The Characters Every good fairy tale needs a hero who is smaller than his troubles, and this one gives us Mario. In 1994, long before he was the plump plumber of a thousand kingdoms, he was simply a stubborn little man in a red cap who could jump, climb and, above all, never give up. Beside him stands the whole reason he runs at all: Pauline, a bright and kind-hearted young woman who has the great misfortune of being very easy to admire. One hundred and one rooms, one very determined moustache. That admirer is Donkey Kong, the great ape of the title. He is not truly wicked, only lonely, jealous and far too strong for his own good. When he decides he wants Pauline all to himself, he simply scoops her up and climbs away, and the entire adventure comes tumbling out behind him like a spilled basket of fruit. Keep an eye out, too, for a small shadow near the very end of the tale: a tiny ape with an enormous heart, who reminds everyone that even a monster can be somebody’s family. The World This story unfolds across nine wondrous lands, and the clever little Game Boy tucks every one of them into the palm of your hand. It begins, as the oldest legends always do, on a construction site of red girders, tall ladders and rolling barrels. But once the chase truly begins, the world opens up like a picture book: a bustling Big City of rooftops and elevators, a shadowy Forest, a rocking Ship out at sea, a steaming Jungle, a blazing Desert, a great Airplane high in the clouds, a glittering Iceberg and a Rocky Valley of cliffs and caverns. Each of these lands is stitched together from dozens of tiny single-screen rooms, more than a hundred of them in all, and every little room is its own clever riddle. Nothing is wasted. A ladder here, a locked door there, a single switch that changes everything: the whole kingdom is really one enormous puzzle box, patiently waiting to be solved one screen at a time. Donkey Kong: 900 pounds of misunderstood loneliness and excellent barrel-throwing form. The Adventure The tale opens with a scene every grandparent will recognise. Donkey Kong stands at the top of a tower of girders, Pauline waits helplessly above him, and barrels come thundering down like an angry storm. Mario climbs, he leaps, he dodges, and after four familiar stages he reaches the summit and takes his lady’s hand. The victory music swells. The story seems, for one lovely moment, to be over. And then comes the cheekiest twist the Game Boy ever pulled. Donkey Kong simply wakes up, snatches Pauline all over again, and bounds clean off the screen. The real adventure has barely begun. What follows is not the old barrel-dodging game at all, but something new and marvellous: ninety-seven more stages, each a tiny puzzle in its own right. In every room a key waits somewhere behind gaps, spikes, ladders and switches, and a matching locked door waits patiently on the far side. Mario must carry that heavy key across the room without dropping it into a pit or a puddle. To manage it, our little hero learns a whole circus of new tricks. He can stand on his hands and walk upside down, spring high off a nimble backflip to reach impossible ledges, balance objects on his head, stack crates and platforms into staircases, ride moving lifts and flip switches that raise ladders and lower bridges out of thin air. And at the end of each of the nine lands, Donkey Kong himself is waiting for a proper showdown, hurling barrels and fruit until Mario, with perfect timing, sends him scrambling off to the next land with Pauline tucked under one great arm. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends The chase ends exactly where it was always going to end: at the very top of the world, on the roof of a towering city building, with nowhere left to climb. Cornered at last, Donkey Kong does the only thing a cornered giant can think to do. He grows. He swells into an enormous, mountainous version of himself and throws everything he has at the tiny plumber below. But Mario has not crossed nine lands to stumble on the final rooftop. With well-judged jumps and well-aimed barrels he wears the giant down, and at last the great ape topples and shrinks back to his ordinary size. And here the fairy tale shows its soft heart. There is no cage, no punishment, no cruel revenge. Mario offers Donkey Kong a hand, Pauline is safe and sound, and the two old rivals part as something much closer to friends. The lonely ape learns that a lady cannot simply be carried off and kept, and the little hero learns that even the biggest brute deserves a hand back up. And so, with a wave and a grin, the longest chase on the Game Boy comes gently to rest. Would you like to hold this pocket-sized legend for yourself? Step into the Game Boy Museum and wander the full catalogue of cartridges, curiosities and stories that we lovingly preserve.

Once upon a time, there was a hero who simply refused to die. Squash him flat, set him alight, or turn him into a shuffling zombie, and he would only grumble, shake it off, and keep marching toward his treasure. This is the tale of Wario Land 2, the adventure where losing was made impossible and getting even became the whole point. No lives, no game over: the only truly deathless hero on the Game Boy. It is a story that begins, of all things, with a flooded castle and a stolen chicken, and it ends not once but many times over, depending entirely on which secret doors our greedy hero decides to open. Come and see how a game turned a plumber's old rival into the most unkillable treasure-hunter on the little grey machine. The Characters Our hero, if we may still call him that, is Wario, and the cartridge that carries him is Wario Land 2. By now Wario has his own castle and a fine hoard of treasure, and there is nothing he loves more than a good long nap on top of a pile of gold. That nap, as it turns out, is exactly the problem. Returning to trouble him are Captain Syrup and her band of pirates, back for revenge after their earlier defeat and just as cunning as ever. They have not forgotten the greedy man who once raided their island, and they mean to teach him a lesson while he sleeps. The trouble begins with a marvellously petty crime. While Wario snores away, the pirates creep into his castle and help themselves to his treasure. They even make off with his beloved pet hen. For good measure they set off his enormous alarm clock to jolt him awake at the worst possible moment, and they leave the taps running so that half the castle is flooding as he opens his eyes. Wario wakes up soaked, robbed and absolutely furious, and off he stomps to get everything back. The World The adventure begins right at home, in Wario's own castle with the water still rising, and then spills outward into a long chain of chapters. Wario chases the fleeing pirates through caves and forests, across strange machines and eerie haunts, deeper and deeper into their world as he tries to catch them and reclaim what is his. The pirates flooded his castle and stole his hen. Big mistake. What makes this land so unusual is that it is not a single fixed road. The chapters branch. Tucked away in many stages are hidden exits, and each one sends Wario down a different path to a different place. Two players can set out from the very same flooded castle and end up wandering completely different corners of the story. The map, in a sense, is different for everyone. The Adventure Here is the great twist that makes Wario Land 2 so different from almost every game around it: Wario cannot die. There are no spare lives to lose and no game over waiting for a careless step. The very worst that an enemy can do is change his shape for a little while, or knock a few of his precious coins loose to go rolling across the floor. Better still, those changes are not punishments at all. They are the keys to the puzzles. Get squashed flat by a weight and Wario becomes a pancake who can flutter down and slip through the narrowest of gaps. Get set on fire and he charges about in a blazing panic, burning through ropes and obstacles that would otherwise stop him. Get stung and puffed up like a balloon and he floats gently upward to places his stubby legs could never reach. He can even be turned into a zombie who sinks straight down through certain floors. Every misfortune is really a tool in disguise. Japanese Game Guide - Cheeky as Wario Because Wario can never be beaten, the whole spirit of the adventure shifts from surviving to searching. Instead of fearing enemies, he uses them. Instead of counting lives, he counts coins and hunts for hidden treasure. And because those secret exits keep branching the road, a curious, greedy Wario is rewarded with more paths, more riches and more of the story to uncover. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends Because the roads keep forking, this tale does not have one tidy ending. It has many. Depending on which hidden doors Wario chooses to open and which paths he follows, he arrives at different conclusions, some quick and some winding, each with its own final scene and its own secret treasures to be found only along that particular route. Yet whichever road he takes, the heart of the ending is always the same. Wario chases down the pirates, gets the better of them, and stomps home with his stolen fortune recovered and his flooded, ransacked castle set right again. To see every last one of the endings, though, a player must go back and walk the roads not taken, which is exactly the sort of thing a treasure-hound like Wario would want you to do. If you would like to meet the cartridge that made its hero utterly impossible to defeat, you can find Wario Land 2 in the collection. Come and see it at the Game Boy Museum.

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.

In part one we met the big names, the brands whose lights, cases and cheat devices defined the accessory aisle. This second part turns to the two most practical problems every Game Boy owner faced: keeping the machine powered, and connecting it to a friend. A whole tier of makers, some famous, some barely documented, built battery packs, chargers and link cables to solve exactly those needs, and the collection holds a deep cross-section. Where a maker's home base is known, it is noted; where it is not, it is left open rather than guessed. Mad Catz The American maker Mad Catz, based in San Diego, grew into one of the best-known third-party names in all of gaming. On the Game Boy the collection holds its Power Clip, a rechargeable battery solution, and a Universal Car Adapter for playing on the road. Mad Catz is the archetype of the accessory house that started small on handhelds and went on to become a fixture on every console that followed. LMP LMP focused on the eternal Game Boy problem of power. The collection holds its Power Pack and the more elaborate Powerbase Bundle, the kind of rechargeable kit that promised to free owners from the endless procession of AA batteries. Power solutions like these were among the most genuinely useful accessories anyone could buy for the battery-hungry handheld. Vidis Vidis is one of the more obscure names in the collection, represented by the Vidis Energy Pack. Little is widely documented about the company, which is exactly what makes pieces like this rewarding to preserve: they are the survivors of the market's long tail, the small makers whose products would otherwise vanish from the record entirely. iMP iMP addressed the same need with brute practicality. The collection holds its Heavy Duty Battery Pack, a no-nonsense answer to the console's appetite for power. Straightforward, unglamorous and genuinely useful, it is a good reminder that much of the accessory market was simply about keeping the machine switched on for longer. Innovation Technologies Innovation Technologies took power in a more forward-looking direction with its Solar Charger, an early attempt at charging on the go from daylight. The same maker was also behind the Super GB Booster, the adapter that let Game Boy cartridges run on a Sony PlayStation, showing an appetite for ideas well beyond the ordinary. Joytech The British maker Joytech specialised in connection. The collection holds its Dual Link Cable and the Multi Link Cable, the cables that turned two Game Boys into a shared game of Tetris or a Pokemon trade. Joytech would go on to become a well-known European accessory brand, but its roots in simple, reliable link cables are on show here. IQL IQL pushed the link cable further with its Dual Link X 4 Player Cable, part of the small family of adapters that tried to expand the Game Boy's two-player nature into genuine multiplayer. Cables like this are a reminder of how much collectors valued the social side of the console, and how many makers competed to enable it. 3Logic 3Logic is another long-tail maker preserved through a single surviving piece, the 3Logic Link Cable. A plain link cable is about as humble as an accessory gets, but each one represents a small company that saw a niche in connecting Game Boys and took its shot at the market. Yobo Rounding out the connectivity makers is the American brand Yobo, represented by its Universal Link Cable. Yobo built a reputation for affordable, cross-compatible gear, and a universal cable designed to work across the Game Boy family is a neat encapsulation of that value-first philosophy. The Series Continues That is the power-and-connection tier. The third and final part gathers the makers of cases, screens and controllers, and the modern outfits still building for the Game Boy today, including the flash-cart maker keeping homebrew alive. Every accessory named here is documented, with photos, in the collection.

Once upon a time, the villain got to be the hero. Not a nice hero, mind you. A loud, greedy, garlic-loving brute of a hero who wanted only one thing in all the wide world: enough treasure to build a castle even grander than Mario's. This is the story of how Wario stopped stealing other people's spotlight and swaggered off into an adventure entirely his own. It is a tale of pirates, of a skull-shaped island, of silly magic hats and, best of all, an ending that grows or shrinks depending on just how greedy our hero is willing to be. Fair warning: nobody in this story is especially well behaved, and that is exactly what makes it fun. The villain gets his own game, and immediately robs a pirate. The Characters Our anti-hero is Wario, and the cartridge that finally lets him lead is Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. Fresh from being thrown out of Mario's castle, Wario wants a palace of his own, and he is not fussy about how he pays for it. The prize that catches his eye is a rumour: a band of pirates has stolen a giant golden statue of Princess Toadstool and is holding it for a princely ransom. Mario is out searching for it too, but Wario reasons that if he grabs the statue first, along with all the pirates' other loot, he can cash it in and buy a palace far bigger than his rival's pathetic little castle. Greed, for once, is the whole plot. Standing in his way is Captain Syrup, the clever and dangerous queen of the Brown Sugar pirates. She rules the island, she commands the crew, and she guards a hoard of stolen treasure that she has no intention of handing over to a garlic-scented thief in a purple cap. The World The whole adventure takes place on Kitchen Island, a strange, skull-shaped scrap of land that the Brown Sugar pirates call home. It is dotted with hiding places, and Wario must fight his way clear across it, one region at a time. He starts on the sunny shore of Rice Beach, then climbs the slopes of Mt. Teapot. There is the frozen, secret Sherbet Land, an icy detour you can only reach by sniffing out a hidden way in. There is the fiery Stove Canyon, the pirate vessel of the SS Tea Cup, and the gloomy tangles of Parsley Woods. And at journey's end looms Syrup Castle itself, the stronghold where the pirate queen waits with her treasure and her temper. The Adventure Wario does not play the game the way Mario would. He is too heavy and far too rude to daintily bounce on his foes. Instead he lowers his shoulder and barges straight through them with a mighty shoulder-bash, or grabs them and hurls them aside. And everywhere he goes he is hunting: for coins, for the fat money bags that fill his sacks, and above all for the fifteen glittering treasures hidden across the island. Scattered through the land are magic Power Up Pots, and each one hands Wario a new hat and a new power. As Bull Wario he wears a horned helmet, pounds the ground with a mighty stamp and even clings to the ceiling above him. As Jet Wario he sprouts a little jet pack and goes zooming through the air. And as Dragon Wario he dons a spout of a helmet and breathes gouts of fire down onto his enemies. One greedy man, three ridiculous costumes, endless mischief. Collect everything and Wario gets a planet. Collect nothing and he gets a birdhouse. The clever part is that treasure hides behind secrets. Many a coin and many a jewel is tucked away behind a hidden door or a blocked passage, and it is those secret exits that unlock the optional icy world of Sherbet Land. A lazy Wario can simply bash his way to the finish. A truly greedy Wario turns over every stone on the island, and, as we shall see, that greed pays off in the strangest way. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends At last Wario storms into Syrup Castle and corners Captain Syrup herself. She is not about to lose gracefully. She rubs a magic lamp, and out roars a great Genie. The pirate queen hops up onto its shoulders and the pair go swooping around the room, flinging fireballs at the intruder. But Wario is stubborn as a mule, and eventually he pounds the Genie down. Beaten but never truly caught, Captain Syrup escapes by blowing up her own castle and slipping away into the smoke. Wario, though, walks off with the loot, and here comes the most delicious twist in the whole tale. What Wario gets to build with his fortune depends entirely on how much of it he managed to carry home. Gather only a little and the poor scoundrel ends up with a tiny birdhouse. Gather more and it grows into a hollow tree trunk, then a cosy log cabin, then a handsome pagoda, then, at last, a proper castle to rival Mario's. And for the very greediest treasure-hunter of all, the one who tracks down every single one of the fifteen treasures and sweeps up every coin on Kitchen Island, the reward is grander than any castle: Wario gets a whole planet of his own to lord over. In this story, the size of your happy ending is measured out exactly by the size of your greed. If you would like to meet the cartridge that turned gaming's greatest grump into a leading man, you can find Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 in the collection. Come and see it at the Game Boy Museum.

Once upon a time, a hero came home from a long and heroic journey, tired and proud, only to find that a stranger had moved into his house. Not just any house: his castle. And not just any stranger, but a big, greedy, purple-and-yellow fellow with a moustache almost as grand as Mario's own. This is the tale of the day Mario had to win back his very own front door. Six golden coins: the world's most inconvenient front-door key. It is a story about coming home, about a rival nobody had ever met before, and about six shining coins scattered to the far corners of a very odd little land. Settle in, because this is where one of gaming's greatest scoundrels first swaggered onto the stage. The Characters Our hero, once again, is Mario, and the cartridge that tells his story is Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins. Mario returns from his travels expecting a warm welcome and a quiet nap, and instead finds his own home locked against him and his own people turned into strangers. The villain, and the true breakout star of the tale, is Wario. This was his very first appearance anywhere, and what an entrance it is. Wario is Mario's greedy rival, a big, grasping fellow who has been jealous of Mario since they were small, and who wants nothing so much as a grand castle to call his own. While Mario was off being a hero, Wario simply took Mario's castle for himself. Worse still, Wario cast an evil spell over the good folk of the island, brainwashing them so that they would serve him and turn against their old friend Mario. To keep the castle safe, he handed six golden coins to six fearsome guardians and hid them across the land. Without those coins, the castle door will not open, and so the whole adventure is set. The World This time the whole tale unfolds on Mario's own island, a land entirely his own, with his beloved castle standing at its very heart. Spread around that castle are six strange and marvellous zones, each one its own little world, and Mario is free to wander into them in almost any order he chooses. There is the Tree Zone, an enormous tree crawling with giant insects. There is the Macro Zone, a house so gigantic that Mario shrinks to the size of a mouse among its everyday clutter. There is the Pumpkin Zone, a haunted jack-o-lantern of graveyards and ghostly houses. There is the Mario Zone, a colossal mechanical statue built in Mario's own likeness, humming with gears. There is the Turtle Zone, a watery world tucked inside a giant tortoise. And high above them all floats the Space Zone, out among the moon and the stars where gravity turns feather-light. Wario's villain debut: a whole game just to answer his own front door. The Adventure Mario's task is simple to say and hard to do: gather all six golden coins, one held by the boss of each zone, and only then can he unlock the castle. Along the way he finds old friends and new tricks. The fire flower is here as always, and a brand new charm too: the Carrot, which sprouts a pair of rabbit ears on Mario's cap so he can flap them and glide gently down through the air. In the Tree Zone he must climb past swarms of bugs to face the Big Bird who guards the branches. In the Macro Zone, tiny and vulnerable, he faces a giant rat far larger than himself. In the Pumpkin Zone he braves the ghosts and their mistress, a cackling Witch. And in the Mario Zone, deep inside the great clockwork statue, he must outwit the Three Little Pigs waiting at the machine's heart. In the watery Turtle Zone, an octopus lurks hidden inside a whale, and Mario must swim it down to claim his coin. And in the far Space Zone, drifting among the stars, he meets an old foe: Tatanga, the very alien who once tried to marry Princess Daisy, now working as a hired guardian for Wario. Defeat him, and the sixth and final coin is Mario's at last. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends With all six golden coins gathered, the great locked door of the castle finally swings open. Mario climbs up through his own twisted halls, now dark and full of Wario's guards, all the way to the top, where the greedy newcomer himself is waiting with a grin. Wario does not go quietly. He fights in one puffed-up form after another, growing larger, snatching Mario's own power-ups and turning fiery and quick, but Mario keeps his head and wears the bully down. At last Wario shrinks to a tiny, sulking little figure and scurries away in defeat. The spell over the island snaps, the good folk wake as if from a dream, and the castle is Mario's once more. As for Wario, he slinks off nursing his bruised pride and dreaming of a castle of his own, which, as it happens, becomes a story all his own. If you would like to see the little cartridge that first introduced the world to Wario, you can find Super Mario Land 2: Six Golden Coins resting in the collection. Come and visit it at the Game Boy Museum.

As Game Boy prices have climbed, the fakes have climbed with them. Reproduction cartridges, counterfeit boxes, resealed games and outright forgeries now circulate freely, and telling the genuine article from the copy has become an essential collecting skill. The good news is that most fakes give themselves away once you know where to look. This is a feature-by-feature guide to authenticating a Game Boy cartridge, told without turning it into a manual for the forgers. Start with the Screw The quickest first check is the screw on the back of the cartridge. Genuine Game Boy carts are held together with a single Nintendo security screw, the three-and-eight-millimetre gamebit type, a tamper-resistant fitting that ordinary tools do not fit. Many reproductions, assembled in generic shells, instead use a common Phillips screw. A Phillips screw where a gamebit should be is not proof of a fake on its own, but it is a strong warning sign and a reason to look harder. Original Game Boy Cartridge Screw Read the Label The label is where most fakes fall apart under scrutiny. Genuine Nintendo labels have crisp printing, correct fonts and consistent colour. Reproductions often show tell-tale signs of being printed from a scan: visible dithering or a dot pattern under magnification, slightly wrong or fuzzy fonts, colours that are too saturated or too flat, and a paper or gloss finish that does not match a period label. Compare any suspect label against a known-genuine copy of the same game and the differences usually jump out. Look at the Board If you can open the cartridge, the circuit board tells the truth. A genuine game uses a proper Nintendo board with a mask ROM, a chip with the game permanently printed into it at manufacture, and Nintendo markings on the PCB. A reproduction typically uses a generic board with a flashable memory chip and a small battery or none, and the board simply looks wrong: different layout, hand-soldered parts, or a re-writable chip where a mask ROM belongs. For save games, a genuine title that saves will have the correct battery-backed setup, whereas fakes often get this subtly wrong. Boxes, Manuals and Reseals Packaging is faked too, and it matters most because a boxed game is worth so much more than a loose one. Watch for reproduction boxes and manuals printed on modern card that feels too white, too thick or too glossy, with the same dithering problems as fake labels. Be especially wary of resealed games, where a genuine loose cartridge is placed into a fake box or a modern shrink-wrap, and of graded slabs from unknown graders. Reputable third-party grading exists precisely to solve this problem, which is one reason a professionally graded and sealed copy carries a premium. Fake Shells and Mislabelled Cartridges Beyond resealed boxes, two of the most common fakes are reproduction shells and bootleg cartridges, and both tend to give themselves away in the moulding and the labelling. Reproduction shells are aftermarket plastic housings, sold legitimately for repairs and modding, but also used to dress up a bootleg or a Frankenstein cart. The tells are physical: plastic that is too glossy or a shade Nintendo never sold, soft or shallow moulded lettering, seams and panel gaps that do not quite line up, and the wrong screws. Nintendo closed its cartridges and consoles with a tri-wing security screw (the gamebit), so a standard Phillips screw holding the case together is a warning sign. A colour that was never an official release is an instant red flag. An original game cartridge/console needs a special screwdriver to open The clearest tell of all is the text moulded into the cartridge itself. A genuine Game Boy cartridge carries the full wording Nintendo Game Boy, with the trademark symbol, moulded into the grey shell above the paper label. Fakes and bootlegs very often get this wrong: the moulded text may read only Game, or nothing at all, or use the wrong typeface and drop the trademark symbol entirely. If a cartridge does not carry the complete Nintendo Game Boy marking, treat it with suspicion. The paper label gives more away. On a fake it is often a low-resolution reprint with fuzzy text and slightly wrong colours, sits crooked or raised out of its recess, or lifts at the corners. The rear label may be missing the proper Nintendo stampings, the model number or the manufacturer line. On an ungraded, low-value piece you can go further and open the shell: a genuine cartridge shows a tidy Nintendo circuit board with clean solder work and stamped chips, while a bootleg often hides a black blob-top chip or a modern flash chip on a rougher board. Why Authentication Matters None of this is about paranoia; it is about protecting both your money and the historical record. A collection is only as trustworthy as the authenticity of the pieces in it, and a single well-made fake can distort a shelf, a valuation and a story. Learning to read the screw, the label, the board and the box turns a nervous purchase into a confident one, and it is exactly the kind of knowledge a serious collector, or a serious buyer, needs before parting with real money. The safest habits are simple: buy from sellers who show clear photographs of the back, the label and, where possible, the board; compare against known-genuine examples; and when a deal on a rare title looks too good to be true, assume it is until proven otherwise. The fakes are getting better, but so can your eye. Genuine, documented examples to compare against can be found throughout the collection.

Once upon a time, on the smallest of screens, a plumber went somewhere no plumber had gone before. Not to the Mushroom Kingdom, and not to rescue Princess Peach, but to a stranger, sun-baked corner of the world that most travellers had never even heard of. This is the tale the little grey cartridge tells, and it begins with a shadow falling across a peaceful land. This was the very first Mario adventure you could carry in your pocket, and its fairy tale is dreamier and odder than anything playing on the big television back home. So gather close, and let us begin where every good story does: with a hero, a villain, and a kingdom in trouble. An alien wanted a queen. He got a plumber in an airplane instead. The Characters Our hero is Mario, and the little grey cartridge that carries him is labelled Super Mario Land. He is the same cheerful, coin-loving, ever-jumping fellow you already know, but here he is a stranger far from home, with no brother at his side and no familiar hills to run through. Everything around him is new, and so is the danger. The one he has come to save is Princess Daisy, the bright and gentle ruler of a realm called Sarasaland. This was Daisy's very first appearance in any story, a brand new princess stepping onto the stage for the first time, and she spends this tale waiting bravely for rescue while a most unwelcome suitor makes his plans. That suitor is Tatanga, and he is no ordinary villain. He is a mysterious creature from outer space, a spaceman with strange powers who came drifting down from the stars with conquest on his mind. Tatanga cast a spell of hypnosis over the people of Sarasaland, turning gentle creatures into obstacles, and he decided that he would make Princess Daisy his queen whether she wished it or not. The World Sarasaland is not one country but four, and each of its kingdoms feels like a different daydream. Mario must cross all four to reach Daisy, and no two of them look alike. First comes the Birabuto Kingdom, a land of hot sand, ancient pyramids and watchful stone sphinxes. Then the Muda Kingdom, a warm and rolling sea where much of the journey happens beneath the waves. After that rises the Easton Kingdom, a windswept country of enormous carved stone heads standing silent on the plains. And last of all waits the Chai Kingdom, a misty, far-eastern realm of pagodas and drifting clouds, closest of all to the sky where the alien's warship hides. The Adventure Mario's road runs through twelve stages, three in each kingdom, thick with coins to gather and blocks to bump. His most delightful trick here is the Superball. Touch the right flower and Mario's throw becomes a bouncing little star that ricochets off floors and walls, striking foes and scooping up coins as it caroms about. It is a small magic, but it makes the whole journey sparkle. At the end of each kingdom stands a guardian, and the first is King Totomesu, a fire-breathing sphinx with the body of a lion who blocks the way out of Birabuto's great pyramid. Here Mario learns a clever secret that repeats across the land: behind each guardian is a switch, and a brave plumber who leaps clean over the monster and slaps that switch can drop the beast away and open the door without ever winning a fair fight. In the Muda Kingdom the adventure dives underwater, and Mario climbs into a tiny submarine called the Marine Pop to putter through the deep, firing at the fish and creatures who bar his way. At the bottom waits Dragonzamasu, a strange armoured seahorse who guards the exit with a spiky little helper at his side. Dragonzamasu - Ruler of the Muda Kingdom The Easton Kingdom is a place of stone, and its guardian is the mightiest sight yet: Hiyoihoi, a towering creature of living rock who hurls great boulders, the Ganchans, down the path to crush anyone foolish enough to approach. Mario must dodge, dart and keep his nerve among the falling stones. At last comes the Chai Kingdom, all pagodas and pale cloud, where the final guardian is Biokinton, a grinning face riding a cloud who flings birds at Mario as he runs. Beat Biokinton, and only the open sky remains between Mario and the alien who started all this trouble. Spoiler Alert: How It Ends For the final chapter, Mario leaves the ground behind entirely. He climbs into the Sky Pop, a plucky little airplane, and soars up into the skies above Chai to meet Tatanga face to face. The alien fights back from his warship, and the two trade fire across the clouds while Mario weaves between the shots, patient and stubborn. When at last Tatanga's ship is battered from the sky, the spell over Sarasaland shatters. The four kingdoms wake as if from a bad dream, the hypnotised creatures come to their senses, and there stands Princess Daisy, free at last. She greets her rescuer, the clouds part, and the smallest Mario adventure ends with the whole of Sarasaland safe and at peace. Not bad for a story you could fit in one hand. If you would like to meet the very cartridge that first carried Mario into your pocket, you can find Super Mario Land waiting quietly in the collection. Come and see it at the Game Boy Museum.

Pick up a Japanese Game Boy, a British one and an American one, switch them on, and you will struggle to tell them apart. The hardware is the same the world over. Look at the boxes, the manuals and the little codes on the back, though, and three quite different products appear. For a collector, those regional differences are part of the fun, and part of the challenge. Here is how the Game Boy changed as it travelled from Kyoto to the rest of the world. One Machine, Many Boxes At its core the DMG-01 was a single global design, the same grey unit that sold in the tens of millions everywhere from Tokyo to Texas. The original Japanese console and the UK retail version run identical hardware. What changed from market to market was everything around the machine: the packaging, the artwork and the language on the box and in the manual. How the Game Boy Regional Variants Differ The clearest way to read the Game Boy regional variants is by their product codes. A suffix such as JPN, USA, UKV or NOE, printed on the box and the unit, tells you exactly which market a Game Boy was built for. Launch software differed too. In the West the console arrived bundled with Tetris, the puzzle game that turned it into a mainstream hit, as in this US Tetris bundle. Japan, by contrast, launched in April 1989 without Tetris as the pack-in, leaning instead on titles like Super Mario Land and Alleyway. Power and Play Across Regions Because the handheld runs on four AA batteries, a Game Boy from any region will happily play anywhere, and its cartridges are largely region-free, an unusual freedom for the era. The main practical difference is the mains adapter, which followed local electricity standards: roughly 100 volts in Japan, 120 in North America and 230 across much of Europe. Timing differed as well, with Japan getting the Game Boy in April 1989, North America that July, and Europe waiting until 28 September 1990. Why Region Matters to Collectors For collectors, region is where a Game Boy gains its story. A matching set, where the console, box, manual and product code all belong to the same market, is far more satisfying, and far harder to assemble, than a mix of loose parts. Sealed or complete regional examples are especially prized. The collection deliberately spans Japanese, European and North American releases so the differences can be seen side by side. Browse them in the DMG-01 hardware reference.

There is a particular kind of irony that only collecting can produce. This arrival is a cartridge whose entire purpose was to be opened every single day, to be carried in a pocket, consulted, scribbled into and relied upon. It is a personal organiser. And it is sealed inside a tamper-proof acrylic case, where it will never organise anything again. Thirty years of survival, rewarded with a plastic coffin and a number on a label. What It Is The InfoGenius Personal Organizer and Phone Book is one of the non-gaming cartridges GameTek released for the Game Boy, and it takes the idea seriously. It stores names, addresses and phone numbers, and adds a memo notepad, a world time clock, a 100-year calendar and a full-function calculator. Released in 1991 and developed by Imagineering, it carries GameTek's own product number GBI-7003 and belongs to the InfoGenius Productivity Pak line. The copy that has joined the collection is factory sealed and graded by Wata at 8.5 with a B plus seal. A Filofax With a D-Pad To understand why this existed, you have to remember what 1991 looked like. The personal digital assistant was barely a product yet, the mobile phone was a brick for executives, and the most sophisticated organiser most people owned was a leather binder full of paper. Meanwhile, millions of households already had a small grey computer with a screen, a keypad and batteries that lasted for days. GameTek's bet was obvious once you see it: why buy a gadget when the gadget is already in your child's bag? Wata 8.5, B+ seal. The productivity tool that will never be productive again. The Organizer was not alone. It sits in a whole family of InfoGenius cartridges that tried to turn the handheld into a working tool, among them the Frommer's Travel Guide, the Spell Checker and Calculator and the Berlitz translators, all catalogued here. We looked at that whole strange, ambitious corner of the library in our piece on the Game Boy as a productivity machine. None of them sold in the numbers Mario did, which is exactly why they are interesting now. Sealed, Graded, and Gently Absurd This particular copy has never been opened, and now it never will be. Wata assessed the outer condition and the factory seal, gave it 8.5 with a B plus for the seal itself, and closed it into a case built to resist exactly the thing the cartridge was made for: someone using it. The label carries an EAN barcode that resolves to the certification in Wata's database, so anyone can confirm the grade is real. It is a neat system, and it does solve the fake problem. It also means a 100-year calendar is now sealed behind plastic with roughly sixty-five of those years left to run, and no way to reach them. The museum is on record about this. We collect complete-in-box precisely so that things can be opened, read and played, and we have written about why we chose CIB over slabs. So why keep a sealed one at all? Because the grading boom is now part of the Game Boy's history too, and a museum that refuses to document a trend it dislikes is not documenting honestly. This slab is evidence, not endorsement. Why It Joined the Collection It earns its place twice over. As software, it documents the Game Boy's forgotten ambition to be a tool rather than a toy, a thread that runs from this Organizer through the translators and travel guides to Konami's Nano Note. As an object, it captures the moment the retro market decided that the best thing you can do with a piece of history is make it permanently untouchable. Preserving it means preserving both stories, the earnest one from 1991 and the stranger one happening right now. The Wata-graded InfoGenius Personal Organizer is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

When the Game Boy arrived, one game came to define it so completely that the others in the launch line-up faded into the background. That game was Tetris. But it was not alone on day one, and one of its shelf-mates has an unusual claim to fame: it is the game where Mario, of all people, drives a spaceship shaped like a bat and knocks down a wall of bricks. It is called Alleyway, and it deserves a moment out of Tetris's shadow. One ball, one paddle, one very patient plumber. Breakout with a plumber at the helm If you have ever played Breakout or Arkanoid, you already know Alleyway. A wall of blocks sits at the top of the screen. You control a paddle at the bottom, bouncing a ball upward to chip away at the wall, angling your returns so the ball keeps flying and never slips past you. Clear the wall and you move on; miss the ball and you lose a life. It is one of the oldest and cleanest ideas in video games, and on a handheld it fits perfectly. The Nintendo twist is in the fiction around it. Your paddle is not an anonymous bar of light but a little ship piloted by Mario, freshly arrived as the company's handheld mascot. It is a small thing, but it is the sort of small thing Nintendo does well: take a genre anyone could clone and stamp it with a familiar face so that it feels like it belongs on a Game Boy rather than any other machine. A workhorse of the launch line-up Alleyway was one of the handful of games ready on day one, sharing shelf space with Super Mario Land and, before long, Tetris. In that company it was never going to be the star, and it never pretended to be. It was the dependable, low-cost cartridge that gave early adopters something instantly understandable to play while the library filled out around it. Clear the wall, then admire the Mario-shaped bonus round. There is nothing wrong with being the reliable one. A launch line-up needs a game like this, something a shopper can pick up, understand in a single sentence, and enjoy on the bus home. The Game Boy's monochrome screen, which struggled with fast scrolling in some early games, handled a bouncing ball and a static wall with no trouble at all. The little touches What lifts Alleyway above a straight Breakout clone is its sense of play. Between the standard stages come bonus rounds where the blocks are not arranged in a plain wall but assembled into shapes: Mario himself, and other familiar Nintendo silhouettes, waiting to be knocked apart for extra points. It is a wink to the player, a reminder that even the studio's most utilitarian launch title had room for a joke. The difficulty ramps up in the classic arcade way. The ball speeds up, the angles get meaner, and the margin for error shrinks until a single lapse in concentration ends the run. It is the kind of game you meant to put down five minutes ago and are still holding twenty minutes later, which is the highest praise a block-breaker can earn. History remembers the Game Boy launch as the Tetris moment, and fairly so. But Alleyway was there too, quietly doing its job, and it is a genuine piece of day-one history. You can find Alleyway in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.

Our second fresh find keeps the theme of objects that wear the Game Boy's shape without ever running a game. Last time it was a pair of walkie talkies. This time it is something you strap to your wrist: the Watch Boy, a licensed LCD watch that turns Nintendo's handheld into a timepiece. What It Is The Watch Boy, model number GBE-002, is a digital LCD wristwatch made in 1995 by Mani Industries of Hong Kong, styled as a miniature Game Boy complete with a tiny screen and a directional pad printed on its face. Despite the toy-like looks it is a proper little watch: it shows the month, date and day of the week, runs in either 12 or 24 hour mode, has an alarm, and includes a six-digit chronograph stopwatch, all driven by the A and B buttons and powered by a single SR41 silver-oxide cell. It was sold in six colours and carried the International Nintendo licensed-product seal, with “Watch Boy” registered as a Nintendo trademark and licensed to Mani. A Game Boy small enough to strap to your wrist, no cartridges required. Why It Was Added A watch that cannot play a game raises the same fair question as the walkie talkies before it, and the answer is the same. The Watch Boy documents how completely the Game Boy had become a shape rather than just a machine. By the mid nineties the grey silhouette was recognisable enough to sell an ordinary quartz watch, and Mani built a whole family of these gadgets around it. That family is part of why this one matters. It joins the Time Boy clock, the Calculator Boy and the Walkie Talkie Boy already in the collection, each taking a mundane everyday object and giving it the Game Boy's face. Seen together they map the console's cultural reach far better than any single cartridge could. Novelties like this were cheap, worn and easily broken, so a complete example still sealed on its card is a good deal scarcer than it looks. A Sibling That Actually Played Here is the twist. Mani did not stop at telling the time. The same range included the Gamewatch Boy, a near-identical wrist unit that really did play a small LCD game, Super Mario Race in 1992 and a Dr. Mario edition in 1993, each with a beginner and an expert setting. The six-colour run advertised as “Six New Colors” on this very card is the 1995 edition of the line. So while the Watch Boy only ever keeps time, its close cousin genuinely put a playable Mario on your wrist. This particular example also travelled a long way to get here, making the trip all the way from Australia before joining the collection in Switzerland. You can find the Watch Boy alongside its siblings in the collection, where it will be fully catalogued with photographs shortly.