The Game Boy That Went to Space

The Game Boy went almost everywhere: school buses, back gardens, long-haul flights. But one of them went somewhere no games console had ever been before. It left the planet.

In 1993 a Nintendo Game Boy orbited the Earth aboard a space station, and decades later it sold at auction with a story few collectibles can match.

The First Game Boy in Space

The journey began on Soyuz TM-17, which carried Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Serebrov to the Mir space station in 1993. Tucked into his kit was a standard Nintendo Game Boy, complete with a Tetris cartridge. That unassuming grey handheld became the first games console in space, a real Game Boy in space rather than a publicity mock-up.

196 Days in Orbit

The little machine did not just visit, it lived up there. Over the mission it spent 196 days in space and circled the Earth more than three thousand times. In his own note on the device, Serebrov recalled that during flight, in rare minutes of leisure, he enjoyed playing the Game Boy, the very same simple pleasure millions of people on the ground knew so well.

Why Tetris Was the Perfect Choice

There is a lovely symmetry to the cartridge he chose. Tetris was created in the Soviet Union, so a Russian cosmonaut unwinding with it far above the Earth feels almost poetic. The game that helped sell the Game Boy on the ground also kept its pilot company in orbit.

From Orbit to Auction

Years later the space-flown Game Boy came back down to market. It was offered in Bonhams' 2011 Space History sale and sold for around 1,220 dollars, its value resting not on a rare model but on an extraordinary provenance. It remains one of the most remarkable footnotes in the whole Game Boy story.