The Factory in the French Countryside Pressing New Game Boy Cartridges

Somewhere in the hills of the Auvergne, in rural France, there is a workshop that presses brand-new Game Boy cartridges. Not reproductions of old games, not bootlegs. Genuinely new titles, boxed and shrink-wrapped, for a console the industry stopped making in 2003. The workshop belongs to Broke Studio, and it is quietly one of the reasons the Game Boy still has a future as well as a past.

Antoine Gohin and Julien "Fei" Boisseau of Broke Studio, the French makers behind Homebrew Factory

From One NES Game to a Cartridge Workshop

Broke Studio was founded in 2017 by Antoine Gohin, initially just to release a single game: Twin Dragons, a platformer for the NES. But making a physical cartridge properly turns out to be a craft in itself, and Broke Studio ended up learning all of it - the PCB design, the shells, the boxes, the manuals, the packaging - and doing every step in-house. Along the way the studio has sold more than fifteen thousand physical copies of its games, which is an extraordinary number for a scene most people assume is a handful of hobbyists trading ROMs.

Homebrew made in France - That's Broke Studio

That hard-won expertise is the foundation for the studio's most interesting move, and the reason it belongs in a museum's Journal.

A Factory That Lets Anyone Make a Cartridge

The move is called Homebrew Factory, and it is essentially a printing press for retro games. If you are an independent developer with a finished game for the Game Boy, the NES or the Mega Drive, Homebrew Factory lets you configure your cartridge, set your price, run a pre-order campaign, and go to production - while Broke Studio handles the manufacturing, the stock, the worldwide shipping and the fulfilment. In other words, it removes the single hardest part of releasing a new Game Boy game in 2026: turning the code into a real, physical object you can hold.

Antoine Gohin assembling a game cartridge by hand at Broke Studio

The effect is easy to underestimate. For most of the Game Boy's life, getting your game onto an actual cartridge meant either a licensing deal with Nintendo or a garage full of parts and a lot of soldering. Homebrew Factory turns that into something closer to publishing a book. It is one of the main reasons the flow of new boxed Game Boy games has turned from a trickle into a steady stream - and why makers like Dr. Ludos can put releases such as Dangerous Demolition into proper boxes at all.

The Production Process

It is one thing to say a cartridge is made in-house, and quite another to watch it happen. Broke Studio let me follow one of their Game Boy releases, Lost Treasure of Lima, through the whole process. Five pictures, and at the end of them a brand-new Game Boy game exists that did not exist before.

The finished Lost Treasure of Lima Game Boy cartridge complete in box with manual and insert

Chips being soldered and programmed onto a Lost Treasure of Lima Game Boy cartridge board

A Lost Treasure of Lima circuit board being fitted into a Game Boy cartridge shell

Bare printed circuit boards for the Game Boy game Lost Treasure of Lima at Broke Studio

Applying the printed label to a finished Lost Treasure of Lima Game Boy cartridge

A Gift to the Museum

There is a postscript to this story that I did not see coming. After our conversation, Broke Studio handed a game over to the museum as a gift: a copy of Fortified Zone 2, given for the collection rather than sold. That is a generous thing for a small studio to do with stock it could easily sell instead, and it says something about how this scene treats the people trying to document it. My sincere thanks to Antoine and Fei.

The cartridge is joining the collection, and it earns its place twice over, because there is a genuinely good story behind this particular game, one I am not going to spoil here. If you want the full background, along with all the trivia about how it came to exist, you will find it in the dedicated article about the game itself (coming soon).

Why a Manufacturer Belongs in a Museum of the Object

This is a museum obsessed with the physical object: the box, the insert, the manual, the cartridge as it was actually sold and held. Homebrew Factory is, in a very real sense, where a whole new generation of those objects is being born. The complete-in-box Game Boy releases that collectors will be chasing in 2050 are being pressed today, in a workshop in the French countryside, by people who care about getting the packaging right. You can see how the original article of that faith - the 1989 DMG-01 - was made and sold in our complete DMG-01 guide.

A museum is often imagined as the place a technology goes when it is finished. Broke Studio is a standing rebuttal. It is not preserving the Game Boy so much as keeping its production line open, one small run at a time. Every cartridge that leaves that workshop is a new object for the record, and a small, stubborn insistence that the grey handheld from 1989 is not history yet. That is exactly the kind of thing this museum loves to document, and exactly why the story deserves a place here.