Every Game Boy Accessory and Peripheral: A Complete Guide
Updated: 6 days ago
No console has a stranger, richer accessory ecosystem than the Game Boy. Because the machine was cheap, hugely popular and endlessly hackable, Nintendo and third parties alike bolted on every idea imaginable, from the genuinely essential to the gloriously absurd. Over its long life the little grey handheld was turned into a television console, a digital camera, a fish finder, a radio and a pocket arcade cabinet. This guide maps that whole world, grouped by what each add-on actually did, with a link to the full story of every one. If you only know the Game Boy as a games machine, prepare to meet the version that scanned barcodes, found fish and played the radio.
The Flagship Nintendo Accessories
A few official add-ons mattered more than all the rest. The biggest was the Super Game Boy, a cartridge-sized adapter that slotted into a Super Nintendo and put the handheld's games on the living-room television, in colour and framed with decorative borders. For many players it was the first time they saw their favourite grey-green games in colour, and some cartridges even carried custom palettes made just for it. Later came a pocket photo studio: the Game Boy Camera and Printer turned the console into a tiny digital camera and a thermal sticker printer, years before phones made that ordinary. For a whole generation the Camera was the first digital camera they ever used, and the Printer spat their blocky portraits out as peel-and-stick labels. Between them they show how far Nintendo was willing to stretch the idea of what a Game Boy could be.
Playing Together
Multiplayer meant hardware, and it was often the making of a game. The humble Link Cable made gaming social, letting two players race at Tetris or trade Pokemon down a single grey wire, and trading was so central to Pokemon that you simply could not complete it alone. The 4-Player Adapter went further, putting four consoles on one game for the handful of titles that supported it, and a small family of rumble and tilt cartridges hid motors and sensors inside the cartridge itself so the games could buzz in your hands or respond as you tilted the console.
Bigger, Louder, Brighter
Others simply amplified the experience, usually to fix one of the Game Boy's famous limitations. Because the screen had no backlight, a whole cottage industry of clip-on lights and magnifiers grew up so you could play in the dark or see the small screen more clearly. The Konami HyperBoy and the wider family of Game Boy arcade cabinets turned the pocket machine into a tabletop arcade, complete with a joystick and a built-in magnifier, while the Sunsoft Sound Boy and Nuby amplifier gave its thin speaker real volume. For developers and show floors there was even the Sunsoft Wide Boy, which blew the tiny screen up onto a full monitor.
Scanners, Sensors and the Truly Odd
Some peripherals abandoned games altogether and turned the Game Boy into something else entirely. Years before amiibo it could read barcodes with the Namco Barcode Boy, scanning printed cards to summon characters, and in 1998 Bandai turned it into a working fish finder with the Pocket Sonar, a real sonar unit built into a cartridge with a sensor you dropped into the water. Others chased the pocket-organizer dream of selling the handheld to grown-ups, from FM radio add-ons to Konami's NanoNote, the Berlitz and Frommer's translator cartridges, and even calculator and clock cartridges that quietly reinvented the machine as a day planner.
Keeping It Running
Four AA batteries gave the Game Boy its legendary endurance, but they were only the beginning. A market of mains adapters, rechargeable battery packs and car adapters grew up to keep it fed on the move, and the collection even holds an inventive solar charger that ran the console on nothing but sunlight. Explore the whole Game Boy power ecosystem for the full range.
Carrying and Protecting It
A machine made to be taken everywhere needed something to carry it in, and the market obliged with every kind of bag, case and hard shell. From the all-in-one Carry-All DLX, which held a console, its games and accessories together in one padded case, to the elusive official Soft Case and the simple Gamester Zip-Bag, carrying gear is a quiet but surprisingly collectable corner of the hobby, and the fragile fabric ones rarely survived in good condition.
Cartridges Beyond Games
The cartridge slot did more than hold games, and some of the strangest hardware of all plugged straight into it. See the Nintendo Power downloadable cartridge, a rewritable cart loaded with games at in-store kiosks long before downloads were normal; the cheat machines behind Game Genie and Action Replay, which rewrote a game's code on the fly; and the modern EverDrive and flash cartridges that load an entire library from an SD card on real hardware today.
Collectible Families
Some accessories are best understood not one at a time but as sets. Discover the keychain Mini Classics, a line of Game Boy-styled miniatures, and the elusive Japanese boxed accessory line, completing which is one of the toughest challenges in all of DMG-01 collecting.
See Them in Person
Every accessory named here is photographed and catalogued in the collection, with its packaging and details.
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