Third-Party Game Boy Hardware, Part 3: Cases, Screens and the Modern Makers

Across part one and part two we met the big accessory names and the makers of power and connectivity. This final part gathers the rest: the companies that helped you carry the Game Boy, see its screen and control it, and the modern makers who are still building for the console decades later. As before, a maker's home base is noted where it is known.

A.L.S. Industries

Carrying a console designed to travel was its own small industry, and A.L.S. Industries built for it. The collection holds an A.L.S. Game Boy Storage Case and a Carrying Case, the sturdy, practical cases that protected the machine and its cartridges in a schoolbag. Unglamorous but essential, cases like these took the daily punishment so the console did not have to, which is exactly why so few survive in good shape.

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  Game Boy Carrying Case A.L.S.

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  Game Boy Storage Case A.S.L.

Pelican

The American maker Pelican brought a touch of showmanship to storage with its GB Game Tower, a display-and-storage stand for a growing cartridge library. It is a lovely example of an accessory that treated a game collection as something to show off rather than hide away, an idea very much in tune with how collectors think today.

nYko

Nyko, the well-known Los Angeles accessory house, is represented by the Game Tote 4, a carrying solution from a brand that would become a household name across later console generations. Its presence here shows how many of gaming's enduring accessory makers cut their teeth on the Game Boy.

Recoton

The American company Recoton, a long-established electronics accessory maker, offered the Recoton Accessory Kit, a bundle of the essentials in one box. Kits like this were aimed at the gift market and the newcomer, packaging several small solutions together, and they are a neat snapshot of what a maker considered the must-have extras of the day.

Gamester

The British budget brand Gamester kept things cheap and cheerful. The collection holds its Light Magnifier, a combination unit that lit and enlarged the screen at once. Value gear like this was bought and battered by the thousand at pocket-money prices, which makes surviving boxed examples surprisingly scarce despite how common they once were.

Xtend

Xtend addressed the perennial screen problem with its Light Master, another of the illumination aids that tried to solve the Game Boy's most notorious shortcoming, the unlit display. It sits among a crowded field of worm lights and clip-on lamps, each maker convinced it had the best answer to playing after dark.

Hori

From Japan comes Hori, one of the most respected names in controllers even today. The collection holds its SGB Commander, a control pad made for use with the Super Game Boy on the television, bringing a proper, comfortable controller to Game Boy games played on the big screen. Hori's reputation for quality control gear reaches all the way back to pieces like this.

krikzz: The Modern Maker

The third-party story did not end in the nineties. Today a new generation keeps the platform alive, chief among them krikzz, the Ukrainian maker whose EverDrive GB X7 flash cartridge lets a single card hold an entire library and run homebrew on original hardware. It is the direct descendant of the old accessory industry: an independent maker solving a real need for Game Boy owners, decades after Nintendo moved on.

Why the Third-Party Makers Matter

Taken together across all three parts, these makers tell a story Nintendo could not tell on its own. Each product answered a genuine need or wish, a missing light, a fading battery, a save worth protecting, a game worth showing off, and together they map exactly what it was like to live with a Game Boy. From global names like ASCII, Mad Catz and Hori to one-product outfits that made a single cable, they turned a plain grey machine into a whole ecosystem, and they did it from workshops on several continents.

For a collector, the third-party shelves are the hardest to complete and among the most rewarding, precisely because there is no official checklist and so little survived. Assembling a real cross-section of these makers captures the Game Boy phenomenon from the one angle Nintendo never controlled: the market that grew up around it.

Every accessory named across this series is documented, with photos, in the collection.