Most original Game Boys are worth a modest, friendly sum, the kind of price that makes them a joy to collect and play. A rare few change hands for as much as a small car. What separates the two is almost never the machine itself, which Nintendo made in the tens of millions. It comes down to rarity, condition and, more than anything else, the box and everything that came in it. This is a tour of the pieces that sit at the very top, and of why they climbed there. Rare and valuable Game Boy Super Star Set What Actually Drives Value Three forces set the price of almost any Game Boy item: how few were made, what condition it has survived in, and how complete it is. A loose, scuffed console is a wonderful thing to own and play, but a pristine, complete-in-box example of the same unit can be worth many times more. The reason is survivorship. The hardware is tough and plentiful, but the fragile cardboard, the plastic trays, the inserts and the paperwork almost never lasted. Children played with the toy and binned the packaging, so the box is often rarer than the console inside it. Grading and authentication raise the stakes again, turning a clean example into a documented, tamper-proof trophy. We make the full case for this in what makes a Game Boy valuable and in our look at sealed, slabbed or complete-in-box. The Rare Shells For collectors, colour is where the hunt gets serious. The Play It Loud series put the same DMG hardware into bold new shells, black, red, yellow, green, clear and more, and some sold in far smaller numbers than others. The Traditional White is widely regarded as the hardest of the line to find. Rarer still are the promotional units, Game Boys branded for companies and campaigns rather than sold in shops: from a Manchester United edition to Japanese giveaways liveried for the likes of Toyota and Japan Airlines. Because these were made in tiny batches and handed out rather than stocked, very few entered the collector market at all, and fewer survived with their packaging. Where a console was sold matters too, since many variants never left one region, which is often what makes them so scarce everywhere else. Our guide to every DMG-01 colour variant maps the whole rainbow, and how Japanese, European and US Game Boys differ explains the regional picture. Rare colors and prints make a Game Boy a trophy for serious collector. The Grails Among the Games On the software side, value clusters around two things: low print runs and condition. Games pressed in small numbers, or issued late in the system's life when retailers ordered cautiously, simply exist in smaller quantities today. Titles that only ever shipped in one region add another layer of scarcity for collectors elsewhere. Layer condition on top and the numbers climb fast: a sealed, well-graded copy of a sought-after title can command sums that dwarf the same game loose and worn. As with the hardware, the box and its completeness do much of the heavy lifting, because a cartridge survives in a drawer for decades while its sleeve, manual and insert rarely do. A loved game that was played to death is common; the same game untouched in shrink-wrap is the grail. For a full tour of those, see our guide to the rarest and most valuable Game Boy games. A sealed, well-graded copy of a sought-after title can command sums that dwarf the same game loose. Boxes, Bundles and Ephemera Some of the most prized items are not single objects at all but complete sets. The elaborate Super Star Set, or licensed bundles such as the Star Wars console package, carry their value in having every piece together and intact, exactly the thing time tends to break apart. Even humble paper becomes collectible once you realise how rarely it was kept: manuals, registration cards, inserts, store advertising and point-of-sale display material were all treated as disposable in their day. Sunlight, damp and simple indifference did the rest. A boxed set with its paperwork complete is, in effect, a small miracle of preservation, and the market prices it accordingly. Special Editions are quite a lottery win to find today Prototypes, Demos and Store Pieces Beyond the retail world sits a stranger tier: pieces that were never meant to be sold at all. Not-for-resale demo cartridges, press and sample units, and the display hardware that lived on shop counters were produced in tiny numbers and were usually meant to be returned or destroyed. The ones that slipped out are prized precisely because they were never inventory. Condition and provenance matter even more here, since there is no retail box to anchor them and reproductions are a real risk, so knowing how to spot a fake or reproduction is essential before any serious money changes hands. A Word on Prices One honest caveat: prices move, and they move more at the top than anywhere else. Grading and sealed examples can inflate figures dramatically, tastes shift from year to year, and a headline auction result is not the same as what an item reliably fetches. A single record sale makes news; it does not set the going rate. The soundest approach is also the oldest one: buy what you love, in the best condition and completeness you can afford, and let rarity look after itself. None of this is financial advice, just the lens a serious collector uses. If you are just starting the hunt, our guide to collecting the original Game Boy is the place to begin.

The Game Boy Museum is a private online museum. Every cartridge, console, and curio in our collection lives on the web, which means you can browse it from anywhere in the world without ever leaving the couch. That is wonderful for reach, and it is the whole point of what we do, but it also means you never quite get to press a real d-pad or hear the satisfying click of a physical power switch. Switzerland, happily, is full of places where you can do exactly that, and we love pointing people toward them. We think of these institutions as kindred spirits. They preserve the same history we care about, only with cabinets you can walk around and controllers you can actually hold. Where we curate pixels and photographs, they curate rooms full of glowing screens and the unmistakable hum of old hardware warming up. If our online galleries whet your appetite, here are three Swiss museums well worth a real-world visit, each one an easy train ride away. Gameorama, Lucerne Gameorama in Lucerne is a hands-on playground that runs across the entire sweep of gaming history. Instead of roping everything off behind glass, it invites you to sit down and play, from early arcade cabinets and pinball tables to the home consoles that quietly defined whole childhoods. It is the sort of place where a quick look becomes a five-hour marathon, and nobody minds one bit. Gameorama, Lucerne - Warning: contains playable nostalgia and mild thumb fatigue. Musee Bolo, Lausanne Musee Bolo sits inside EPFL in Lausanne and takes the broadest view of them all. Its focus is computing and digital-culture preservation, tracing the machines that shaped how we work, play, and think, from room-sized pioneers to the home computers that landed on kitchen tables. Alongside the calculators and mainframes you will find the game systems that grew out of that same silicon lineage, which makes it a genuinely fascinating companion to a Game Boy collection. Musee Bolo, Lausanne - Glass cases optional, actual buttons very much included. GamePlaza, Zurich GamePlaza in Zurich is an interactive video game museum only a few tram stops from the city center. It leans fully into the joy of playing, with stations spanning generation after generation of consoles, handhelds, and arcade hardware. If you are already in Zurich for the day, it is an easy and very rewarding detour, and a lovely way to see how far games have travelled. GamePlaza, Zurich - Swiss precision meets a perfectly timed A-button jump. Musee Suisse du Jeu, La Tour-de-Peilz On the shore of Lake Geneva, in a castle at La Tour-de-Peilz, the Musee Suisse du Jeu is the oldest games museum of its kind in Europe, with more than ten thousand games from antiquity to the present. Under its director Selim Krichane, a video game scholar, it has made the video game a strategic part of its collection, and there are currently two Game Boys on display. We wrote a full feature on it, Where Every Game Is Kept, and you can plan a visit at museedujeu.ch. A visit to the Musée du Jeu - where play itself is the exhibit, from ancient board games to the pixels of today Go See Them in Person We have also told the wider Swiss Game Boy story ourselves. Our Around the World: Switzerland feature traces how Nintendo's little grey handheld found its way into Swiss hands and hearts, and it pairs nicely with a visit to any of the museums above. Read it first and the display cases suddenly have a few more stories tucked inside them. So treat this as a small itinerary. Browse the Game Boy Museum online to plan what you would most like to see, then go press some real buttons in Lucerne, Lausanne, and Zurich. Some history is best experienced from the couch, and some is best experienced with a controller warm in your hands. These three kindred spirits are firmly in the second category, and we could not recommend them more. This is one of the places gathered in our guide to the video game museums worth visiting.

A synthesizer in your pocket Most of the cartridges in this collection are games. This one is not. Slot the Nanoloop NL13 into a Game Boy, flick the power switch, and instead of a title screen you get a glowing grid of little squares. There is no princess to rescue and no high score to beat. Instead, the machine invites you to make music. In that moment the Game Boy stops being a console and becomes an instrument, a tiny synthesizer and drum machine that runs on batteries and slips into a coat pocket. The little grey cart that turned a toy into a techno machine. It works because the Game Boy was always a small musical machine in disguise. Nintendo gave it a dedicated sound chip with four voices, two pulse-wave channels for melodies and basslines, one programmable wave channel, and one noise channel for percussion and hi-hats. Game designers used those voices for jingles and sound effects. Nanoloop simply hands them to you and asks what you want to do with them. Oliver Wittchow and the birth of Nanoloop Nanoloop is the work of one person, the Hamburg artist and musician Oliver Wittchow. It began as a study project at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg in the late 1990s, when Wittchow started programming the Game Boy to generate sound directly from its own hardware rather than playing back pre-recorded music. The first public performance took place at the Liquid Sky club in Cologne in early 1998. The venue is long gone, but the idea stuck. Word spread, and Nanoloop cartridges became commercially available within Germany in late 1999, with worldwide sales starting in 2000. In 2002 the first album made entirely with the software, simply titled nanoloop 1.0, appeared on the Disco Bruit label, followed by a long trail of other releases. How you actually make music on it Nanoloop is a step sequencer wrapped around a synthesizer, and its interface is famously minimal. Instead of menus and words, you get a grid. Each of the four sound channels has its own set of steps, sixteen little cells arranged in a tidy square, and you switch cells on and off to place notes in time. It looks less like a music program and more like a puzzle, which is part of the charm. That silver foil label, marked NL13 in the corner, is the badge of a hand-made instrument. From there you sculpt the sound by hand. Hold a button and tilt the D-pad, and a single cell changes its pitch, its volume, its length, or its timbre. The palette is deliberately narrow, raw rectangular waves, noise, and a simple four-bit waveform, with no presets and no effects racks to hide behind. That restriction is the whole point. With so few ingredients, every small tweak matters, and people quickly discovered they could coax surprisingly deep, hypnotic techno and dub out of a children's toy. The scene it helped launch Nanoloop did not stay a private experiment for long. It arrived just as a new musical movement was taking shape, one that treated ageing game hardware as a serious instrument. That movement became known as chiptune, and Nanoloop sat at its foundation. Its great companion was Little Sound Dj, usually shortened to LSDj, written by the Swedish developer Johan Kotlinski and released in 2000. Where Nanoloop is spare and grid-based, LSDj is a dense, tracker-style program with more control and a steeper learning curve. Between them, the two cartridges gave a generation of musicians everything they needed to compose on a Game Boy, and most players still swear by one or the other. Around these tools grew a whole culture. The New York collective and netlabel 8bitpeoples, founded in 1999, gathered artists such as Nullsleep and Bit Shifter, and from 2006 the Blip Festival brought chiptune performers together on stage in New York and beyond. Suddenly the Game Boy was not a relic in a drawer, it was a live instrument glowing under the lights of a club. The NL13 in the collection The cartridge in the museum is a Nanoloop unit marked NL13, and it wears its homemade origins openly. A silver foil nanoloop label is stuck to the front, with the marking NL13 tucked into the corner. The shell itself is not a Nintendo shell at all. It is a plain grey-brown third-party case, moulded on the top grip with nothing but the single word GAME, rather than the usual Nintendo Game Boy lettering. Turn it over and you find PAT. PEND. moulded into the back, held together by a single screw. That is a lovely detail once you know the story. Early Nanoloop cartridges were hand-made homebrew, assembled in small batches and sold in blank aftermarket shells, because there was no factory stamping out official cases for a one-person music project. On an ordinary game, a non-Nintendo shell with a generic GAME logo would be a red flag, the classic warning sign of a bootleg. Here it is the opposite, an honest badge of a small-batch instrument built by hand and sold to the people who wanted it. We are not dating this particular NL13 revision precisely, since that detail is unconfirmed. The idea proved durable enough to keep evolving. Over the years Nanoloop grew through several versions on the original Game Boy, gained a special mono cartridge with a real analog filter, moved to the Game Boy Advance as a more powerful software synthesizer, and later reached modern phones as iOS and Android apps. In 2019 Wittchow returned to where it began, launching a successful Kickstarter campaign for a standalone, Game-Boy-inspired hardware groovebox that puts the whole instrument in a dedicated little box, no console required. Beyond the Cartridge: the Game Boy Goes MIDI Making music on the Game Boy no longer stops at the cartridge. The Arduinoboy, an open-source interface, wires the console into a modern MIDI studio, syncing Little Sound Dj or Nanoloop to a DAW and driving the mGB cartridge so the Game Boy behaves like a MIDI sound module. It just joined the collection. Those same four channels can do more than melodies and beats. The Droneboy cartridge is a specialist for endless ambient drones and pads, and it is MIDI-enabled through the Arduinoboy too. Hear how it joined the collection. That is the joy of a collection like this one. A cartridge that looks almost like a mistake, wrong shell, no logo, one lonely screw, turns out to be a small landmark in the history of electronic music. If you would like to see more of the Game Boy's stranger and more wonderful side, come and explore the rest of the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Part 1: The Game Boy as an Instrument (you are here) · Part 2: When a Handheld Made the Charts This piece is part of The Sound of the Game Boy, the museum's full story of the console and music.

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. If you would rather dump and back up your own cartridges, the Flash Boy is the little kit built for exactly that.

Preservation is a team sport. Today we joined the team. As of today, the Game Boy Museum is a supporting member of EFGAMP, the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects. It is a small line to write and a big thing to mean. It aligns this collection, which is devoted entirely to one grey handheld from 1989, with a federation that brings together national libraries and some of the most important video game museums in Europe. This felt like the right moment to explain what EFGAMP is, why preserving games is genuinely difficult, and the reason a museum about a single machine wanted to stand behind it. What EFGAMP is EFGAMP was founded in 2012 as a non-profit federation with a single, serious purpose: safeguarding and disseminating the history of video games and our wider interactive digital heritage. Games, it argues, are now a central part of the media landscape we all live in, and yet they are unusually fragile and unusually easy to lose. So the federation brings preservation-minded institutions together to work on the problem as a group rather than as scattered individuals, and to speak with one voice on the things that no single museum can fix alone. In practice that means a few different kinds of work. EFGAMP networks with digital-preservation communities around the world, advocates for the availability of interactive heritage, and lobbies to keep the European legal framework compatible with the needs of preservation, an area where copyright rules and the reality of saving old software often collide. It also works on the less glamorous but vital groundwork of shared description standards and connecting existing collections, so that one day the holdings of many institutions might be searched and understood together. The federation is a genuinely broad church. Its full members range from grassroots initiatives to national libraries, and include the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, which opened the world's first permanent exhibition of digital interactive culture back in 1997, VIGAMUS in Rome, the Finnish Museum of Games, the National Library of Sweden and the Royal Danish Library, France's MO5.com, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the Embracer Games Archive, and more recently companies such as GOG. Around them sits a circle of supporters, and that is where the Game Boy Museum now belongs. Reassuringly, we are in familiar company there: the Swiss Bolo Museum is a fellow supporter, so our first step into the federation is one taken alongside a neighbour. Why preserving games is so hard It is easy to assume that old games simply sit safely on their cartridges forever. They do not. Preservation runs into problems on several fronts at once, and EFGAMP names them plainly: legal, technological, conceptual and financial. A game is software bound to ageing hardware, and both decay. Anyone who collects Game Boy cartridges already knows the quiet tragedy of this: the little batteries that hold a saved game slowly die, and when they go, decades of progress vanish with them. Plastic yellows, contacts corrode, and the machines needed to read a format eventually stop working. On top of the physical decay sit the legal and financial questions. Copying a game to keep it alive can run straight into copyright law that was never written with preservation in mind, and the careful work of archiving is expensive and rarely funded. These are exactly the walls a lone collector cannot climb alone, and exactly the reason a federation exists. What is at stake, in EFGAMP's own words, is the salvation of an important heritage that should stay accessible for celebration, education and innovation. Why a single-machine museum joined This museum is not a national library or a large institution with a building and a budget. It is a private, non-commercial preservation project built around a single conviction: that one machine, the original DMG-01 Game Boy and the entire world of hardware, games, accessories, print and culture that grew up around it, deserves to be documented completely and kept together. The guiding rule has always been to keep things complete in their boxes wherever possible, so that the ecosystem and the feeling of those years stay tangible rather than reduced to a list. For a long time that felt like a solitary pursuit, and a slightly eccentric one. Why give a single handheld this much attention? The answer, the longer the work went on, became obvious: because preservation needs depth as much as breadth. The big archives rightly try to save everything, across every platform, and that is a heroic and necessary job. But someone also has to go narrow and deep, to chase down the obscure Japanese accessory, the withdrawn variant, the email cartridge whose service died decades ago, and to write down why each one mattered before the knowledge disappears with the people who remember it. A museum devoted to one device can afford that patience in a way a sprawling collection cannot. That is really why supporting EFGAMP made sense. Working alone, this collection can catalogue and care for its objects, but it cannot influence copyright law, cannot compare notes on how to store a dying save battery, and cannot make sure a single device's story is stitched into the larger record of European gaming heritage. Standing behind a federation makes all of that possible. It turns a private hobby into a small, accountable part of a shared and lasting effort, and it means that if anything ever happens to one collection, the knowledge it gathered does not simply vanish. For a project whose entire reason for existing is to make sure things are not forgotten, that safety net is the whole point. What happens now Becoming a supporter does not change what this museum is. It will still be a private, non-commercial project cataloguing one machine as thoroughly as one person can. What changes is that the work now sits within reach of a network of people trying to solve the same problems, from national libraries to fellow grassroots projects, and that the deep, narrow knowledge gathered here can flow into something bigger than itself. It is a proud day, and a quietly reassuring one. You can read more about the federation and its work at efgamp.eu, and explore the collection now standing behind it here at the Game Boy Museum. This is one of the places gathered in our guide to the video game museums worth visiting.

Every good game once came with a secret weapon, and it was rarely on the cartridge. It lived on paper. Long before a walkthrough was a quick search away, the way you beat a stubborn boss, found a hidden warp or squeezed one more life out of a level was to reach for a printed guide, thumb-worn and sometimes pricier than the pocket money that bought it. The collection keeps a modest shelf of these companions, and together they tell their own story about how the Game Boy was actually played, one dog-eared page at a time. The shelf splits neatly into two families. On one side are the official Player's Guides that Nintendo published to cover a whole system or a whole series. On the other are the strategy books built around a single game, most of them Japanese. Both did the same job of getting you unstuck, yet they went about it in very different ways. Some of the books cost more than the games they explained. The official Player's Guides Nintendo understood early that a good guide sold more games, so it put its own name on the best of them. The oldest here is the Game Boy Player's Guide (USA), published by Nintendo of America in 1991. Across 178 pages it introduced players to the young system's library and gave detailed level guides for a selection of titles. It set the template so well that the later German books openly followed its lead, right down to the mix of enthusiastic game introductions and step-by-step solutions. Before the internet, this was the internet. That German lineage begins with the Game Boy Player's Guide (Germany) from 1992. Its almost 150 pages introduced games, walked through solutions and explained the hardware, clearly modelled on the American guide from the year before. Two years later Nintendo of Europe followed it with the Game Boy Player's Guide 2 (Germany), another 144 pages covering newer releases in the same friendly style. That second volume had a much smaller print run, so surviving copies are scarce, making it the harder of the two German books to track down today. The Super Game Boy Player's Guide (USA) from 1994 took a different angle. Instead of the handheld alone it focused on the games that looked their best through the Super Game Boy adapter, the cartridge that let you play Game Boy titles in colour on a SNES. Alongside tips, strategies and colour screenshots it took a close look at the adapter's own features. It was sold on its own and also bundled with the Super Game Boy itself, which is catalogued here too. A guide book dedicated to the Super Game Boy The most lavish of the group is the Pokémon Player's Guide (Germany) from 2000. Almost 120 pages cover Red, Blue and Yellow, laying out the games' maps and packing in solutions and tips, and it arrived with a large poster map and a sheet of Pokémon stickers. By the time it appeared, Pokémon had turned the ageing Game Boy into a worldwide phenomenon, and those generous extras show just how big the games had become. The three titles it guides you through are, of course, also in the collection. The per-game strategy books Where the Player's Guides tried to cover a whole system, the strategy books zoomed in on a single adventure, and most of them came from Japan, where companion books were a thriving corner of the hobby. Fittingly, the shelf starts where the Game Boy's Mario story does. The Super Mario Land Strategy Guide was published by ASCII in 1989, the very year the game launched. Super Mario Land was Mario's first outing on the handheld and was meant to be the system's showcase until Nintendo of America chose to bundle Tetris instead. It still sold more than 18 million copies, outselling even Super Mario Bros. 3, and spawned two sequels. The game and its follow-ups all sit in the collection. From the same launch year comes the Super Mario Land + Golf, Tetris Strategy Guide, an official book published by Kodansha in 1989 that bundled help for three of the Game Boy's defining early games at once: Tetris, Golf and Super Mario Land. Each of those titles is catalogued here in its own right. The Mario thread continues with the Super Mario Land 2 Strategy Guide from 1992. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins sold over 10 million copies, ranked among the highest-rated Game Boy games and, most importantly for what came next, introduced a greedy new rival named Wario. Nintendo published this Japanese book to steer players through the sequel's larger, more elaborate levels. The game is in the collection as well. Wario promptly stole the spotlight. The Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 Strategy Guide from 1993 accompanies the third and final Super Mario Land game, the one that handed the controls to Wario himself as he hunts for a home of his own. It marks the end of one series and the start of the Wario Land line, and Nintendo issued this guide to help players through its trickier stretches. Five years on, the Wario Land 2 Strategy Guide from 1998 carries the story forward, as pirates led by Captain Syrup raid Wario's castle and flood it. That game is catalogued in both its Japanese and European versions. Rare's apes get their own volume too. The Donkey Kong Land Strategy Guide supports Rare's 1995 handheld game, released in Japan as Super Donkey Kong GB, which shrank the SNES hit Donkey Kong Country down onto the Game Boy. It was ambitious and genuinely tough for its time, so Nintendo put out this Japanese book to guide players through the harder sequences. Two Japanese curiosities round out the shelf. The Game Boy Victory Book is a Japan-only strategy and hint book from the system's early years, published by ASCII and Famitsu and, wonderfully, shaped like the original Game Boy itself, gathering tips, secrets and game information in a thoroughly stylised package. Beside it sits the Game Boy Strategy Guide 05/1990, a special edition from the Japanese NES Magazine that collected tips, tricks and reviews for ten of the most popular Game Boy games of 1990. Both capture the era when a printed companion was simply part of owning a handheld. Held together, these books map out a whole way of playing that has quietly disappeared, back when knowing a game meant owning the book about it. If you would like to leaf through the rest of the shelf, the guides and the games they cover are waiting at gameboymuseum.com. The Full Series Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books · Part 2: Player's Guides and Strategy Books (you are here) · Part 3: Catalogues and Club Nintendo · Part 4: Fan Magazines and Sticker Albums · Part 5: The Books That Made the Game Boy History This piece is part of Pokemon and the Game Boy, the museum's guide to the whole Pokemon corner. Part of the The Paper Trail series.

The Game Boy never really stayed in its box. It leaked out into everything a 1990s child might touch on the way to school: the gum in your pocket, the stickers on your folder, the eraser rattling around your pencil case, even the tissue you sneezed into. Nintendo and its licensees had worked out something simple and slightly ruthless. If a small grey handheld could sell 8-bit dreams, it could just as easily sell sweets, stationery and novelties. This is a roundup of the sweet, papery, disposable side of the collection, the tie-ins that were never meant to survive, which is exactly why the survivors are so charming. Gum that came with homework: the Amurol trading cards In 1993, American confectioner Amurol released a set of Nintendo-licensed Game Boy trading cards and did the cleverest possible thing with them: it hid them inside gum boxes shaped like the console itself. There were 96 cards spread across four series, which meant no child was ever going to complete the set on pocket money alone. Each card pictured an iconic Game Boy title, from Super Mario Land to Metroid to Kirby's Dream Land, with a short game tip printed on the back. It was advertising dressed up as a strategy guide dressed up as candy, and it worked. The cards earned a genuine cult following and remain coveted by collectors today, a sugary little postcard from the 8-bit era. Amurol gum box: the only Game Boy that was also a snack. Two hundred and seventy-six stickers: the Merlin collection Over in the sticker aisle, Merlin put out its licensed sticker collection in 1992: a hoard of 276 stickers featuring characters and screenshots from the NES and Game Boy games of the day. Two hundred and seventy-six. That is enough to cover a schoolbag, a pencil case and a patient younger sibling, with doubles left over to trade in the playground. The set belongs to the same 1992 Nintendo licensing wave as the Merlin sticker album also catalogued in the collection, back when peeling a tiny Mario off a backing sheet and sticking him somewhere permanent counted as a completely legitimate hobby. The oldest of the bunch: Bandai's 1989 collector cards For the true origin story we go back to Japan in 1989, the Game Boy's launch year, where Bandai issued a set of collector cards almost as soon as the console reached shops. Popular titles were spun into card series and other printed merchandise at remarkable speed, and these cards are among the very earliest pieces of Game Boy merchandise in the whole collection. Think about that timing for a moment. Before the Game Boy had even finished conquering the world, it was already being turned into things to collect, which tells you everything about how quickly people fell for it. Bandai, 1989: merchandise older than most of the people who collect it. A mini Game Boy in an egg: the Pokemon Collectors Egg By 1995 a certain pocket-monster fever was setting in, and it arrived in the collection inside an egg. This small collectible egg from Japan, made by Kyodo Co., Ltd., cracks open to reveal a miniature Game Boy tucked in alongside a set of Pokemon collector cards. It is one of several Pokemon-themed novelties here, and a neat little proof of a rule that seems to hold across this entire roundup: put a tiny Game Boy inside almost any object, and a collector somewhere will decide they need it. The craze ran both ways, too: the trading-card game those cards belonged to eventually became a Game Boy game of its own, Pokemon Card GB. The Pokemon egg: crack it open, find a tiny Game Boy inside. Promotional tissues, honestly: the Wario Land handkerchiefs Some tie-ins were designed to be used up and thrown away, which is exactly what makes them so hard to find now. Around the 1994 release of Wario Land, Nintendo handed out Game Boy-design handkerchiefs to fans in Japan. Tissues. With a Game Boy printed on them. It is genuinely difficult to imagine a more disposable piece of merchandise, and that is precisely the point: most were used the way tissues tend to be used and then vanished forever. A surviving, unused example is therefore a quietly satisfying thing to have in a collection. Fifty yen of Mario: the Super Mario Land cap eraser Back at the very beginning again, in 1989, Nintendo offered Mario fans in Japan a small cap eraser for 50 yen apiece, released around the launch of the hit Super Mario Land. It is cute, it is cheap, and it is precisely the kind of object that lives at the bottom of a pencil case for a year before disappearing without ceremony. Which is why a surviving cap eraser from 1989 is such a charming little fragment of early Game Boy history, a fifty-yen souvenir that somehow outlasted the games it was sold to promote. Wario Land tissues: the most disposable collectible ever officially licensed. The one that plays music: the Pokemon Game Music Collection And last, the show-off of the group. The Pokemon Game Music Collection is a collectible miniature Game Boy, faithfully modelled on the original DMG-01, that actually plays music and sound effects from Pocket Monsters Red and Green, with Charizard glowering out from the packaging. Made by Game Freak and part of a broader collectible line, it is the rare novelty in this roundup that does more than sit still looking nostalgic. Every other item here is content to be looked at. This one hums the theme tune back at you. Relive sound effects from Pocket Monsters Red and Green That is the strange magic of the Game Boy. A games machine that somehow ended up as gum, stickers, cards, an egg, a handkerchief, an eraser and a little music box, and people kept, and keep, every last piece of it. If you enjoyed this rummage through the sweet and disposable end of the shelf, there is a great deal more waiting for you at the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series The craze ran well beyond the official sets; see the Game Boy sticker and trading card craze. Part 1: The Family of Fake Game Boys · Part 2: On the Desk and Around the House · Part 3: Build It, Wear It, Frame It · Part 4: Cards, Stickers and Sweets (you are here) This piece is part of Pokemon and the Game Boy, the museum's guide to the whole Pokemon corner. Part of the Game Boy in Disguise series.

After a shelf full of bright reds and yellows, this arrival is a deliberate change of tone. It is the black console from Nintendo's European Limited Edition colour series, one of the more understated finishes in a run that was otherwise all about standing out. What It Is Nintendo offered this European Limited Edition line in red, green, black, yellow, white, blue and clear, and black is the reserved member of the family, a sober counterpoint to the brighter shades sold alongside it. As with every console in the series, the colour is the only thing that changed. Underneath it is an ordinary DMG-01: the same monochrome green screen with no backlight, the same controls and the same four AA batteries that powered every original Game Boy. It is a familiar machine in a smart new suit. Same DMG-01 underneath, just wearing its most serious suit. Why It Joined the Collection The collection documents every colour in this European run, and the black unit is another entry ticked off toward that complete set. There is a real point to gathering the whole series rather than a favourite or two: seen together, the colours show exactly how Nintendo used nothing more than a change of casing to keep a maturing console feeling fresh and collectable. Black may be the least flashy of them, but a set is only complete when the quiet members are present too, and it earns its place precisely by being the restrained one in the line. The quiet one in a very loud crowd of coloured Game Boys. The black Limited Edition console is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: the Play It Loud colours.

Not every piece in a collection is something you would want to own new. This arrival is proudly illegitimate: a grey-market multi-game cartridge, one of the pirate carts that squeezed dozens, sometimes hundreds, of official Game Boy games onto a single chip. It is exactly the kind of object a tidy collection might be tempted to ignore, and exactly the kind it should not, because the Game Boy's story is not complete without its shadow. Bootleg Game Boy multi-game cartridge What It Is The Game Boy's runaway success drew copiers as surely as it drew fans. Where Nintendo sold one game per cartridge, the pirates crammed enormous menus of copied titles onto a single board and sold them cheaply through markets and mail order. This cart is one of those, and the counterfeiting does not stop at the software: even the hardware is faked. Look closely at the shell and the tell is right there, a Game Boy-style case with the Nintendo logo conspicuously missing, because the counterfeiter could copy the shape but not risk stamping the real trademark on it. The Shadow Market Grey-market items like this document the unofficial side of the Game Boy, the part that never appears in a catalogue or an advertisement. They are a reminder that a console's popularity is measured not only by official sales but by how eagerly others tried to profit from it without permission. Pirate multi-carts were how a great many players, especially in markets where genuine games were expensive or hard to find, actually experienced the Game Boy library, so for all their illegality they are a real part of the machine's social history. Why It Joined the Collection A collection that only shows the polished, official face of the Game Boy tells half a story. This cart sits alongside the collection's other black-market pieces precisely to tell the other half: the copiers, the fakes, the informal economy that grew up around a machine everyone wanted. It is not valuable in the usual sense, and that is the point. Its worth is as evidence, a genuine artefact of the unofficial Game Boy, kept so the record is honest rather than flattering. This multi-game cartridge is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in flash carts and multicarts.

Of all the things a museum might preserve, a packet of tissues has to be among the most unlikely. Yet this arrival is exactly that: Game Boy-branded handkerchiefs, given away by Nintendo to fans in Japan around the 1994 release of Wario Land, and somehow surviving the thirty years since. A packet of tissues - an unlikely item in an musuem What It Is These Game Boy-design handkerchiefs were handed out by Nintendo to fans in Japan around the launch of Wario Land in 1994. They are a small, thoroughly disposable piece of promotional merchandise, the kind of thing meant to be used up and thrown away within days, which is precisely why surviving examples are such a nice addition to the collection. Unopened and intact, they are a tiny, fragile fragment of a specific marketing moment. The Art of the Pocket Tissue There is a lovely piece of cultural context behind this object. In Japan, handing out free packets of pocket tissues is a long-established advertising tradition; for decades, companies have printed their message on tissue packs and given them away on busy streets, knowing people will happily take something useful and carry the advertisement around in their pocket. For Nintendo to use that very channel to promote a Game Boy game is a perfect little example of marketing woven into everyday Japanese life, the console's characters slipped into a routine as ordinary as blowing your nose. A Package Of Tissues As Wario Land Promotin That the giveaway promoted Wario Land specifically fits the mischievous spirit of the game, whose greedy anti-hero was Nintendo's cheeky answer to the wholesome Mario. But the real charm here is the survival of something so ephemeral. Promotional consumables like these were never catalogued, never treasured and almost never kept, so an intact example is far rarer than many a boxed game. It is the sort of humble, overlooked object that a preservation-minded collection exists precisely to rescue. Why It Joined the Collection The most disposable promotional items are the hardest to find and the most revealing to keep, and these tissues are a perfect case. They document a very Japanese style of advertising and a specific 1994 Wario Land promotion, and they sit among the collection's other easily-lost pieces of Game Boy merchandise. Preserving something meant to be thrown away is, in a small way, the whole point. The Wario Land promotional tissues are documented, with photographs, on their own page in the collection. See the full feature: the wild world of Game Boy merchandise.

If you watched television in Britain in the early 1990s, you may have heard this arrival without ever knowing its name. It is a small slab of vinyl, a 1992 single called Playing with the Boy, and its bleeping, insistent hook was the sound of the Game Boy's own television commercials. Technician 2 Playing with the Boy 1992 Game Boy vinyl single What It Is This is a 7-inch vinyl single from an electronic music studio project built entirely around the sound of the Game Boy. Released in the United Kingdom in 1992 on BMG Records, Technician 2's Playing with the Boy featured in the Game Boy television commercials of the early nineties, making it a genuine piece of the console's own marketing. It is an unusual crossover item, and it does not stand alone in the collection: the Ambassadors of Funk Super Mario Land CD is here too, its companion in a small sub-collection of Game Boy-inspired music. The Sound of an Advert, Pressed to Vinyl What makes this record special is the direction of the borrowing. Plenty of songs have sampled game sounds, but here the music and the advertising are tangled together from the start: a track built from Game Boy bleeps that then became the soundtrack to selling the Game Boy itself. It captures a very early-nineties moment, when the crackle and buzz of cheap electronics was fashionable, when rave and dance culture were hungry for exactly these synthetic, toy-like textures, and when a games company was happy to ride that wave to make its handheld feel cool. Together with the Ambassadors of Funk CD, this vinyl marks the point where the Game Boy briefly became pop music, its distinctive sound escaping the handheld to appear on the radio, on television and in record shops. These crossover pieces are easy to dismiss as novelties, but they are strong evidence of just how deeply the console had penetrated the culture: not merely a toy children played with, but a sound the wider world recognised and danced to. Physical music from this era is also increasingly scarce, which makes a surviving single a satisfying rescue. Why It Joined the Collection Music is one of the most surprising measures of the Game Boy's cultural reach, and this record has a double claim on the story: it is both Game Boy-inspired music and part of the console's actual advertising. Paired with the Ambassadors of Funk CD, it anchors the collection's little archive of Game Boy pop. Preserving it keeps hold of a moment when the console's voice slipped out of the handheld and into the charts and the ad breaks. The Technician 2 vinyl is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. See the full feature: the Game Boy and music.

Not every Game Boy artefact plugs into a cartridge slot. Some of them you play on a stereo. This arrival is one of the strangest and most joyful objects the collection has taken in: a compact disc, from 1993, built entirely around a Game Boy game, credited to Ambassadors of Funk featuring MC Mario. M.C. Mario - The funky side of Mario What It Is This is a United States dance-music release from 1993, put out by Warlock Records and dedicated to Super Mario Land, one of the Game Boy's defining early games. It is a studio project rather than a soundtrack, pop music that takes a video game as its subject, complete with the game's melodies woven into a club-ready production. It is one of only two Game Boy-related music releases in the collection, sitting alongside a Technician 2 vinyl record from the United Kingdom. A Game Boy Game in the Pop Charts The side-story here is genuinely remarkable. "Super Mario Land" by Ambassadors of Funk featuring MC Mario was a real chart hit, climbing into the upper reaches of the UK singles chart around Christmas 1992, an era when novelty and video-game records could go toe to toe with the biggest pop acts of the day. For a brief moment, a track named after a handheld platformer was competing for radio play and chart positions, proof of just how far the Game Boy and its games had seeped into mainstream culture barely three years after launch. It belongs to a wider early-nineties craze for turning game themes into dancefloor tracks, the same impulse that produced records built on the tunes from Tetris and other Nintendo hits. Most were cheerfully disposable, which is exactly why they are interesting now: they were commercial products of their moment, made to be played once at a party and forgotten, and very few survive in clean, complete condition. As a physical object, this CD is a small monument to the point where gaming culture and pop culture briefly, gloriously overlapped. Why It Joined the Collection A collection about the Game Boy is really a collection about the console's reach, and few things measure that reach better than music made in its honour. This CD documents a moment when a Game Boy game escaped the screen entirely and turned up on the radio, and it pairs with the collection's Technician 2 vinyl to form a tiny but telling sub-collection of Game Boy pop. Keeping it preserves a side of the phenomenon that the hardware and the cartridges simply cannot show: the sound of the Game Boy in the wider world. The Ambassadors of Funk / MC Mario CD is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. Read the full story: the Game Boy and music.