold and calculating Giovanni. And in the deepest cave of all sleeps a secret: Mewtwo, a creature made by human hands, waiting for a trainer brave enough to face it. The World The whole tale takes place in the wide land of Kanto, a region of rolling routes, winding caves and bustling towns, all rendered in the Game Boy’s cosy shades of grey. From Pallet Town the road runs north and outward, through Viridian and Pewter, past the sparkling waters of Cerulean, down to the busy port of Vermilion, into the neon glow of Celadon and Saffron, out to seaside Fuchsia and across to the volcanic island of Cinnabar. Each of these towns guards a Gym and a Gym Leader, and each Leader hands out a single hard-won Badge to those who can beat them. Eight Badges are the keys to the kingdom, for only a trainer who holds all eight may pass through Victory Road and climb at last to the Indigo Plateau, where the very strongest trainers in the land are waiting. Pokémon Yellow - Branded & Fan Art Items The Adventure It all begins with a choice. Professor Oak offers the young trainer their very first partner: the leafy Bulbasaur, the fiery Charmander or the watery Squirtle. From that moment the journey has two great threads woven together. One is Oak’s dream, to travel far and wide and record every kind of Pokemon for his grand encyclopedia. The other is the trainer’s own dream, to collect all eight Gym Badges and become the greatest of all. And so our hero walks the long roads of Kanto, catching creatures in the tall grass, raising and befriending them, and battling the rival again and again at every crossroads. But there is trouble to face too. The thieves of Team Rocket lurk everywhere, stealing Pokemon and bullying honest folk, from the tunnels of Mt. Moon to a hidden lair beneath a Celadon game parlour and the towering offices of Silph Co. in Saffron City. In time our trainer discovers the terrible truth: the boss of Team Rocket, Giovanni, is none other than a Gym Leader himself, hiding his crimes behind a badge. In the Yellow edition, this old tale is told with a wink toward the animated show that had captured everyone’s hearts. There the trainer’s first partner is a single cheerful Pikachu, and rather than riding inside a ball it trots along faithfully at the hero’s heels, its mood written all over its little face. The rival, meanwhile, sets out with a mischievous Eevee, and the familiar journey feels fresh and companionable all over again. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends With all eight Badges in hand, the trainer braves the long dark of Victory Road and emerges at the Indigo Plateau, where the Elite Four await: four champion trainers who must each be beaten in a single unbroken run, with no chance to rest between them. One by one they fall, and just as the crown seems won, one final challenger steps forward. It is the rival, who reached the top first and crowned himself Champion of the whole region. And so the story comes full circle. The two neighbours who set out on the same morning face each other one last time, and this time our hero prevails, taking the title of Champion at last. Professor Oak arrives to record the moment for all time. Yet even then the world holds one more secret. Deep within Cerulean Cave, revealed only to the new Champion, waits Mewtwo, the mightiest and most mysterious Pokemon of them all, so that the greatest trainer in Kanto still has one legend left to chase. Want to see these four little cartridges that launched a phenomenon? Step into the Game Boy Museum and explore our full catalogue, where every Game Boy game keeps its own story alive.

Slot an original cartridge into a Game Boy and you get exactly one game, fixed in silicon forever. That is how the machine was designed, and for most of its life that was that. But a small world of unofficial hardware grew up around the console with a very different promise: a single cartridge that could hold your entire library, ready to load any game onto real hardware at the flick of a menu. These are the flash cartridges, and the collection holds several generations of them. What Is a Game Boy Flash Cartridge? An ordinary Game Boy game lives on a mask ROM, a chip stamped with one game at the factory that can never be changed. A flash cartridge swaps that for rewritable flash memory, the same kind of storage found in a memory card or a USB stick. That one change is transformative: instead of being locked to a single title, the cartridge can be erased and rewritten with different game files, or read them live from a memory card, all while running on a genuine DMG-01 rather than an emulator. Flash Cartridges - The EverDrive GB This puts flash cartridges in an interesting grey area. The devices themselves are simply reprogrammable hardware, and they are a legitimate way to run homebrew games or to play your own backups. Copying and distributing commercial game ROMs is another matter entirely, which is why these carts have always lived on the unofficial, grey-market side of Game Boy history. The museum catalogues them honestly as exactly that. The EverDrive: The Modern Standard The best known flash cartridge today is the EverDrive, a line developed by the hardware maker Krikzz. The GB EverDrive reads game files directly from an ordinary SD card, so a single cartridge with a large enough card can carry hundreds of games at once. It even includes a built-in cheat module, bringing old-school game-enhancer codes into a modern, tidy package. For anyone who wants to play a big library on original hardware, it has become the default choice. The collection also holds the more advanced EverDrive GB X7, a later and more capable model in the same family. Sitting the two side by side shows how quickly this niche matured, from a simple game loader into a polished piece of kit with extra conveniences layered on top. The EverDrive is the point where the flash cartridge stopped being a hobbyist curiosity and became a genuinely refined product. The flagsip model - the EverDrive GB X7 Flash cartridges also matter for a reason that has nothing to do with piracy: they are how new Game Boy games get played on real hardware. The console has a thriving homebrew scene, with developers still writing fresh titles decades after the last official release, and a flash cartridge is the bridge between code written on a modern computer and a genuine 1989 machine. Without a way to load your own program onto a real Game Boy, a homebrew game is just a file in an emulator. With one, it becomes a cartridge you can hold, plug in and play, which is exactly the magic that keeps the platform alive. The Grey-Market Multicarts Long before SD cards, the same basic desire produced simpler devices. The GB Smart Card 32 packs up to 32 megabytes of game data onto a single cartridge. Because most Game Boy games were tiny by modern standards, that was enough to squeeze the equivalent of hundreds of titles onto one card. It is a pure grey-market device, with no official maker and no release date, exactly the kind of anonymous black-market hardware that circulated through markets and mail order in the console's later years. Early Days Flash Cartridge - The GB Smart 32 MB Dumping and Preserving: The Flash Boy Not every device in this corner of the collection is for playing games. The Flash Boy, a modern unit from 2022, is a small tool for backing up the ROMs stored on genuine Game Boy cartridges. Crucially, it can also read and write the save data on supported games, including the Pokemon titles, whose battery-backed saves fade as their internal batteries die. Used this way, a flash device becomes a preservation tool, rescuing decades-old save files and cartridge data before they are lost for good. Modern Flash Device (2022) - The Flash Boy Why Collect the Unofficial Side? It might seem odd for a museum devoted to original hardware to prize these unofficial cartridges, but they are an essential part of the full story. They show how a passionate community refused to let the Game Boy fade into obsolescence, building tools to play, back up and preserve its games on the real machine long after Nintendo had moved on. They are also a window into the console's shadow economy, the grey-market world of multicarts and backup units that has always shadowed popular hardware. The Flash Cartridges in the Collection From the polished, SD-card EverDrive to the anonymous Smart Card multicart and the humble Flash Boy dumper, these devices trace the whole arc of unofficial Game Boy storage. Together they make the case that the Game Boy is not a dead machine at all, but a living platform that people are still playing, coding for and preserving. You can find them among the special and unofficial items across the collection.

The Characters At the heart of this story swing two heroes. There is Donkey Kong, the broad-shouldered ape with the red necktie and a bottomless appetite for bananas, and there is Diddy Kong, his small, quick, cap-and-shirt-wearing nephew, forever cartwheeling one step ahead. Together they are unstoppable, or at least they very much like to think so. Donkey and Diddy set out to save their bananas and, more importantly, their pride. Then there is the true engine of the whole tale: Cranky Kong, the grouchy old-timer of the family, who has seen every fashion come and go and approves of almost none of them. And lurking on the other side of the board sits King K. Rool, the enormous, crown-wearing crocodile king, and his scaly army of Kremlings, who never met a banana hoard they did not want to steal. The World This is a Game Boy tale, and it wears that fact like a badge of honour. Everything unfolds in crisp shades of grey on a little screen, and yet the world feels vast. Our heroes travel through four great realms on their journey. They creep through the creaking timbers of a mysterious pirate ship, shiver across frozen peaks buried in snow, dive into the flooded halls of an eerie underwater temple, and finally clamber high into the clouds for a wild adventure in the sky. Cranky Kong: proof that every family has one relative who thinks nothing was ever good enough. Between these wonders lie the tangled jungles and rickety mine-paths that any Kong knows by heart. And scattered throughout are their old animal friends, chief among them Rambi the rhinoceros, ever ready to lower his horn and charge through anything foolish enough to stand in the way. The Adventure The whole quest begins, wonderfully, with an argument. Donkey Kong Country had just dazzled the world with its glittering pictures, and Cranky Kong was thoroughly unimpressed. All that success, he grumbled, was nothing but fancy graphics and trickery. Donkey and Diddy insisted the game was loved because it was simply fun to play. So Cranky, in his infinite crankiness, set them a wager: prove it on the humble little Game Boy, with none of the mighty machinery of the big consoles to help you. To make the bet sporting, the crafty old ape secretly hired King K. Rool to steal the precious banana hoard all over again. And so the Kremlings marched off with the loot, and the two heroes set out in furious pursuit, not only to win back every last banana, but to prove their stubborn old relative wrong once and for all. Japanese Donkey Kong Guide Book Across ship and snow, temple and sky, Donkey and Diddy make the perfect team. They tag in and out for one another, roll and cartwheel through crowds of enemies, bounce off tumbling foes and hurl barrels at anything that snarls. They ride Rambi through walls of trouble, they leap between swinging ropes and vanishing platforms, and at the close of each realm a hulking Kremlin boss bars the path, demanding to be outwitted before the chase can continue. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends At the end of the long road waits the greedy crocodile king himself. Donkey Kong and Diddy Kong corner King K. Rool for the final showdown, dodge his heavy charges, and pelt him until his crown very nearly rattles off. Beaten and grumbling, the reptile king finally surrenders, and the great banana hoard is recovered at last, every golden bunch back where it belongs. But the sweetest prize is not the fruit. It is the look on Cranky Kong’s face. The two heroes have crossed a whole monochrome world and triumphed on the smallest screen of all, proving that the magic was never in the fancy pictures but in the joy of the adventure itself. The old ape, for once, has nothing clever to say. And that, for Donkey and Diddy, is a victory sweeter than any banana. Fancy tracking down this little grey-scale epic in the wild? Visit the Game Boy Museum and explore our full catalogue of Game Boy cartridges, complete with the stories behind them.