Behind the GB Museum
ABOUT THE COLLECTOR
 | I’m Marcel, the collector and curator behind the Game Boy Museum in Zurich, Switzerland. What began as a childhood fascination has stayed with me for more than 25 years. The Game Boy has accompanied me through very different stages of life, while the collection has grown slowly and deliberately along the way. For me, the museum is the natural continuation of that journey: a way to share what I have collected, learned and discovered with others who are equally curious about this extraordinary little machine. |
Most of my friends wanted the newest games. I wanted new functions.
IT STARTED WITH CURIOSITY
My fascination with the Game Boy began in childhood.
While my friends were chasing whatever game was hottest that season, trading cartridges in the schoolyard and comparing high scores, my curiosity sat one layer deeper.
I was less interested in what the Game Boy could already do and more interested in what it could be made to do. And the answers became increasingly strange.
The Barcode Boy gave it the ability to scan barcodes from cards and everyday products. Bandai's Pocket Sonar transformed it into an actual fish finder. GB KISS used infrared-enabled cartridges to exchange data without a cable. Other devices connected the Game Boy to cameras, printers, computers and technologies that seemed to have very little to do with playing Tetris.
This little grey machine was not finished yet.
Someone, somewhere, had found another function to give it.
That is where the collecting really began for me. Not with the games, but with everything built around them.
A MACHINE THAT DEFINED A WHOLE GENERATION
The Game Boy was not the first handheld gaming device, nor was it the most powerful one of its time.
What it achieved was more important: it helped turn portable video gaming into a global mass-market phenomenon.
It travelled in school bags, cars and suitcases. It went to the back seat, the top bunk, the waiting room and on holiday. It did not need a television or a permanent place in the living room. It was personal, portable and instantly recognisable.
Its grey shell, green screen, red buttons and unmistakable shape became part of growing up for an entire generation.
It is more than hardware. It is a cultural object and a symbol of a generation.
And its history cannot be told through Super Mario, Tetris, Zelda and Pokémon alone.
WHY THE WHOLE ECOSYSTEM?
A console on its own tells only part of the story.
The Game Boy Museum is a private, non-commercial preservation project dedicated to the ecosystem surrounding the original Nintendo Game Boy DMG-01: consoles, accessories, peripherals, system extensions, packaging, manuals, publications, merchandise and the many third-party companies that built alongside Nintendo.
Games form part of that archive too, particularly where they help explain the history, technology or culture surrounding the system.
But my fascination has always been with the wider ecosystem.
Nintendo created the platform. Licensed manufacturers, independent companies, developers and inventors kept asking what else they could do with it.
Some products solved genuine problems. Others gave the Game Boy entirely new functions. Some were ingenious, some eccentric, and some wonderfully unnecessary.
Together they show how one remarkably simple machine became a platform for experimentation.
Preserving What Usually Disappears First
The surrounding ecosystem is also the part of history that disappears most easily.
Boxes get thrown away. Leaflets are lost. Cables disappear into drawers. Third-party accessories become obsolete. Products nobody considered important at the time can become almost impossible to document decades later.
That is why original packaging plays such an important role in the collection.
A loose accessory can show us what an object did.
Its packaging can tell us why it existed.
Who made it? Where was it sold? How was it marketed? What other products surrounded it? How did its manufacturer expect people to use it?
Once that context disappears, part of the story disappears with it.
Today the museum brings together more than 350 systematically catalogued objects, with a strong focus on original packaging, complete-in-box examples and the breadth of the DMG-01 ecosystem.
The aim is not to own as much Game Boy material as possible.
It is to preserve enough of the ecosystem that the full picture survives.
THE STORY IS STILL BEING WRITTEN
Preserving the Game Boy does not mean drawing a line under its history.
Quite the opposite.
New Games
More than three decades after its launch, an active and growing indie scene is creating entirely new games for Game Boy hardware.
Developers deliberately work within the limitations of a machine designed in the 1980s and continue to discover how much more can be extracted from it.
Many releases go beyond downloadable ROMs. New titles are once again appearing as physical cartridges, sometimes complete with professionally produced boxes, manuals and collector editions.
A platform whose commercial life ended decades ago has developed a new creative life.
That belongs in the museum.
Not because every new game needs to be collected, but because the phenomenon itself tells us something important about the continuing cultural life of the Game Boy.
New Functions
Games are only one part of that continuing story.
The same urge to discover what else the Game Boy can become is still alive.
nanoloop turned the Game Boy into a portable sequencer and synthesizer.
ArduinoBoy allows MIDI equipment to communicate with the Game Boy and music applications running on it.
Projects such as ZeroBOY reinterpret the familiar Game Boy form using modern electronics. Others add new displays, rechargeable power systems, USB connectivity, video capture or entirely new circuit boards.
The GBInterceptor, for example, connects an unmodified Game Boy to a modern computer and captures gameplay over USB.
The technology changes.
The question does not.
What else could this thing do?
The experimentation that fascinated me as a child never really stopped.
It simply passed from one generation of inventors to another.
New Cultural Life
There is also another kind of afterlife.
The Game Boy has become recognisable far beyond retro gaming.
Companies increasingly return to its shape, design and cultural associations because they mean something to the generation that grew up with it.
The LEGO Game Boy is a perfect example. It does not need to function as a video game console to be recognisable.
The object itself has become the message.
Its shape, buttons and proportions are enough to evoke memories of a particular period of childhood, technology and popular culture.
The Game Boy is no longer simply an old piece of consumer electronics.
It has become part of the visual language of a generation.
A museum of the Game Boy should not only preserve what the ecosystem was. It should document what people are still turning it into, and what the Game Boy itself has come to represent.
PLAYING AND PRESERVING
There are different ways to preserve video game history.
The Game Boy Museum represents the quieter, archival side.
Most objects here are preserved rather than regularly played with. Many have survived for decades together with their boxes, manuals, inserts and accessories.
A digital museum allows them to be photographed, catalogued, compared and placed into historical context while the originals remain protected.
But a video game was created to be played. The sound of an arcade, the feel of a controller and the shared experience around a screen are part of gaming history too.
I explained this distinction in the Journal after visiting GamePlaza, Zurich's interactive video game museum (Article: Game Plaza - Where the Games Are Switched On)
There, the machines run and the controllers stay warm. That is preservation through play.
Here, the focus is on preserving the surviving artefacts and their context.
Complementary, not competing. One preserves the experience. The other preserves the evidence.
Together, they tell a fuller story than either approach could alone.
Zurich, happily, now has both.
PRESERVATION WORKS BETTER TOGETHER
Although the Game Boy Museum is a private project, it is not meant to exist in isolation.
I welcome cooperation with museums, exhibitions, collectors, researchers, developers, indie studios, makers and anyone seriously interested in preserving video game history.
That might mean lending an object for an exhibition, documenting an unusual item together, exchanging historical information, meeting the people still producing Game Boy hardware and software today, contributing to an article or helping identify something that has not yet been properly recorded.
No single collection can preserve an entire culture. We can preserve much more when we connect what we know.
Have something that belongs to the story? Get in touch.
HELD IN TRUST
The collection has grown over more than 25 years, but I increasingly think of it less as ownership and more as custodianship.
The objects existed before they entered my collection.
With care, they can survive long after me and eventually pass to another custodian who will protect them and carry the story forward.
Until then, this website is my way of sharing them.
A collection like this is only ever held in trust for a time.
An open digital museum dedicated to the machine a generation grew up with, the extraordinary ecosystem that developed around it, and the people who continue to give it new life.
STILL CURIOUS
After all these years, what keeps me interested is remarkably close to what fascinated me as a child.
I can still discover an accessory I have never seen before, an obscure regional package, an ambitious new indie game, an unexpected DIY project or some wonderfully strange peripheral created by someone who looked at Nintendo's little grey box and thought:
What else could this thing do?
More than thirty years later, developers, musicians, makers and designers are still asking exactly the same question.
That question started the collection.
The Game Boy Museum is my attempt to preserve the answers.
Collector & Curator
Zurich, Switzerland
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