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.

A console meant to be carried everywhere needed something to carry it in, and a small industry grew up to meet that need. This arrival is one of its sturdier answers: the Game Boy Safe by Dynasound, a hard case built for the safe transport of the console and its essentials. A hard case built to survive the school bag, the suitcase and the careless drop. What It Is The Safe is a rigid protective case with fitted compartments: room for the Game Boy itself, up to five games and the stereo headphones (the DMG-02). Where a soft pouch merely kept dust off, a hard case like this promised to survive being dropped in a school bag or a suitcase, keeping the fragile screen and cartridges from harm. It is a practical, unglamorous object, made for the reality that these consoles lived on the move. Unglamorous, rigid and exactly what a console-on-the-move actually needed. Why It Joined the Collection The collection keeps a whole range of Game Boy carrying cases, from official Nintendo designs to third-party organizers, and the Dynasound Safe adds another point on that spectrum. Cases are one of the most overlooked accessory categories, yet they say a great deal about how the console was actually used: constantly, and on the go. Documenting the different approaches to protecting and toting a Game Boy fills in a small but genuine part of its everyday history, and this hard-shell example is a solid addition to that shelf. The Dynasound Game Boy Safe is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the wild world of Game Boy merchandise.

The Game Boy's afterlife as a design icon is nowhere clearer than on the bedside table. This arrival is a modern one: an officially licensed alarm clock, made by Paladone, that takes the exact shape of the original Game Boy and wakes its owner the only proper way, with Super Mario Land. An alarm clock shaped like a DMG-01 that wakes you with Super Mario Land. Perfect. What It Is Released in 2018, the clock is moulded to look like a DMG-01 and runs on two AA batteries, a nice nod to the console's own appetite for them. Its alarm plays original sounds from Super Mario Land, so the object is as much a piece of nostalgia as a timepiece. It belongs to a whole range of Paladone Game Boy lifestyle items that the collection holds, sitting alongside the money box, the heat-change mug, the watch and the bottle opener, a small family of homeware that turns the console into everyday decor. Why It Joined the Collection Modern licensed merchandise matters to the collection because it shows that the Game Boy never really became history, it became a brand people still want on their shelves decades later. The Paladone clock is a perfect small example, and it also completes a set: gathered with the other Paladone pieces, it helps document how one company has kept turning the DMG-01 silhouette into new lifestyle products. Preserving the whole family, rather than one piece of it, tells that ongoing story far better. The Paladone Game Boy alarm clock is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in the Game Boy in disguise.

This is the set that launched a million commutes: the classic American Game Boy and Tetris bundle. But this particular arrival carries a small secret on the outside of its box, the kind of detail that turns an ordinary boxed set into a collector's quiet delight. US Game Boy Tetris bundle box with headphones What It Is The US Tetris bundle brings together the console, the Tetris cartridge and the original stereo headphones in one box, the definitive package that introduced most Americans to the Game Boy. Tetris was the perfect pack-in, a game that sold the machine to commuters and children alike, and the headphones let players hear its music in stereo, which the console's small mono speaker could never deliver. It is the archetypal Game Boy set, the one that turns up in a thousand nostalgic memories. Unusual: The Game Boy Serial Number on the Backside of the Box The Serial Number on the Box Here is the collector's secret. For a period in the United States, the Game Boy's serial number was attached to the outside of the box along with the warranty card. The warranty card could be peeled away, but the serial number stayed put. At the time it probably looked a little untidy, a sticker most owners never gave a second thought. Decades later it has become a small gift to collectors, because a serial number on the box is strong evidence that the packaging is genuinely original and not a modern reproduction, a reassurance that matters more and more as clever fakes appear. Hard to find: Matching Serial Number Box & Game Boy It is a lovely example of how the passage of time rewrites the meaning of a detail. A rushed piece of retail packaging logic, born of the need to register a warranty, has aged into an authenticity marker that helps separate real boxes from the growing tide of reproductions. Little quirks like this are exactly what a preservation-minded collection lives for: the small, accidental fingerprints that a genuine period object carries and a copy cannot easily fake. Why It Joined the Collection The Tetris bundle is arguably the single most important Game Boy package there is, the set that turned a Japanese handheld into a Western phenomenon. Preserving a complete American example, with its telltale serial on the box, keeps both the object and its authenticity intact, and it pairs neatly with the collection's British Tetris bundle to show how the same landmark set differed from market to market. The US Tetris bundle is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. More on this in collecting box sets and bundles.

Here is a fact that surprises almost everyone: Nintendo was founded in 1889. That is not a typo. The company that gave the world Mario, Zelda and the Game Boy is older than the aeroplane, and it began not with silicon but with paper. Understanding that long, strange journey is the best way to appreciate why a small grey handheld in 1989 was not a lucky break, but the natural product of a company that had spent a century learning how to sell fun. From Playing Cards to a Restless Empire Game Boy (JPN/1989) Nintendo started in Kyoto as a maker of hanafuda, traditional Japanese playing cards, founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi. For decades it was a respected but modest card company. That changed under his great-grandson, Hiroshi Yamauchi, who took over in 1949 and spent the 1960s restlessly trying anything that might grow the business: instant rice, a taxi company, even short-stay hotels. Most of these experiments failed, but they revealed a company willing to gamble and reinvent itself. What finally stuck was toys. Gunpei Yokoi and the Toy Years Gunpei Yokoi (Source: Wikipedia) The turning point had a name: Gunpei Yokoi. Hired to maintain the machines on the card factory floor, he was spotted tinkering with an extending toy arm to pass the time. Yamauchi told him to turn it into a product. That toy, the Ultra Hand, sold in huge numbers in 1966 and pushed Nintendo firmly toward playthings. Yokoi went on to become the company's great inventor, the man whose philosophy of clever, cheap, reliable engineering would one day define the Game Boy itself. Into Electronics: Game & Watch As electronics grew cheaper, Nintendo moved from mechanical toys into electronic ones. In 1980 Yokoi launched the Game & Watch, a series of pocket LCD games that each played a single title, and they were a sensation. Crucially, it was on a Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong that Nintendo introduced the cross-shaped directional pad, the D-pad, a control scheme so intuitive that it is still on every controller today. The Game & Watch taught Nintendo two lessons it would never forget: people love games they can carry, and great control design matters more than raw power. The Famicom Rescues an Industry Nintendo's arcade hit Donkey Kong in 1981 introduced a jumping carpenter who would become Mario. Then, in 1983, the company launched the Famicom home console in Japan. When it reached North America in 1985 as the Nintendo Entertainment System, it did something remarkable: it revived a home video game market that had collapsed almost completely in 1983. With Super Mario Bros. leading the way, Nintendo did not just sell a console, it rebuilt an entire industry's trust and made its name a household word around the world. The Game Boy Bet in the History of Nintendo By 1989 Nintendo ruled the living room, and it turned back to Yokoi's first love: portable play. The Game Boy pulled together everything the company had learned. It used the D-pad from the Game & Watch, the cartridge model from the Famicom, and Yokoi's philosophy of lateral thinking with withered technology, choosing mature, inexpensive parts used cleverly. Rivals like the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear were more powerful and full of colour, but they were expensive and drained batteries in hours. The Game Boy was cheaper, tougher and lasted far longer on a set of AA cells, and with Tetris in the box it became irresistible. In the long history of Nintendo, it was the moment the company's toy instincts and its technology finally fused into something perfect. How the Game Boy Secured the Future The payoff was enormous. The monochrome Game Boy and its Color successor together sold around 118 million units, and the handheld line became the steady engine of Nintendo's business for decades, carrying it through periods when its home consoles struggled. The strategy the Game Boy proved, that accessibility and battery life beat raw specifications, runs straight through the DS and, arguably, all the way to the hybrid Switch. Nintendo learned that its safest ground was always the pocket. A Company Built to Endure From hanafuda cards to the Game Boy is a span of exactly one hundred years, and the thread running through all of it is a willingness to reinvent while never losing sight of one simple goal: to make people play. That is why a company that began with paper cards could, a century later, put a games arcade in a child's pocket. The original DMG-01 console at the heart of this collection is not just a gadget; it is the culmination of that hundred-year story. Explore the rest of it in the collection.

Before you could look up a walkthrough online, beating a hard Game Boy game often meant buying a book. And the printed Game Boy world went far beyond strategy: there were activity books, annuals, gamebooks and even an art book devoted to the console. Gathered on a shelf, they reveal a side of the handheld that had nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with how deeply it soaked into children's daily lives, filling the same shelves as their storybooks and school annuals. When beating a game meant buying a book. Here is a tour of the Game Boy on the bookshelf, drawn from the collection, category by category. The Strategy Guides The most familiar Game Boy books are the guides. The collection holds a general Game Boy strategy guide from 1990 and dedicated volumes for individual hits, including a Donkey Kong Land strategy guide and a Super Mario Land 2 strategy guide. Part manual, part glossy love letter, these books walked players through the toughest games level by level, with maps, screenshots and secrets laid out across the page. In an age before every solution was a search away, a good guide was genuinely valuable, and children saved up for them the way they saved up for the games themselves. Victory Books and Gamebooks Some titles turned playing into reading. The collection includes a Game Boy Victory Book, packed with tips and tricks across many games, and a Handy Game Machine gamebook, the sort of choose-your-path adventure that let you play a game with nothing but pages, a pencil and your imagination. They capture a moment when the line between video games and books was pleasantly blurry, when the excitement of a game could be carried into a paperback and back again, and when publishers were still experimenting with what a games book could even be. Annuals and Activity Books The Game Boy also filled the shelves reserved for children's annuals and activity books. The collection holds the colourful Game Boy Scouts series and the German Meine Game Boy Welt, the kind of bright, busy books that turned a games console into an all-round hobby, with puzzles, pictures, stories and things to do away from the screen. These are the books that reveal just how completely the Game Boy had crossed over from toy to lifestyle, earning a place in the annual-buying rituals of Christmas and birthdays alongside the biggest cartoon and comic brands of the day. An Art Book of Box Art Most unusual of all is a book about the games' packaging itself: The Box Art Collection, a volume dedicated entirely to the cover artwork that once lined toy-shop shelves. It is a lovely, self-aware object, a book about the very images that made children want the cartridges in the first place, and its existence is a quiet argument that Game Boy box art has now been recognised as a genuine art form worth preserving and studying in its own right. A generation that grew up staring at those covers has grown up to celebrate them. Reading a Console's Wider Life What this shelf really documents is the moment a piece of hardware becomes a culture. A console that only produced games would never have generated activity books and annuals; those appear only when a brand is big enough to structure a child's whole leisure time, from the game itself to the guide that helped you beat it to the annual under the tree at Christmas. The books map that expansion better than almost anything else, because each new type of book marks another part of daily life the Game Boy had reached. Why the Books Belong in a Collection Books, guides and annuals are easy to overlook next to the hardware, but they are where the Game Boy became a whole culture rather than just a device. They record how players learned, dreamed and obsessed over these games, and because paper is fragile and rarely kept, a good run of Game Boy books is harder to assemble than a shelf of cartridges. Together they round out the story that the consoles alone cannot tell, and they remind us that for millions of children the Game Boy was not only something you played, but something you read about, drew in and lived alongside. The books and guides named here are documented, with photos, in the collection.