Open a modern flash cartridge and you are holding something the Game Boy was never meant to have: a single grey slab that can carry a whole library. Slot in a memory card, power on, and a menu of games appears where a factory cartridge would have given you exactly one. It feels like a magic trick, and like most magic tricks it lives right on the edge of the rules. One cartridge, a hundred games, and a lifetime of arguments about whether that is allowed. The Game Boy Museum keeps a small shelf of these devices, filed under the collection's unofficial, grey-market side. They range from carefully engineered tools that the retro community genuinely respects to crude bootlegs stamped out for a quick profit. This entry in the Bootlegs and Flashcarts series walks along that shelf and, just as importantly, stays honest about where the line actually falls. What a flashcart is A normal Game Boy cartridge is a small circuit board with a single game burned permanently into a chip. It does one thing, forever. A flash cartridge swaps that fixed chip for rewritable memory, or reads game files, known as ROMs, straight from a memory card. The console cannot tell the difference. To the Game Boy it is simply a cartridge; to you it is a slot that can become any cartridge you feed it. That one idea explains everything else on the shelf. Store the games as files, let the hardware load them on demand, and a single physical cartridge stands in for a shelf full of them. The differences between these devices come down to how gracefully they manage it, who built them, and, above all, where the game files came from in the first place. The EverDrive standard If flash cartridges have a gold standard, it is the EverDrive line by the maker known as krikzz. The collection holds two of them. The plainer GB Everdrive reads Game Boy game ROMs directly from an SD card on the original hardware, and depending on the card it can carry hundreds of games on a single cartridge, with a built-in cheat module thrown in. The Everdrive GB X7 is the more advanced of the pair, and the museum entry calls it the most capable flash cartridge in the collection. It works on both the original Game Boy and the Game Boy Color, loading ROMs from a microSD card on real hardware, and it adds the conveniences a purist cartridge never had: fast loading, save states, Game Genie cheat support, battery-backed saves, and a real-time clock so that time-aware games such as Pokemon behave correctly. The EverDrive: a very well-made empty box, waiting for you to do the right thing. What earns the EverDrive its reputation is that it is a proper piece of engineering, sold openly by a known maker and bought by collectors who want to play on the genuine console rather than on an emulator on a phone. The hardware itself is entirely legal. It is a well-made empty vessel. What you pour into it is the part that carries moral and legal weight, and we will come back to that. Flash Boy and the open scene Not every device on the shelf is there to play games. The Flash Boy, a modern unit dated to 2022 in the collection, is a small tool for backing up ROMs from Game Boy cartridges. On supported cartridges, including the Pokemon games, it can also read out or write back the save data, the very save that holds a childhood's worth of hours. The Flash Boy, quietly rescuing your Pokemon team from a battery that is thirty years tired. This is where flash hardware shows its most defensible face. A device that copies the contents of a cartridge you already own, or rescues a save from a battery that is slowly dying, is doing preservation work. Real Game Boy cartridges are now more than thirty years old, their save batteries fail, and their memory chips will not last forever. Tools that read a cartridge back to a file are how fragile originals get archived before they are gone. The Flash Boy belongs to a broader modern scene of open, community-built hardware and homebrew, made by enthusiasts rather than factories, and aimed at owners and tinkerers rather than pirates. The pirate collection carts At the other end of the shelf sit the devices that gave the whole category its shady reputation. The GB Smart Card holds up to 32 MB of Game Boy game ROMs on a single cartridge. Because most Game Boy games were tiny by modern standards, 32 MB was enough for the equivalent of hundreds of them, and the card arrived already full. The museum files it plainly as a grey-market device, part of the unofficial side of Game Boy history. A memory card holding more Game Boys than Nintendo sold in a good week. Cruder still are the multi-game collection cartridges, the classic bootlegs that anyone who grew up near a market stall will recognise. The Game Boy's success drew copiers who packed dozens, even hundreds, of official games onto single illegal cartridges and sold them as one product. Sometimes even the hardware was faked. One example in the collection is a game case with the Nintendo logo simply left off, a small tell that nobody official was involved. Spot the difference: real Nintendo logo missing, honesty apparently also optional. These are the 100-in-1 carts of legend, and the difference between them and an EverDrive is not really technical. It is intent. An EverDrive is an empty tool sold to someone who supplies their own games. A collection cartridge arrives pre-loaded with other people's copyrighted work, copied and sold for profit by someone who owned none of it. That is straightforward commercial piracy, and it is why these belong on the black-market shelf. Preservation or piracy? So which is it: preservation or piracy? Honestly, it can be either, and the hardware alone does not decide. A flash cartridge is a blank instrument. Loading it with backups of games you physically own, running homebrew written by the community, testing your own code, or archiving a cartridge before its battery dies are all reasonable and largely defensible uses. This is how a great deal of preservation actually happens. The line is crossed at the game files. Downloading or sharing ROMs of games you do not own is copyright infringement, plain and simple, and the fact that the console is old or the game is out of print does not make it legal. It is a genuine grey-to-black area, argued over endlessly, and we are not going to pretend otherwise or hand out a recipe for doing it. The museum's interest is in the objects and the debate they represent, not in helping anyone copy a game they have no right to. That is the honest tension these little cartridges carry. The same technology that lets a collector protect a dying save or a developer test a piece of homebrew also let a market stall sell a hundred stolen games on one card. Keeping both stories on the same shelf is the point. It is history, unofficial chapter included. If you would like to see these devices and the rest of the unofficial Game Boy story up close, the full collection lives at gameboymuseum.com. Come and explore the shelf we do not always talk about. The Full Series Part 1: Every Game on One Cartridge (you are here) · Part 2: The Do-It-Yourself Game Boy · Part 3: New Games for an Old Machine

When the Game Boy arrived in 1989 it was sold as a toy, a grey plastic slab you threw in a bag and stopped being careful with. Nobody prints a 2.5 kg hardcover about a toy. Yet here we are, decades on, with the little handheld sitting on coffee tables and reference shelves, treated as history and as art. This entry in The Paper Trail is about the books that made that shift official. Not the manuals that came in the box, but the encyclopaedias, guides and logbooks that arrived years and sometimes decades later, written by people who simply wanted to remember. Four of them live in the collection, and each treats the Game Boy a little differently. Game Boy: The Box Art Collection (Silver Edition) Bitmap Books published Game Boy: The Box Art Collection in 2021, and calling it a book almost undersells it. It is a richly illustrated encyclopaedia featuring hundreds of Game Boy games from around the world, the sort of sweep that lets you see the console's whole life laid out in cover art, region by region. It is more than pictures, though. The pages are threaded with interviews with collectors and a history of the console itself, so the images sit inside a story rather than floating free. 1. 2.5 kilograms of Game Boy history, in a colour your dumbbells will envy: silver. The silver edition is the show-off version. Lithographic printing, a hardcover, sewn binding and that full 2.5 kg of paper turn it into a genuine centrepiece, and the whole thing arrives inside a designed silver art box. It is strictly limited to 1,500 copies, which makes it one of the standout modern publications in the collection. (UK, 2021) Perfect Guide of Nostalgic Game Boy From the UK we travel to Japan and to 2017, where Magazine Box Co., Ltd. published the Perfect Guide of Nostalgic Game Boy. Where the Box Art Collection celebrates, this one catalogues. It gathers a great deal of Game Boy knowledge in one place: the best and worst games, curious accessories, competing products, the later consoles and much more. Where the Box Art Collection celebrates, this one catalogues That range is the point. It is a modern reference book written for committed fans, the kind of volume you reach for when you want the whole map rather than a single landmark, the best games sitting a page away from the worst and the rivals filed next to the successors. (Japan, 2017) Meine Game Boy Welt Long before either of those, in 2002, a German-language guide called Meine Game Boy Welt appeared, limited to just 1,000 copies. Across 134 pages it works patiently through the 100 best games, the Game Boy's history, its hardware and its accessories, a full tour of the world promised in the title. Meine Game Boy Welt: 1,000 copies, zero shop shelves, you simply had to be there. What makes it special is how it travelled. It was sold or traded only at retro gaming events, never on a normal shop shelf, which turns this German fan publication into a genuinely scarce item. Finding one meant showing up in person and knowing the right table. (Germany, 2002) Game Boy Spiel Katalog The last book in the set is the most humble and, in its way, the most personal. The Game Boy Spiele Katalog, published by Verlag Bad Vilbel in 2016, is not a book you read so much as a book you fill in. It is a collector's log that lets Game Boy game collectors record their progress and make notes on their collection. The Game Boy Spiel Katalog, the only book here that expects you to do the writing. Among the encyclopaedias and reference guides it is the practical companion piece, the one that assumes you are not just reading about the hobby but living it, ticking off cartridges and jotting notes in the margins of your own shelf. (Germany, 2016) Together these four trace a quiet transformation. A handheld sold as a toy became a subject worth an English encyclopaedia, a Japanese reference volume, a limited German guide and a logbook for keeping your own records straight. Somewhere along the way the Game Boy stopped being something you only played with and became something you study. It earned its paper trail. If you would like to leaf through more of the shelf, the collection is always open at gameboymuseum.com. The Full Series Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books · Part 2: Player's Guides and Strategy Books · Part 3: Catalogues and Club Nintendo · Part 4: Fan Magazines and Sticker Albums · Part 5: The Books That Made the Game Boy History (you are here)

Every great machine leaves a paper trail. The Game Boy arrived in 1989 as a small grey box with a green screen, and almost immediately the presses started rolling around it. Not just Nintendo's own manuals, but a whole ecosystem of independent magazines, supplements and collectibles, made by people who simply could not stop talking about the thing. This is a walk down that paper trail, from a British newsstand to a Tokyo bookshop, with a sticker album waiting at the end. The official starting point Our trail begins with something semi-official. The Handy Game Machine Gamebook was an official Japanese guide, sold only in Japan under its Handy Game Machine title. Across 82 pages it introduced games and hardware and offered complete walkthroughs with detailed hints for selected titles. Produced by Nintendo, it set the template so many later books would follow: a printed companion you kept beside the console. Before wikis, there were staples and glossy paper. It is one of several official Japanese guide books in the collection, and a reminder that even before the fan press turned up, the Game Boy already came wrapped in paper. From here, though, the interesting part is what the fans and independent publishers did next. A voice from the UK newsstand Cross to Britain and the tone changes completely. GB Action was an independent UK Game Boy magazine from Europress Interactive, first published in June 1992. It ran a remarkable 41 issues until August 1995, packed with tips, tricks, reviews and product news. For a magazine devoted to a single handheld, that is a long and healthy life. The very first issue, catalogued here, arrived with a 16-page Buyers Guide supplement carrying 50 extra game reviews, the sort of generosity that made a newsstand reader feel they had struck a bargain. It stands as one of the European magazines in the collection, and as proof that the Game Boy could carry an entire publishing operation on its little grey shoulders. Tips, tricks and product news, printed while the ink of the launch was still wet. Japan's fan press finds its feet Back in Japan, the independent press was busy from the very start. Game Boy Magazine (08/89) dates from the 1989 launch year, published soon after the console's release. It covers early titles such as Tetris, Makai Toushi SaGa and Dracula Densetsu, capturing the first software lineup that defined the Game Boy's market entry. Published by Tokumashoten Intermedia, it reads like a snapshot of a system still finding its audience. The same publisher's September 1990 issue shows how quickly the format matured, carrying tips, tricks, reviews and product introductions a full year deeper into the Game Boy's life. Placed side by side, the two issues make a neat before-and-after of a magazine, and a machine, growing up together. Then there is Game Boy Fan No. 1, whose first issue appeared in January 1990. Independent, enthusiastic and full of tips, tricks, reviews and product introductions, it is an early example of the Japanese print culture that grew up around the handheld. Holding issue one of anything carries a small thrill, and this is issue one of a magazine that existed for no other reason than that people loved a green-screened machine. The Game Boy Scouts report for duty The most charming corner of this trail is a set of four coloured booklets. The Game Boy Scouts supplements were distributed with the Japanese magazine Famicom Tsushin over a few short weeks in early 1990, and the collection holds the full four-volume run. Volume 1 led off in early February 1990, covering early post-launch titles such as Nemesis, Selection, Asmik-kun World and Baseball Kids with short previews and platform news. Volume 2 followed in mid-February with Batman, SD Lupin III, Othello, Trump Boy and Popeye, working as a curated software guide with editorial content. Volume 3 arrived in early March, highlighting Batman, Funny Field, Flappy Special, Flipull and Makai Toushi SaGa, before Volume 4 closed the series in mid-March with Quarth, Pitman, Dead Heat Scramble, Soccer Boy and World Bowling. Produced by ASCII Corporation, the Scouts were one of the earliest structured efforts to catalogue and promote the growing Game Boy library. It is a short-lived series, but a tidy one, and its rapid month-by-month cadence tells you exactly how fast the software was arriving in those first frantic months. Four booklets in six weeks is not a magazine, it is a running commentary. Peel, stick, collect The trail ends not with words but with pictures. Merlin's Nintendo sticker album from 1992 was a big hit with collectors, holding 274 stickers with motifs from popular Nintendo NES and Game Boy games. Among them were Super Mario Land and Mario Tennis on the Game Boy, and The Legend of Zelda on the NES. 274 stickers and only two sweaty thumbs to place them. Anyone who filled one of these knows the ritual: the swaps in the schoolyard, the pile of doubles, the one sticker that never once turned up. Today the album is a coveted collector's item and one of the more colourful publications in the collection, a licensed slice of playground history to round off a very papery story. From an official Japanese gamebook to a German sticker album, the Game Boy's paper trail crosses continents and formats, and all of it was set in motion by one small handheld. You can browse these publications and hundreds of other catalogued pieces at the Game Boy Museum. Bring a magnifying glass for the small print, and perhaps a spare sticker or two. The Full Series Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books · Part 2: Player's Guides and Strategy Books · Part 3: Catalogues and Club Nintendo · Part 4: Fan Magazines and Sticker Albums (you are here) · Part 5: The Books That Made the Game Boy History

Before an algorithm decided what you would play next, Nintendo mailed the future straight to your door. In the years around the Game Boy's launch, the way you discovered what was coming to that little grey handheld was almost always on paper: a glossy fold-out tucked into a box, a club magazine dropped through the letterbox, a price list pinned behind the shop counter. These modest printed pages turn out to be some of the most honest records we have of how the Game Boy was really sold. Country by country, they show exactly which games Nintendo wanted in your hands, and precisely how it wanted you to feel about them. The catalogue habit From the very beginning, Nintendo treated the printed catalogue as a core marketing tool. The trail starts in Japan with the Game Boy Launch Catalogue of 1989, the company's official launch-era booklet presenting the brand-new console, its accessories and its earliest software for the 1989 fiscal year. It appeared just after the Game Boy went on sale in Japan in April 1989, and one small detail gives the game away: it is marked by fiscal year, a sign that Nintendo already planned to publish a fresh catalogue every year. This was not a one-off flyer. It was the opening chapter of a habit. Before the algorithm: this is how you found out what to play next. That habit is exactly why these catalogues matter today. Each one is a primary source, a time capsule that captures which titles Nintendo was pushing in a given year and how it chose to present them. Read them in sequence and you can watch the Game Boy library grow, watch the marketing language evolve, and watch the same console being reintroduced again and again to new audiences in new countries. One console, four languages As the Game Boy conquered Europe, the catalogue habit travelled with it, and Nintendo simply reprinted its pitch in every local language. Germany got its first dedicated booklet with the Nintendo Game Boy Catalogue 1991, the opening entry in a long run of yearly German catalogues. Britain had the Nintendo Game Catalogue 1992, an official UK edition showing the latest games across Nintendo's systems, followed by the combined Nintendo Game Catalogue 1993-1994 that covered two years in a single volume. France ran on the same rhythm. The Nintendo Game Catalogue 1991-1992 gathered two years of French releases into one booklet, and the Nintendo Game Catalogue 1994 carried the tradition forward mid-decade. Line these European editions up beside the Japanese original and the strategy is obvious: one console, one carefully controlled message, translated and re-skinned for each market but always steering the reader toward Nintendo's own hardware and first-party stars. The German News years In Germany the catalogue eventually grew a personality of its own. The 1994 edition arrived under the cheerfully loud banner of Nintendo Game Boy Wow! Big News, trading the plain product-list look for something closer to a mini-magazine. From there the German line settled into an almost newspaper-like format: the Nintendo Game Boy News 1995/1996 and the standalone Nintendo Game Boy News 1996 kept members up to date on the latest games and hardware as the handheld matured. The run closes on a quietly historic note. The Nintendo Game Boy News 1996/1997 is the last German catalogue to feature original Game Boy (DMG-01) content before the line wound down, making it a kind of full stop on the Game Boy Classic era in print. Held together, these German booklets trace the whole later life of the console, from a breathless 'Wow!' to a graceful farewell. Nintendo Power, the American megaphone Catalogues told you what existed. Magazines told you why you should care, and nobody did that louder than Nintendo of America. The Nintendo Power magazine of September/October 1989 used its pages to introduce club members to the newly launched Game Boy, along with its games and accessories. The handheld, designed by Nintendo's Gunpei Yokoi, had reached the United States that July, so this issue effectively captures the American launch moment as it happened. It is one of the earliest publications in the whole collection, and it shows Nintendo Power doing what it did best: turning a product announcement into an event. Nintendo's greatest hits, printed on paper and posted to your door. For a young reader in 1989, a magazine like this was often the very first place the Game Boy felt real: not a rumour or a shop-window curiosity, but a machine with a name, a designer and a lineup you could already start dreaming about. That is the quiet power of the in-house magazine. It does not just list the games, it makes you a fan of them before you have played a single one. Club Nintendo and the members' welcome Europe had its own version of that insider glow, and it was called Club Nintendo. When the Game Boy reached Europe in 1990, Nintendo Germany greeted its members with a Club Nintendo Special Edition, an entire issue built to introduce the console, its games and the available hardware to the club faithful. The Game Boy had launched in Japan in April 1989 and in the US that July before arriving in Europe, so this issue marks the moment the handheld finally landed for German members. It sits at the same point in the story as Nintendo Power's launch issue, only speaking German and aimed at a community that had signed up specifically to hear from Nintendo first. Club Nintendo: the membership card to Game Boy fandom. France got the same treatment in its own accent. The Club Nintendo Magazine 1990/02 devoted a full section to introducing the Game Boy, its games and its accessories to French fans around the European launch, making it the direct counterpart to the German special edition. Between them, these club magazines show the other half of Nintendo's paper strategy: not just selling to shoppers, but rewarding members, building loyalty and making everyone who opened the envelope feel like they were on the inside. Club Nintendo in France - Game Boy Debut Following the trail Taken together, this paper trail is a marketing map of the Game Boy's world tour. From a fiscal-year booklet in Tokyo to a Wow! Big News fold-out in Germany, from Nintendo Power in America to Club Nintendo in France, the same little grey machine was introduced over and over, each time tailored to a new audience yet always singing from Nintendo's own songbook. You can browse every one of these catalogues and magazines, page by page, over at the Game Boy Museum. Come and follow the paper trail for yourself. The Full Series Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books · Part 2: Player's Guides and Strategy Books · Part 3: Catalogues and Club Nintendo (you are here) · Part 4: Fan Magazines and Sticker Albums · Part 5: The Books That Made the Game Boy History

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

GameBoy Comics System Series - First Print vs. Reprint Every console leaves a paper trail. Boxes and manuals, warranty slips and magazine spreads, the printed odds and ends that tend to outlive the machine itself. Usually that trail is practical stuff. But every so often it wanders somewhere unexpected, and for the Game Boy it wandered right onto a comic-shop rack. In 1990, while children across the world were still tilting their grey bricks toward the nearest lamp to catch the light, Valiant Comics handed the handheld its very own comic book. Four of them, in fact. The series was simply, proudly called Game Boy. These issues live on the museum's Publications shelf rather than in the hardware cabinet, and that is precisely where the pleasure of collecting them begins. Four issues, each printed twice, carrying the same adventures in more than one language. It is a small, self-contained corner of Game Boy history, and following it from cover to cover is exactly the kind of journey this series is about. So let us follow the paper trail. A licence in four colours The Game Boy comics were published by Valiant Comics as a licensed adaptation of Nintendo's games, and they appeared in both English and French. That bilingual detail is worth dwelling on for a moment. This was not a fan project or an unofficial cash-in, but an authorised piece of Nintendo merchandising, part of the wider Nintendo Comics System line that spun the company's game worlds into newsprint adventures. Where the cartridges gave you the games to play, the comics gave you the same universe to read, in colour, at your own pace, with no batteries required. The Game Boy's origin story, printed on paper instead of pressed into plastic. The run was capped at exactly four issues. No more, no less. That tidy little number is part of the charm for anyone who collects them: this is a finite series with a clear beginning and a clear end, the sort of thing you can genuinely complete rather than chase forever. Finish the fourth issue and you have finished the story. Where the comics sit in the collection In our catalogue the Game Boy comics are filed under Publications, the same broad family as the strategy guides, the magazines and the other printed matter that grew up around the console. It is an easy shelf to overlook. The hardware gets the glass case and the spotlight, while the paper gets a folder. Yet these fragile, colourful things are often the hardest survivors of all. A plastic shell can take a knock and shrug it off, but a thirty-five-year-old comic that has been read, folded, carried around and loved is a small miracle every time one turns up in good shape. That fragility is a big part of why edition and condition matter so much here. The four-issue run The trail opens with Game Boy #1 in its 1990 first print, the issue that introduced the licence to the comic racks. From there the story carries on through Game Boy #2 and Game Boy #3, both first printed in 1990, before arriving at Game Boy #4, the fourth issue and the last of the run. Four covers, one continuous story, and then the presses fell quiet. There is something appealing about a series that knows exactly how long it wants to be. Plenty of licensed comics sprawl on for years, but the Game Boy run says its piece in four issues and bows out. For a collector that means the finish line is always in sight. Track down all four first prints and the original 1990 series is complete, sitting in order on the shelf like the four chapters of a very short, very colourful novel. First print or reprint? Here is where collectors lean in a little closer. Every one of the four issues was reprinted in 1991, and in the museum both editions are catalogued side by side. The reprints arrived in neat monthly succession: issue #1 in February 1991, issue #2 in March 1991, issue #3 in April 1991, and issue #4 in May 1991. Same stories, same covers, roughly a year after the originals. To a casual eye a first print and a reprint can look all but identical on the rack, which is exactly why the distinction matters so much to the people who care about these things. In the museum's cataloguing the two editions even carry different product codes: the 1990 first prints are grouped under 1049-1473, while the 1991 reprints share 1049-149X. First prints tend to be the ones enthusiasts prize, being the original pressings, but a thorough collector often wants both editions of all four issues. That quietly turns a set of four comics into a set of eight, the whole paper trail laid end to end. And a reprint, in its quiet way, is a kind of compliment. Publishers generally bring an issue back around because the first run found its readers, and the fact that all four Game Boy comics returned within months of the originals hints that the little handheld's fans were showing up at the comic shop as faithfully as they showed up at the toy aisle. The Game Boy was a phenomenon on the screen, and it is rather lovely to think that some of its owners wanted its story on paper too. Whether you hunt only the 1990 first prints or chase the complete set of eight, the Game Boy comics are a happy reminder that a handheld's story was never told on its screen alone. It spilled out onto paper too, in two languages and two printings, and it has been waiting patiently on the comic-shop shelf ever since. You can browse the whole four-issue run, first prints and reprints together, over at the Game Boy Museum. The Full Series Part 1: The Game Boy Comic Books (you are here) · Part 2: Player's Guides and Strategy Books · Part 3: Catalogues and Club Nintendo · Part 4: Fan Magazines and Sticker Albums · Part 5: The Books That Made the Game Boy History

Welcome back to The Game Boy's Hidden Powers. In the first part we looked at how a plain grey handheld, built for nothing grander than playing games, kept quietly reinventing itself into something more. This time the theme is the senses. We are going to give the Game Boy eyes, and then we are going to give it ears. The trick lives in the cartridge slot. From the outside, the Game Boy is sealed and stubbornly simple. There is no camera, no microphone and no sensor of any kind on the machine itself. So how did it ever take a photograph or listen to the bottom of a lake? The answer is that a Game Boy cartridge does not have to be a game at all. It can be a piece of hardware in its own right, and that little slot on the back is really a doorway. More than a game on a chip Most cartridges simply held a game on a chip. But because the slot fed power and data straight into the console, some carts could carry extra hardware too: rumble motors, tilt sensors, even little clocks that kept ticking after the power went off. The camera and the sonar took that idea to its logical extreme. Each packed a real sensor into the cartridge and let the Game Boy supply the rest: the screen, the brain and the batteries. It was a clever, thrifty way to build a gadget. Rather than design a whole new device, you could piggyback on the millions of handhelds already sitting in people's pockets. Eyes: the Game Boy Camera In 1998 Nintendo released the Game Boy Camera, a chunky cartridge with a golf-ball-shaped bulge poking out of the top. That bulge holds the lens. The camera takes greyscale photos in the Game Boy's famous four shades of grey, at a resolution of roughly 128 by 112 pixels. That is tiny by any standard, yet at launch it was small enough to earn a place in the Guinness World Records as the world's smallest digital camera. That little ball is the lens. Yes, it spins right around so you can point it at your own face. The best detail is that the lens ball rotates. Give it a twist and it swings a full 180 degrees to face back at you, so you could hold the Game Boy at arm's length and snap your own portrait. This was the selfie, arriving years before the word existed and long before any phone carried a front-facing camera. For a machine most people thought of purely as a toy, that was a quietly forward-thinking touch. Each shot was saved onto the cartridge itself, around thirty at a time, and you could fuss over them in the camera's own software with stamps, frames and a handful of hidden mini-games. Better still, you could feed your pictures to the Game Boy Printer and watch them emerge as tiny stickers on a roll of thermal paper. Photos could also be carried across to compatible software such as Mario Artist on later Nintendo hardware, giving those humble greyscale snaps a second life. Four shades of grey, thirty photos, and an afternoon that vanished before you noticed. Japan met this gadget first, and under a different name. There it was the Pocket Camera, released the same year. Same swivelling eye, same four greys, just an earlier label for the machine the rest of the world would come to know as the Game Boy Camera. Ears: the Bandai Pocket Sonar If the camera is the charming one, the Bandai Pocket Sonar is the eccentric genius of the family. Released in Japan in 1998 and officially licensed by Nintendo, it is a real, working fish finder that slots into the back of a Game Boy. Yes, a genuine piece of angling equipment, driven by a handheld games console. Somewhere between a toy and a tackle box: the Game Boy that goes looking for fish. Here is how it works. The chunky, battery-powered cartridge has a sensor on the end of a long cable, kept afloat by a small float so you can drop it over the side of a boat or a jetty. The sensor sends ultrasonic pulses down into the water and listens for the echoes bouncing back. From those echoes the software draws a picture on the Game Boy screen: the depth of the water and any fish lurking in it. Bandai even included a dry bag to keep the handheld safe from splashes while you fished. It was not all business, though. The software added a fish database to help you identify your catch, plus a fishing mini-game to pass the time when nothing was biting. Guinness World Records recognised the Pocket Sonar as the first sonar-enabled peripheral for a games console, which is exactly the kind of record you would expect it to hold. It works with the original Game Boy and the Game Boy Pocket, but not with the later models that followed. Senses on a cartridge A camera and a fish finder look nothing alike, but they share one lovely idea. Each treated the Game Boy as a body waiting for senses, a screen and a brain that only needed the right attachment to see or to hear. Eyes and ears, delivered on a cartridge. It is a neat reminder that console was always far too small a word for this little grey machine. There are plenty more of these quiet talents waiting in the collection. Come and explore the whole cabinet of curiosities at gameboymuseum.com, and stay tuned for the next chapter of Hidden Powers. The Full Series Part 1: A Sense of Movement · Part 2: Eyes and Ears (you are here) · Part 3: Talking Cartridges · Part 4: A Bigger Memory · Part 5: Cheat Modules · Part 6: Making Music · Part 7: Getting to Work · Part 8: Every Game at Once

Collecting the Game Boy is mostly a wholesome hobby. You chase boxes, compare shades of grey plastic and swap stories about the games that shaped a childhood. Spend long enough on the shelves, though, and you reach an edge that is harder to label. It is the place where preservation, piracy and a lively homebrew scene all meet on the same little cartridge. This series is about that edge, told honestly, with a lot of curiosity and without a how-to for anything that would land you in trouble. The truth is that the Game Boy never really stopped. Long after Nintendo moved on to newer machines, hobbyists kept dumping cartridges, backing up their saves, modding the hardware and even manufacturing brand-new games for it. Some of that work is pure preservation, the digital equivalent of keeping an old book from crumbling. Some of it sits squarely in the grey market. And a surprising amount of it is fresh creativity, made by people who simply love the platform too much to let it go quiet. Where you draw the line between those three is a personal question, and a fair one. Our goal here is not to tell you what to think, but to show you the objects, explain how they work and be clear about which side of the law they sit on. The chapters below walk through each face of that story, one shelf at a time. Flashcarts and the grey market One cartridge to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them. The flagship chapter looks at the cartridges that can hold a whole library at once, from the respected krikzz EverDrive to the classic 100-in-1 pirate cards that turn up at every flea market. Read it in Bootlegs and Flashcarts, Part 1: Every Game on One Cartridge, where we walk the museum's shelf of flash carts and bootlegs and stay honest about the exact point where preservation ends and piracy begins. The do-it-yourself Game Boy The honest little brick meets its more mischievous cousins. Some collectors do not just play the Game Boy, they take it apart and build it into something new. Bootlegs and Flashcarts, Part 2: The Do-It-Yourself Game Boy visits a screen-capturing GBinterceptor, a Raspberry Pi powered Zeroboy and a tidy USB-C power mod. It is a short tour of the hobbyist maker culture that keeps rewiring the machine, decades after the last one left the factory. New games for an old machine New games for an old console More than thirty-five years on, small studios are still designing and pressing brand-new physical cartridges for the console. Bootlegs and Flashcarts, Part 3: New Games for an Old Machine meets three of them, from Greenboy Games, Incube8 and Broke Studio, and asks what it means that the grey brick is still a living platform with a release calendar of its own. EverDrive and the flash cartridges in the collection Every game ever made, plus a few that never officially existed. For a closer look at the hardware that makes all of this possible, EverDrive and Beyond: The Game Boy Flash Cartridges in the Collection tours the flash cartridges and backup devices on the museum's shelves. It runs from the SD-card EverDrive down to the grey-market multicarts and the Flash Boy dumper, and explains how one rewritable chip quietly rewired the way people play. Clones, multicarts and the grey market abroad The grey market was never only a Western curiosity. The Game Boy in Asia: Clones, Multicarts and the Grey Market follows the console through China's console ban, clone handhelds and hundreds-in-one multicarts across a region where millions met the Game Boy through the back door rather than a Nintendo shelf. None of this is an invitation to cut corners or to download what you have not paid for. It is an invitation to understand the whole Game Boy, the licensed and the unlicensed alike, and to respect the community that refuses to let it fade. If that mix of careful history and cheerful mischief appeals to you, come and browse the rest of the collection at gameboymuseum.com.

The world tour ends where the museum begins: Switzerland Every article in this series has followed the Game Boy somewhere far away. It has crossed deserts and megacities, dodged tariffs and grey markets, and turned up in suitcases on the far side of the world. This one is different, because it comes home. Switzerland is where the Game Boy Museum lives, and the little grey machine has a quieter, more particular story here than almost anywhere we have visited. A Small Market, Handled Locally Switzerland was never big enough for Nintendo to run itself. For decades the company reached Swiss players through a partner, the Swiss firm Waldmeier AG, one of Nintendo's oldest business relationships anywhere in Europe. Through the whole life of the original Game Boy and long after, it was Waldmeier, not a Nintendo office, that brought the consoles, cartridges and accessories to Swiss shelves. Only in April 2013, decades into the story, did Nintendo of Europe finally take the Swiss business in-house and open its own branch. That single fact shapes everything. A market served by a local distributor is a market that receives rather than defines: Switzerland got the hardware Europe was already making, in the packaging Europe already used, adapted just enough for a small, wealthy, and unusually complicated country. Four Languages, Several Boxes The complication is language. Switzerland speaks German, French, Italian and Romansh, and that turns even a simple boxed Game Boy into a small puzzle. Rather than print a unique Swiss edition, Swiss shops typically stocked the boxes that already existed next door: German-language packaging from the German market, French-language packaging from the French market, side by side on the same shelf. A child in Zurich and a child in Geneva might own the identical console in two entirely different boxes. Because Switzerland sits in the middle of Europe with open borders on every side, a lot of hardware also simply walked in. It was easy, and often cheaper, to buy a Game Boy or a game in Germany, France or Italy and carry it home, so Swiss collections tend to be a genuine mix of neighbouring markets rather than one clean national style. For a collector this is oddly charming: a Swiss shelf is a small map of Europe, and it belongs to the wider world of Game Boy regional variants. A Living Retro Scene If Switzerland's Game Boy past is modest, its Game Boy present is anything but. The country has grown a lively retro-gaming culture, with dedicated spaces where the machine can still be played rather than just displayed. In Lucerne, Gamorama lets visitors play across the whole breadth of gaming history, in Zurich the Game Plaza does the same, and in Lausanne the Musee Bolo preserves the wider history of computing that the Game Boy grew out of. Between them they keep the hands-on, social side of the hobby alive right across the country's language regions. Coming Home There is a reason this article closes the world tour rather than opening it. The Game Boy Museum is itself a Swiss project, run from here out of pure enthusiasm, and everything you have read across this series, from Japan to Brazil to Africa, was documented from Switzerland. In that sense the whole journey has always been Swiss, told from a quiet corner of the Alps by someone who simply refused to let the grey brick and its world be forgotten. So the Game Boy's Swiss story is not a tale of huge sales or famous local editions. It is a story of a small, multilingual, border-crossing country that received the console rather than shaped it, and then, decades later, became the place where its history is being carefully gathered and preserved. Every other stop on this tour was a country the Game Boy travelled to. This one is where it came to rest. You can explore the whole collection, and the rest of the world it came from, at the Game Boy Museum. This article is part of our series on the Game Boy around the world.

Walk into any serious video-game collection today and you will spot them: cartridges and boxes sealed inside clear, hard plastic cases, each stamped with a certificate and a number. To a newcomer it can look a little strange, almost like putting a comic book behind museum glass. Yet those numbers carry a whole vocabulary, and once you learn to read it, a graded game tells you a surprising amount about the object inside. This entry in The Collector's Handbook is a plain-language guide to how video-game grading works. It is educational and nothing more. We will not tell you what to buy, and we will not predict what anything is worth, because the market moves and grading always involves a degree of human judgement. The goal here is simply to help you read the label. Why grade a game Grading is the process of having an independent company inspect a game, judge its condition against a published standard, and seal it in a protective case. That case is usually called a slab: a tamper-evident, UV-resistant acrylic shell that protects the item and displays a printed label with the assigned grade. Once a game is slabbed, opening it breaks the certification, so from that point on the grade and the object travel together. Collectors value this for a few reasons. A consistent grade gives two strangers a shared language for condition, which makes buying and selling far less of a guessing game. The sealed case also preserves fragile paper and plastic that would otherwise wear with every handling. Grading of this kind is still fairly young. The first dedicated company appeared around 2008, and interest grew sharply from 2018 onward, borrowing much of its visual style from the older world of comic-book grading. There is also a documentary value to it. Every slab carries a unique certification number, and the grading company logs the item, so a graded game becomes a small recorded artefact rather than an anonymous copy. For a museum that quiet record-keeping is genuinely useful, because it ties an object to a date, a standard and an independent opinion. The companies: WATA, CGC, VGA Three names come up most often. WATA Games, founded in 2018, helped popularise the modern format and is widely associated with the headline auction sales that pulled grading into the mainstream. CGC, the Certified Guaranty Company, is a long-established grader of comics and other collectibles that extended its work to video games. VGA, the Video Game Authority, is the oldest of the three and is respected among long-term collectors for keeping its standards consistent over many years. Their scales are not identical, which is worth knowing before you compare two slabs side by side. WATA and CGC both use a ten-point numeric scale, where a grade such as 9.0 sits high on that range without being a perfect 10. VGA has traditionally used a different scale, so a VGA number and a WATA number are not directly interchangeable. Each company also keeps its detailed methodology partly in-house, and none of them claims that grading is a pure science. Choosing between them is less about which is best and more about what a collector values. Some prioritise the name recognition of the market leader, others the long consistency of an older grader. Turnaround times, fees and even the look of the case all differ, and preferences shift as the field matures. For our purposes the important point is simpler: a grade only means something once you know which company issued it and on what scale. Reading the label Most graded games fall into one of three broad categories, and the label reflects which one you are looking at. A sealed game is still in its original factory shrink-wrap and has never been opened. A complete-in-box game, often shortened to CIB, has been opened but still has its box, manual and inserts. A loose game is the cartridge or disc on its own, without the packaging. Sealed games carry an extra piece of information: a separate seal rating. Because the wrap itself can be original, resealed or damaged, graders assess it on its own scale, commonly running from lower letters up to marks like A++ for a near-perfect original seal. So a sealed title can show two things at once: a numeric grade for the box and contents, and a letter grade for the seal. Reading both together tells you more than either mark alone. Beyond the category and the grade, a label also records the basics: the game's title, the platform it ran on, and that unique certification number. It is designed to be read at a glance and verified in detail, which is exactly what you want from a small paper record sealed next to the object it describes. The museum's graded pieces The museum keeps a small number of graded pieces, and they make useful, real examples. One is a complete-in-box copy of Super Mario Land, graded CGC 9.0. The 9.0 places it high on CGC's ten-point scale, with the box at 9.0, the cartridge at 9.8 and the manual at 8.0, which is a neat illustration of how a single overall grade can sit on top of several component grades. The slab lets us display the game while keeping the original box and cartridge protected. Another is the InfoGenius Personal Organizer, graded by WATA. It is a good reminder that grading is not only for famous games. This was a productivity accessory for the Game Boy rather than a blockbuster title, yet it sits in a WATA slab all the same. Together the two pieces show the same idea from two angles: an independent grade and a sealed case, applied to very different objects. The case for and against Grading has clear benefits. It protects delicate items, it creates a shared standard that strangers can trust, and it makes an object's condition and provenance easier to document. For a collection meant to be preserved and shown rather than played, those are real advantages. It also has honest limits. Grading is partly subjective: two experienced graders can look at the same box and land a fraction apart, and published standards can shift over time. The market for graded games has been volatile as well, with prices rising and falling in ways that nobody reliably predicts. None of this is financial advice, and nothing here should be read as a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything. A grade describes condition. It does not promise value. That is the short version of what a grade really means: a careful, independent read of condition, sealed alongside the object so the two can never drift apart. If you would like to see how these pieces sit next to the rest of the collection, you are always welcome to explore the Game Boy Museum. We are always glad to share what we have learned along the way. The Full Series Part 1: What a Grade Really Means (you are here) · Part 2: Storing and Preserving Your Game Boys · Part 3: Cleaning a Game Boy Without Ruining It

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.

In Part 1 we drew a start-screen picture and a small font. A picture, though, is not yet a title screen. A real one appears the moment the console boots, sits there looking inviting, and waits for the player to decide when to begin. In this part we bring the design to life: the game will show our SNAKE screen on start-up and hold there until START is pressed. As before, we will read every line together, so no coding background is needed. Painting the Title Screen Drawing the title screen is just placing tiles, using the draw_text helper from Part 1 for the words and the plain body tile for a little coiled snake. Painting the Home Screen for the snake like game We gather it all into one reusable instruction we can call whenever we want to show the title: void title_screen(void) { clear_screen(); draw_text(7, 5, "SNAKE"); // a small coiled snake, drawn from body tiles set_bkg_tile_xy(7, 8, T_BODY); set_bkg_tile_xy(8, 8, T_BODY); set_bkg_tile_xy(9, 8, T_BODY); set_bkg_tile_xy(9, 7, T_BODY); set_bkg_tile_xy(12, 8, T_FOOD); draw_text(4, 12, "PRESS START"); } Let us read it from the top. The screen is a grid twenty columns wide and eighteen rows tall, and we count from the top-left corner, so a position is written as (column, row). clear_screen() first wipes the display to a blank field so nothing old is left behind. draw_text(7, 5, "SNAKE") writes the word SNAKE starting at column 7, row 5, using the font we made in Part 1. The four set_bkg_tile_xy lines that follow each drop a single snake-body tile at one named square, and by choosing squares that sit next to each other we draw a little coiled snake by hand, one segment at a time. The next line places one food tile beside it. Finally, draw_text(4, 12, "PRESS START") writes the prompt lower down the screen. Nothing here is clever; the whole function is simply a list of what goes where. Waiting for the Player Now the game shows the title and simply waits. There is also a neat trick hidden in these few lines that gives us randomness for free: title_screen(); seed = 0; waitpad(J_START); // hold here until START is pressed while (joypad() & J_START) seed++; // count while the button is held initrand(seed); // seed the randomness waitpadup(); // wait for release, then begin Here is what each line is doing. title_screen() paints the screen we just built. seed = 0 sets a counter to zero, ready to use in a moment. waitpad(J_START) is the important one: it freezes the whole game on the title screen until the player presses START, so nothing moves until they are ready. The next line, while (joypad() & J_START) seed++, then runs over and over for as long as START is still held down, adding one to seed each time, so seed ends up holding roughly how long the button was pressed. We hand that number to initrand(seed), which uses it to decide where food will appear; because every player holds the button for a slightly different moment, every game gets a different pattern of food. Lastly, waitpadup() waits for the player to actually let go of START before the snake springs to life, so a long press does not accidentally carry over into the game. A Game That Greets You Build the ROM now and the difference in feel is out of all proportion to the few lines we added. Instead of dropping you straight into a moving snake, the game opens with a calm, confident title screen and lets you begin in your own time. It is a small courtesy that instantly makes the project feel finished rather than experimental, and it gives us a home to return to whenever a game ends. Coming Up in Part 3 Our game looks inviting, but it still does not tell you how well you are doing. In Part 3 we add a score: a counter that starts at zero, climbs with every piece of food the snake eats, and is drawn live at the top of the screen using the font we designed in Part 1. The console this all runs on is documented, with photographs, in the collection. The Level Up Series Part 1: Drawing Graphics the Game Boy Way · Part 2: A Title Screen for Your Snake (you are here) · Part 3: Keeping Score · Part 4: Three Lives · Part 5: A Proper Game Over · Part 6: Sound and Pause