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.

Film noir is not the first thing the Game Boy's little green screen brings to mind, but Inspector Waffles: Early Days makes a surprisingly good case for it. This brand-new 2024 cartridge casts you as a rookie cat detective in a grimy city of cats and dogs, and it plays like a pocket-sized point-and-click mystery. A hard-boiled cat detective, running on a 1989 Game Boy. What It Is Published by Broke Studio and developed by Goloso Games, Early Days is a top-down detective adventure. You play the young Inspector Waffles in his first days on the job in Cat Town, notepad in paw, hunting for clues and questioning the witnesses and suspects, trying to work out who the real culprit is. Like Broke Studio's other releases in the collection it is a proper boxed cartridge that runs on the original DMG-01, the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Advance. A Prequel That Lives on Two Handhelds The name is not new. Inspector Waffles began life as a modern noir point-and-click adventure, released on Steam and GOG in 2021, a loving pastiche of classic detective games starring a deadpan cat gumshoe. Early Days is a prequel to that game, and rather than a straight port it was built as a genuine handheld title in its own right. The same sleuth also stars on Panic's Playdate: one game, two tiny handhelds. The really charming part is where it landed. As well as this Game Boy cartridge, Early Days was released for Panic's Playdate, the tiny yellow 2022 handheld with a hand crank on the side. So the same feline detective now headlines two of the most characterful small screens in gaming, one from 1989 and one from more than thirty years later. Very few modern indie games can claim to run on both. A Broke Studio Cartridge Like Lost Treasure of Lima, this cartridge comes from Broke Studio, whose French workshop presses brand-new Game Boy games by hand. The story of that factory is told here in the Journal. You can find Inspector Waffles: Early Days in the collection, fully catalogued, alongside its Broke Studio siblings Lost Treasure of Lima and Fortified Zone 2.

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.

The best way to play a 1989 handheld might still be a 1989 handheld. But it is no longer the only way. Between original hardware, flash cartridges, hardware-accurate clones and emulators, there have never been more routes back to that green screen. Here is the full map, from the purest to the most convenient. On the Real Thing Nothing beats an original DMG-01 with a fresh set of AA batteries and its unmistakable reflective screen. Many players improve the view with a backlight or IPS screen modification, and the results are gorgeous, but be aware that any such mod changes the console from its original state, which matters if the unit has collector value. Game Boy Mod - High Resolution IPS Screen with Backlight If you simply want to play your favourites on real hardware without hunting down every cartridge, a flash cart is the answer, and we cover the options in detail in our piece on EverDrive and the Game Boy flash cartridges. Original Game Boy with Flash Cart and USB-C Power Kit The Flash-Cart Route A flash cartridge lets you load a library of your own game backups from a microSD card and play them on genuine Game Boy hardware. The current benchmark is the EverDrive-GB X7, which adds modern comforts like save states, an in-game menu and a real-time clock, and sells for a little over a hundred dollars. Its cheaper sibling, the X5, does the same core job without the save states and extras. Either turns a single Game Boy into your whole collection. EverDrive - One way to play the original Game Boy in 2026 The FPGA Clone If you want new hardware that behaves exactly like old hardware, the Analogue Pocket is the standout. Rather than emulating the Game Boy in software, it recreates it on an FPGA chip, a hardware-level rebuild, and plays original cartridges directly. Drop an EverDrive into it and you get a sharp modern screen with hardware-accurate behaviour, which is as close to a brand-new Game Boy as anyone currently makes. Emulators On a phone or computer, accurate emulators such as SameBoy and mGBA reproduce the Game Boy faithfully and are perfect for previewing a game or studying how it works. They are a wonderful research tool, and no threat to the originals; if anything, they send people looking for the real cartridges afterwards. There are also hardware producers specialised to bring back the old playing experience. Anbernic for example offers a whole bunch of retro consoles. Anbernic offers a whole bunch of retro consoles And Brand-New Games Here is the part people forget: you do not have to play only old games. New Game Boy titles are still being written, pressed and boxed today, and many run happily on all of the above. We tell that story in full in the new-cartridge renaissance, a tour of the studios still making games for the grey brick in 2026. Whichever route you take, the destination is the same: the four-shades-of-green world that started it all. If you are new to the machine, our complete guide to the original Game Boy is the place to begin.

Most treasure-hunt games invent their loot. This one did not have to. Lost Treasure of Lima, a brand-new Game Boy cartridge pressed in 2024, sends you digging for a fortune that genuinely existed, genuinely disappeared, and has never been found in more than two hundred years of searching. The loot in this game is real, and still buried somewhere off Costa Rica. What It Is The game is a Broke Studio release developed by drgd_retro. You play the adventurer Sebastian Madsen across four levels of environmental puzzles, exploration and race-against-the-clock chases, all in search of the long-lost treasure. It is a modern homebrew title sold as a proper boxed cartridge, and like the other Broke Studio games in the collection it runs on the original 1989 Game Boy, the DMG-01, as well as the Color and the Advance. The Treasure That Was Actually Real Here is where it gets good. The Treasure of Lima was real. In 1820, as the wars of independence closed in on Spanish Peru, the church treasure of Lima, gold and silver, jewelled candlesticks and two life-size solid-gold statues of the Virgin and Child, was loaded onto a merchant ship, the Mary Dear, to be carried to safety in Mexico. The captain entrusted with it, William Thompson, made a different decision. He and his crew turned pirate, killed the guards and priests on board, and sailed instead to Cocos Island off Costa Rica, where they are said to have buried the lot. Thompson was soon captured. To save his neck he offered to lead the Spanish to the treasure, then slipped away into the island's jungle and was never seen again. The hoard, worth something like 160 million pounds in today's money, has never been recovered. A brand-new 2024 Game Boy cartridge, pressed by hand in France. That has not stopped people trying. Cocos Island has drawn hundreds of expeditions over the past century and a half, among them the German adventurer August Gissler, who lived on the island for nearly twenty years hunting for it, the explorer Frank Worsley of Shackleton's Antarctic voyage, and even the American gangster Bugsy Siegel. Every one of them went home empty-handed, which is exactly what makes the legend such good material for a game. From Legend to Cartridge There is a local footnote too. This is the very game the museum watched being manufactured for its piece on Broke Studio's Homebrew Factory, the workshop in rural France that presses new Game Boy cartridges by hand. If you want to see how a game like this goes from raw code to a shrink-wrapped box, that story is told in the article on the factory. You can find Lost Treasure of Lima in the collection, where it is fully catalogued, sitting on the shelf beside its Broke Studio stablemates Fortified Zone 2 and Inspector Waffles: Early Days.

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.

Slot this into a Walkman, press play, and after a click and a soft hiss you would hear a nineteenth-century Russian folk tune reborn as early-nineties dance pop. This is the cassette single of Doctor Spin's Tetris, catalogue number CRCPS 4, the format most people actually carried around in 1992. It carries the same two tracks as its seven-inch sibling: Tetris on one side, Play Game Boy on the other. The music is identical. What differs is the object, and the object is half the story. The same record, a humbler shell Behind the cassette is the same unlikely arrangement as behind the vinyl. Doctor Spin was a pseudonym for two people: Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer of Cats and The Phantom of the Opera, and the record producer Nigel Wright. Together they turned the Game Boy's most familiar melody into a novelty dance single that reached number six on the UK Singles Chart in 1992. The tune itself, the one every Game Boy owner already knew by heart, is Korobeiniki, a Russian folk song old enough to be safely out of copyright. Catalogue number CRCPS 4, please rewind before returning. The vinyl tends to get the attention, because vinyl usually does. But the cassette single, stamped with catalogue number CRCPS 4, is arguably the more honest artefact of the moment. This is the format a teenager would actually have owned: cheap, pocketable, and built to be played until it gave out. Two tracks, endlessly rewound The cassette single, sometimes called a cassingle, was a fixture of the late eighties and early nineties. It offered one or two tracks on a short tape, sold for pocket money, and dropped straight into the Walkman that half the country seemed to be wearing. It was the download of its day: the cheapest possible way to own a single song you had heard on the radio and could not get out of your head. For a novelty record like Tetris that was the perfect vehicle. Nobody was buying Play Game Boy for the audiophile experience. They were buying three minutes of a tune they recognised from a grey plastic handheld, and a cassette delivered exactly that, over and over, until the tape wore thin or the mechanism finally chewed it up. Why keep the same song twice A reasonable question hangs over a shelf that holds both the vinyl and the cassette of the same record: why keep two copies of an identical song? The answer is that they are not really the same object. A release is not only its music. It is also a format, a price, a moment, and a way of being used. The seven-inch was the collector's disc and the radio plugger's tool. The cassette was the everyday copy, the one that rode around in a coat pocket. The Walkman edition of Andrew Lloyd Webber's secret hit. It is the same instinct that makes a museum keep several editions of a book: the words do not change, but the paperback, the hardback and the book-club printing each carry their own fingerprints of who read them and how. A cassette and a seven-inch of the same novelty single do exactly that quiet work. Holding both is a way of documenting how a single piece of music actually reached people in 1992, in more than one shape at more than one price. The identical release also exists here on the seven-inch vinyl edition, and the Game Boy version of Tetris that started the whole craze sits in the collection too, the small grey cartridge at the root of a surprising amount of pop history. A format that nearly vanished The cassette single did not last. Within a few years the compact disc pushed tapes off the shelves, and the cassingle all but disappeared, its cheapness turning against it: few people thought a disposable tape worth keeping. That is precisely why a clean example with its inlay card still intact is a small find today. The very qualities that once made it forgettable, the low price and the throwaway plastic, are what make surviving copies uncommon now. The Doctor Spin Tetris cassette single is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection. This piece is part of The Sound of the Game Boy, the museum's full story of the console and music.

Some characters guest-star on a console. Mario moved in and took over. Across the life of the Game Boy the plumber turned up almost everywhere: headlining platformers, fronting puzzle games, lending his name to spin-offs and grinning out from the strangest merchandise. He was Nintendo's most bankable face at exactly the moment the company needed to prove that its new handheld was more than a machine for one puzzle game, and he was pressed into service again and again to do it. One plumber, one whole handheld. Follow Mario through the library and you end up with a surprisingly complete tour of what the Game Boy could do, and of how Nintendo thought about its own hardware. This is that tour, gathered from the copies in the collection. The Platformers It began with Super Mario Land, Mario's odd and wonderful handheld debut. Developed by a different team from the mainline console games, it dropped the plumber into the unfamiliar world of Sarasaland, gave him a brand-new princess to rescue and swapped his usual fireballs for a bouncing ball and even a couple of shoot-em-up stages. It feels slightly askew compared to the console Mario, and that is exactly its charm: it is the sound of a studio working out what a Mario game could be on a tiny monochrome screen. Super Mario Land - Mario's First Game Boy Adventure Its bigger, more confident sequel, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, arrived a few years later and looked like a different console entirely, with large detailed sprites and a sprawling overworld map to explore at your own pace. Super Mario Land 2 - The sequel is all about Coins Almost as an afterthought it introduced a greedy, muscular rival called Wario, squatting in Mario's own castle. That rival promptly stole the third game, released as Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, proof that Mario's world had grown big enough to spin off villains who could carry series of their own. Three cartridges trace the whole arc, from tentative experiment to a franchise confidently budding new branches. Super Mario Land 3 - Where Mario is just a side character The Puzzlers Mario was just as happy solving puzzles as stomping goombas, and the handheld's short, portable sessions were the perfect home for him to do it. Dr. Mario reinvented the plumber as a physician flinging coloured pills at viruses, and its irresistible, tidy-up-the-screen loop, plus a two-player link mode, made it one of the platform's great addictions. It is a reminder that Nintendo was happy to lend its mascot to an abstract puzzle game and trust his face alone to sell it. Mario finally passed his exams: Call him "Doctor Mario" A different kind of thinking arrived with Mario's Picross, which handed Mario a chisel and a grid of nonogram logic puzzles in which you chip away squares to reveal a hidden picture. Quietly brilliant and endlessly replayable, it slipped under the radar in the West but is beloved by collectors and puzzle fans today. Between them, the two games show how easily the character stretched across genres: whether the task was clearing viruses or deducing a grid, Mario made it feel friendly and familiar. Mario's most difficult quest Mario in a Supporting Role Sometimes Mario turned up in games that were not quite his own, and often those were the best of the lot. The brilliant Donkey Kong of 1994 opens by faithfully recreating the original 1981 arcade game, then explodes into around a hundred inventive puzzle-platforming levels, casting Mario against his very first nemesis in what many consider one of the finest games on the system. He shared top billing in the colourful puzzle-platformer Mario & Yoshi, and starred in Game & Watch Gallery, which reimagined Nintendo's old LCD Game & Watch classics with a fresh Mario coat of paint. Wherever Nintendo wanted to dust off an old idea or launch a new one, a friendly, familiar face was the obvious way in, and Mario was always available. Mario Off the Cartridge The plumber did not stay inside the games, either, and this is where a collection really shows how far the brand reached. Mario merchandise from the era runs from a Super Mario cap eraser, a piece of pocket-money stationery, to a keychain Mini Classics Mario's Cement Factory that put a tiny working Mario LCD game on a schoolbag. He even left the screen entirely for a rare Japanese Super Mario Land board game, translating a video game back into cardboard and dice. These are the pieces where a game character becomes a genuine cultural mascot, stamped onto anything a child might plausibly want to own. One Character, Many Genres Line the Mario pieces up in order and a strategy comes into focus. Nintendo used its mascot as a kind of guarantee: whatever the genre, whatever the risk, a Mario on the box told a wary parent or a curious child that this was a safe, quality purchase. That single move let the company push the plumber into platforming, puzzles, revived arcade classics and board games alike, and it worked because the games were, by and large, good. Mario was never just marketing dressing; he was attached to some of the handheld's most inventive design. Why Mario Runs Through the Whole Collection Line up the Mario pieces and you have, in miniature, the whole story of the Game Boy: the bold early experiments, the confident sequels, the genre-hopping spin-offs and the merchandising machine that followed a hit wherever it went. No other character ties the library together so neatly, which is exactly why the plumber turns up in so many corners of any serious DMG-01 collection. To collect Mario on the Game Boy is, almost by accident, to collect the platform itself. Every Mario game and curio mentioned here is documented, with its packaging where complete, in the collection.

Before you reach for a single cotton swab, take a breath and really look at the Game Boy in front of you. Most of the time, the kindest thing you can do for an old handheld is very little. A soft cloth, a bit of patience and a willingness to stop early will serve you far better than any aggressive method you might find online. Cleaning should make an object safe to handle and pleasant to look at, not brand new. The honest wear, the faint scuffs and the softened edges, is part of its story. My Very Personal Game Boy Maintenance Kit The guiding idea for everything below is reversibility. Prefer steps you can undo, or that leave no trace at all: a swab of alcohol that evaporates, a wipe of mild soapy water, a puff of air. Avoid anything permanent, anything abrasive and anything you are simply not sure about. When in doubt, do less. You can always clean a little more tomorrow, but you cannot un-scratch a screen or un-bleach a shell. The toolkit You do not need much, and you should resist the urge to buy a drawer full of chemicals. A short, sensible kit covers almost everything. Spa day for a handheld that has earned its wrinkles. High-percentage isopropyl alcohol, ninety percent or higher, is the workhorse. The higher the concentration the better, because the leftover water is what causes trouble. Read the label and make sure nothing like acetone has been added, since acetone can cloud plastics and leave a residue on metal contacts. Pair the alcohol with plain cotton swabs, ideally ones with paper or wooden shafts rather than hollow plastic. Add a couple of soft, lint-free cloths, a soft brush such as a clean paintbrush or a soft toothbrush kept only for this job, and a can of compressed air or a hand blower for dust. To open a Game Boy you need one special tool: a tri-wing screwdriver, sometimes called a Y-tip. Nintendo used tri-wing screws on the console shell, so an ordinary Phillips will not fit and will only chew up the heads if you force it. The original cartridges use a different fitting again, a 3.8mm gamebit, so a small bit set aimed at retro consoles is a worthwhile buy. Optional but kind to the plastic: a pair of disposable gloves, which keep the oils and salt from your fingers off the surfaces and the contacts. Cartridges and contacts If a cartridge is misbehaving, dirty contacts are the usual culprit, and they are also the easiest thing to fix well. Dip a cotton swab in high-percentage isopropyl alcohol, not dripping, just damp, and gently wipe the gold contacts along their length. Turn the swab as it picks up grime and reach for a fresh one when it darkens. Let the alcohol evaporate fully, a minute or two, before you slot the cartridge back. Old plastic, gentle hands, no heroics. Please skip the old pencil-eraser trick. It is everywhere online, and it does seem to work in the moment, but an eraser is mildly abrasive and can slowly wear away the thin plated layer on the contacts, and it tends to leave crumbs and residue behind. Isopropyl alcohol cleans just as well without any of that risk, which is why it is the method most careful collectors now prefer. Avoid seventy percent rubbing alcohol too, because the extra water it carries can encourage corrosion on metal. The same gentle approach works for the cartridge connector inside the console, though you rarely need to go that far. A single careful swab, then a little time to dry, is almost always enough. The shell and screen For the outside of the case, start with the least invasive option. A soft brush and a puff of compressed air will lift dust from the seams, the button gaps and the speaker grille. Hold the can upright and use short bursts from a little distance, so you do not spray cold propellant onto the plastic. Grime that a brush will not shift usually comes off with a cloth barely dampened with mild soapy water. Work gently, wring the cloth well and keep moisture away from any openings. If you want to clean the shell more thoroughly and you are comfortable opening the console, the safest route is to remove the two case halves entirely and wash the bare plastic in warm soapy water, well away from the circuit board, then dry it completely before reassembly. Water and electronics do not mix, so the board itself should never go near the sink. Sticky residue from an old price sticker calls for patience rather than force. Let a little soapy water or a dab of isopropyl alcohol sit on the spot to soften it, then coax it away with a soft cloth or brush. Do not scrape at it with anything hard or sharp, and do not scrub with abrasive pads, because a scratched or hazed shell cannot be undone. For the screen and its plastic lens, less is more: a dry or barely damp microfibre cloth, wiped softly, with no solvents pooling at the edges where they could seep behind the plastic. When to leave it alone Some Game Boys should not be cleaned at all, and knowing which ones is a real skill. If an item is factory sealed, boxed in mint condition, or professionally graded and encased, leave it exactly as it is. Opening the case, breaking the seal or cleaning the surface of such a piece can wipe out much of its value in a single afternoon, and that value does not come back. A graded slab is worth what it is precisely because it has been left untouched and verified. The same caution applies, in gentler form, to any piece you suspect is rare or valuable. If you are not certain, treat it as if it were, and stop. There is no rush. A little honest dust on a special item is far safer than an experiment you cannot reverse. When something genuinely valuable needs attention, it is worth asking an experienced collector or a specialist before you touch it. Restoration versus preservation There is a real difference between preserving an object and trying to improve it, and the line matters. Preservation keeps an item stable, clean and honest. Improvement, the urge to make a yellowed shell look factory fresh, is where most of the damage is done. Whitening treatments are the clearest example. The popular method uses hydrogen peroxide and strong light to reverse yellowing, and it can look impressive at first. But long-term reports are unkind: treated plastic has been seen to yellow again, sometimes worse than before, and to develop streaks and blotches that untreated pieces do not. Many now regard whitening as, at best, a temporary cosmetic fix that may cause irreversible harm to the plastic itself. Repainting a shell carries the same warning in bold: it permanently alters an original finish and, on anything collectible, usually lowers its worth rather than raising it. None of this means you cannot enjoy tidying up a well-loved Game Boy. It simply means choosing the gentle, reversible path and being honest about when to stop. A clean, original, slightly aged handheld is a lovely thing. It does not need to pretend it just left the factory in 1989. If you enjoy careful, collector-minded guides like this one, you are always welcome to browse the rest of our Journal at the Game Boy Museum. Come in gently, take your time, and treat every little machine as if it has a story worth keeping. The Full Series Part 1: What a Grade Really Means · Part 2: Storing and Preserving Your Game Boys · Part 3: Cleaning a Game Boy Without Ruining It (you are here)

Some people look at a Game Boy and see a childhood. Others see a synthesizer waiting to be let out of its case. HobbyChop belongs firmly to the second group, and the grey brick is all the happier for it. For a machine designed in 1989 to play Tetris on a bus, the Game Boy has enjoyed a remarkable second life as a musical instrument. That second life does not happen on its own. It depends on people who are willing to open the case, respect the hardware, and coax new sounds out of four humble sound channels. HobbyChop is one of those people, and we are delighted to feature the studio here in the Journal. A studio built on retro obsession HobbyChop describes itself as a small creative studio obsessed with retro tech, DIY sound, and nostalgic vibes, and that self-description turns out to be admirably accurate. For two years the studio sold handmade gear and designs on Etsy, connecting with makers and musicians all over the world, before opening its own shop at hobbychop.com. Every piece is still made by hand, with care, one unit at a time. Handmade is not a marketing word here, it is the whole model. Selling on Etsy for two years meant every order was a small conversation with a real maker or musician somewhere in the world, and that habit of connection clearly stuck. The move to a dedicated shop feels less like a corporate step and more like a bigger workbench, with the same hands behind it. If you have spent any time in chiptune circles you may already know the studio by its online handle, crunchypotato, which turns up on Etsy, Tindie and Bluesky. There is a YouTube channel called Chiptune-Anamnesis, an active Discord community, and an Instagram at hobbychop. It is, in the best sense, a one-bench operation with a global address book. Turning the Game Boy into an instrument HobbyChop's speciality is simple to state and hard to do well: they turn game hardware into instruments. On the Game Boy side, the cornerstone is the Arduinoboy, the open-source adapter that lets a Game Boy talk MIDI. The original design comes from Timothy Lamb, better known in the scene as trash80, and HobbyChop builds and sells ready-to-play units so you do not have to source the parts and solder your own. The version that just joined our shelves is the Arduinoboy Pro, a fuller build with a DIN5 MIDI socket and an mGB cartridge already included, plus programs like LSDj, Chord, Drum & Bass II and Boom Bap. In plain terms, it lets a Game Boy sit inside a modern studio setup and take instructions from a MIDI keyboard, a sequencer or a DAW, while that companion mGB cartridge turns the handheld itself into a MIDI sound module. The Game Boy stops being a toy and becomes another voice in the rack. Credit where it is due: the Arduinoboy itself was created and open-sourced by the chiptune musician Timothy Lamb, better known as Trash80, and HobbyChop's Pro build is a polished, ready-to-play take on his design. The Arduinoboy Pro, where a 1989 handheld learns to speak fluent MIDI. If MIDI is new to you, think of it as the common language modern instruments use to talk to one another. Teaching a 1989 handheld to speak it fluently is a genuinely clever piece of work, and building those units reliably, by hand, is another skill entirely. The mGB cartridge is already included For a performer, the practical upshot is freedom. The same Game Boy that once lived in a coat pocket can now trigger from a full studio, lock to the tempo of everything else on stage, and hold its own next to synthesizers many times its price. That is a lot of music to pull from a chip that predates the World Wide Web. A cartridge family that refuses to be quiet Beyond the adapter, HobbyChop makes a whole family of chiptune cartridges, each one a small idea taken seriously. There is Droneboy for endless drones and pads, the GB-303 for acid basslines, the GB POLY-4M four-channel MIDI synth, the monophonic Chord, the BOOM BAP with its 221 MIDI-sync loops, Drum & Bass II with 190 breaks, the reactive glitch sequencer STUTTER, and PULSE\GRID, an 8-bit MIDI-reactive visualiser for when you want the Game Boy to watch the music instead of make it. Droneboy at rest: eight bits, endless drones, zero chill. There are even homebrew games in the catalogue, among them Balloon.gb, Spirit Board Simulator and Techdweeb Zombies, because a studio this fond of the hardware was never going to stop at sound. HobbyChop also builds gear for other platforms, from the Nintendo DS and PSP to Sega's GenMDM, the YM2149F, the MT32 and a MIDI-Pi, but it is the Game Boy work that brought them to our door. Handmade, and proud of it What makes all of this worth featuring, and not just cataloguing, is the how. These are not mass-produced units stamped out by the thousand. They are assembled by hand, tested, and sent out one at a time, which is exactly the ethos a museum like ours wants to celebrate. Preserving the Game Boy is not only about keeping old cartridges safe under glass. It is also about the people who keep the platform alive and audible, who take a design that is more than thirty-five years old and give it something new to say. Two new voices in the collection We are pleased to say that two HobbyChop pieces have now joined the Game Boy Museum: the Arduinoboy Pro and the Droneboy cartridge. One opens the Game Boy up to an entire studio, the other asks it to hold a single, patient drone for as long as you like. Between them they sketch the range of what this little machine can do once someone with a soldering iron and good taste gets involved. For us that pairing is close to perfect. A museum is at its best when it can show not just what a machine was, but what it became, and these two pieces do exactly that, side by side on the shelf. It is also, quietly, the kind of cooperation we like to see. A museum cannot keep a living platform alive on its own, and studios like HobbyChop are a good part of the reason there is still something living to preserve. If this has put a tune in your head, our ongoing series The Sound of the Game Boy digs deeper into how the handheld became a serious musical instrument, and where those four channels came from in the first place. That same series digs into the two great Game Boy music trackers, nanoloop and LSDj, the software side of the story HobbyChop tells in hardware. Our sincere thanks to HobbyChop for keeping the grey brick singing. To see where these two pieces sit among everything else, and to hear more of what the Game Boy has become, explore the collection at the Game Boy Museum.

There is a particular kind of itch that every Game Boy lover knows: the wish for one machine that keeps the soul of the original but can do so much more. I did not want to buy that machine. I wanted to build it with my own hands. So I built a Zeroboy. This one is personal. It is the only item in the entire collection that I made myself, and it might be the piece I am proudest of. Project Zerboy - Building my own Game Boy The Game Boy Zero Dream A Zeroboy belongs to the wider Game Boy Zero movement: the idea of fitting a tiny modern computer, usually a Raspberry Pi, inside a genuine DMG-01 shell. From the outside it still looks like the classic grey brick I grew up with. Inside, it runs a sharp colour display, a high-capacity battery and an emulator that can play a huge library of retro games. There is no official product and no neat kit you simply click together. Every Game Boy Zero is hand-built, so no two are ever quite the same. Sourcing the Parts from Around the World Half the adventure was gathering the pieces. There was no box to buy, so I ordered the components myself from suppliers abroad: the Raspberry Pi, the screen, the battery, the buttons and the small boards that tie everything together. Parts trickled in from different corners of the world over several weeks, and slowly a pile of electronics on my desk started to look like it might one day become a Game Boy again. The ZeroBoy from all sides More Controls Than Nintendo Ever Intended The original Game Boy gave you two action buttons, A and B, and that was plenty for its library. Mine needed more. On the front I added two extra red buttons alongside the classic pair, so the familiar face now carries four. On the back I fitted two more, shoulder-style triggers that the original shell was never designed for. These extra controls are not decoration. They are exactly what lets this little grey case handle modern and more demanding games that a simple two-button layout could never cope with. Drilling cleanly into a genuine DMG-01 shell, placing the buttons so they feel natural under the fingers and wiring each one back to the board took patience and more than a few test fits before everything sat right. Soldering My Own HDMI Cable The hardest part, and the one I am secretly proudest of, was the video connection. Instead of relying on a ready-made lead, I soldered the HDMI cable myself, joining it together strand by strand from individual wires. If you have ever tried this, you know how unforgiving it is: the wires are hair-thin, the contacts are tiny, and a single bad joint means no picture at all. When the display finally lit up cleanly, after more than one false start, it was one of the most satisfying moments I have had in this whole hobby. Bye Bye AA Batteries A Highly Customised RetroPie Heart Hardware is only half of a Zeroboy. The brain of mine is a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie, and I refused to settle for the default install. I built a highly customised setup, reworking the menus, the button mapping for those six controls, the emulators and even the boot sequence so the finished machine feels like a Game Boy rather than a small computer wearing a costume. Getting emulation to run smoothly, with the right systems, the right performance and a front end that feels native in the hand, is fiddly and largely invisible work. Nobody sees the hours of tweaking config files and testing games one by one, but it is the difference between a gadget and something that genuinely feels like a console. The final Zeroboy in action A Labour of Love Why go to all this trouble when you can emulate a Game Boy on a phone in seconds? Because this was never about convenience. All told, the build cost me well over a hundred hours, spread across sourcing parts, drilling and fitting buttons, soldering, wiring, flashing software and endless small adjustments. It was about keeping my hands on the thing I love, understanding it down to the last wire, and giving a classic shell a second life without losing what made it special in the first place. My Zeroboy is not flawless, and that is exactly why I treasure it. It carries my own soldering, my own mistakes and my own fixes. It sits in the collection among the other DIY and modding pieces, like the GBinterceptor, as proof that the Game Boy is not only something to keep behind glass. It is still something to build, tinker with and genuinely love. You can see my Zeroboy in the collection.