Games That Print: Which Game Boy Printer Titles Still Work on a DMG-01
Updated: 15 hours ago
Plug a Game Boy Printer into an original DMG-01, slot in a random printer game, and there is a real chance that nothing happens at all. The printer arrived in 1998, only months before the Game Boy Color, so most of the games that learned to print did so in the colour era, and a great many of them simply refuse to start on the first grey machine.
This is part three of our series on the Game Boy Printer, and it answers a question owners of the original Game Boy ask more often than you would think: which printer games actually run on a 1989 DMG-01? We went back to the full, hardware-tested list of every printer-compatible game and kept only the titles a grey brick can really use.
A printer that almost missed its own console
The Game Boy Printer, called the Pocket Printer in Japan, reached shops on 21 February 1998 in Japan, 1 June 1998 in the United States and 4 June 1998 in Europe, and was made until around 2003. It is a thermal printer: no ink at all, just heat and chemically treated paper. It runs on six AA batteries, prints only in the Game Boy's shades of grey, and uses 3.8 cm adhesive-backed thermal paper sold in white, red, yellow and blue. Each picture is about 27 by 23 millimetres with its frame, and a roll is good for roughly one hundred to one hundred and eighty of them.
There is one catch unique to the original Game Boy. The printer's cable ends in the small link plug of the Pocket and Color machines, while the DMG-01 has the older, wider socket. To join the two you need a Universal Game Link adapter, the little converter that bridges the old plug and the new one. Without it, a DMG-01 owner never even reaches the question of which games print.
How many printer games a DMG-01 can actually run
In total, 110 games can talk to the Game Boy Printer, a list only fully pinned down and tested on real hardware in 2021, when one very patient enthusiast printed from every single one. Of those 110, exactly 52 are Game Boy Color exclusives on clear cartridges, and those do not boot on a DMG-01 at all. That leaves 58 a grey Game Boy can run: 49 black dual-mode cartridges, built for the Color but backward-compatible with the older model, and 9 that are pure original Game Boy games with no colour features whatsoever. For the record, 72 of the 110 never left Japan.
So a little over half of the printer library works on a DMG-01. The catch is that the famous half and the working half are not the same: several of the best-remembered printer games are precisely the ones a grey Game Boy cannot start.
The DMG-01 printer games at a glance
Here are the printer titles a 1989 grey Game Boy can actually run and print from, sorted by cartridge type and what each one puts on paper. These are the confirmed, well-documented cases; the long tail of obscure Japanese titles below adds dozens more, but this is the core a DMG-01 owner will recognise.
Game | Cartridge | What it prints on a DMG-01 |
Game Boy Camera / Pocket Camera | Grey Game Boy | Your own photos, with several in a row joining into one panorama strip, plus a set of hidden Pokemon stickers |
Pokemon Yellow | Black dual-mode | Pokedex stickers, stored Boxes, a party Pokemon, the Pokedex diploma and the Pikachu's Beach hi-score |
Pokemon Gold | Black dual-mode | Pokedex stickers, Boxes, Pokemon mail and the Unown stamps from the Ruins of Alph |
Pokemon Silver | Black dual-mode | Pokedex stickers, Boxes, Pokemon mail and the Unown stamps from the Ruins of Alph |
Pokemon Trading Card Game | Black dual-mode | A single card, a deck list, or a list of your whole card collection |
Photos first: the Camera the printer was built for
The Game Boy Camera, and its Japanese twin the Pocket Camera, are the entire reason the printer exists. Both are plain grey-cartridge Game Boy games, so they run on any Game Boy right back to the first one, and printing is the whole point of owning them.
The Camera once held a Guinness World Record as the smallest digital camera in the world, and if you print several shots in a row the paper joins them into a single long strip, turning the handheld into a pocket panorama machine.
Pokemon: the printer's best customer
No series used the printer more than Pokemon, and happily its main entries are the backward-compatible black cartridges that a DMG-01 can run. Pokemon Yellow was the first Pokemon game able to print, and in Japan it arrived next to a special yellow, Pikachu-themed edition of the printer itself. It prints Pokedex entries, the contents of a storage box and a diploma for completing the Pokedex.
Gold and Silver, also dual-mode and DMG-compatible, print Pokedex stickers and stored Boxes, along with Pokemon mail and the Unown stamps from the Ruins of Alph, while the Pokemon Trading Card Game, the 1998 video-game version of the card game, prints a single card, a full deck list or your entire collection.
Pokemon printer beside Pokemon Yellow Cart Pokemon Yellow cartridge beside the Game Boy Printer
One correction worth making, because older lists get it wrong: the original Red, Green and Blue, including the Japanese Red and Green that are two years older than the printer, cannot print at all. They simply predate the feature. You can see these cartridges in the collection at the Game Boy Museum.
The long tail: Japan's strange printer catalogue
Most of the printer library is Japanese and genuinely obscure. Among the dual-mode and grey cartridges a DMG-01 can run are hamster-raising sims (the Hamster Club and Hamster Paradise lines), cooking games (the Nakayoshi Cooking series), a shelf of Hello Kitty and Sanrio titles, mahjong, Sylvanian Families, and a run of shameless Pokemon imitators such as the Monster Race games. Printing in them is often buried behind cryptic menus or locked until a full completion, which is half the reason the definitive list took until 2021 to nail down.
How to tell before you buy
The cartridge itself is the quickest guide. A grey cartridge from before the Game Boy Color always runs on a DMG-01, and a black dual-mode cartridge was built to run on both. A clear cartridge is Color-only, so no matter what it prints, it will never start on a grey Game Boy. Printer support is harder to read at a glance: some boxes carry a small printer symbol and some do not, so the surest sign is the game's own menu, where a print option shows up only when the feature is genuinely there.
What a DMG-01 can still print today
Strip the library down to what a 1989 Game Boy can really do and the picture is clear: photographs from the Camera, Pokedex pages and diplomas from Yellow, Gold and Silver, and cards from the Trading Card Game, all printed onto adhesive paper that is now harder to find than the printer itself. It is a small, specific pleasure, and it still works. Part two of this series explains how the Game Boy and the printer actually talk to each other, and part four follows a new cartridge that teaches the 1998 printer a trick nobody shipped in its day. To see the hardware up close, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.
The Full Series
Part 1: Nintendo's Sticker Machine of 1998 · Part 2: How the Game Boy Printer Works · Part 3: Games That Print (you are here)
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