Space Invaders: The Game Boy Cartridge Hiding a Whole SNES Game

Here is a fact that sounds made up. There is a Game Boy cartridge that contains, hidden inside it, a complete Super Nintendo game. It is not a rumour or a hoax, and it is not even hard to trigger. The cartridge is Space Invaders, and it is one of the most quietly astonishing objects in the entire Game Boy library.

Plug it into a Super Game Boy and everything changes.

The game that started it all

Space Invaders needs little introduction. Created by Tomohiro Nishikado and released by Taito in 1978, it was the arcade game that turned video games from a curiosity into a global craze. Rows of aliens descend, your cannon slides left and right behind four crumbling shields, and the march of the invaders speeds up as their numbers thin, a happy accident of the hardware that became the game's signature heartbeat. It was so popular in Japan that legend says it caused a shortage of 100-yen coins, a story that is probably too neat to be true but tells you how big the game was.

Into your pocket in 1994

By 1994, Taito had brought Space Invaders to the Game Boy. On its own terms it is a tidy, faithful handheld version of the arcade original, exactly the sort of pick-up-and-play classic the machine was made for. If that were all it did, it would still earn a place on the shelf. But Taito had a surprise tucked away that turned a straightforward port into a collector's talking point.

The Super Game Boy trick

The Super Game Boy was an adapter that slotted a Game Boy cartridge into a Super Nintendo, letting you play handheld games on the television, often with a splash of colour and a decorative border. Space Invaders supported it, so through the adapter the monochrome game gained a proper colour palette and a themed frame around the action. That alone was a nice bonus. It was not the real secret.

Space Invadors - Two consoles in one cartridge

The game inside the game

The real secret is this: when you run the Game Boy Space Invaders cartridge through a Super Game Boy, you can access a complete, full Super Nintendo version of the arcade game, running natively on the more powerful console. Not an upscaled Game Boy game, but a separate, richer edition with proper arcade-quality visuals and sound, stored on the same little Game Boy cartridge and played out through the SNES. In effect, Taito hid a whole second game inside the first one.

It is the kind of trick that delights anyone who cares about how these machines actually worked. A humble grey cartridge, the sort you would toss in a bag without a second thought, turns out to be quietly overachieving, using the Super Game Boy as a doorway to hardware far beyond the handheld's own. For a series about great games on a tiny screen, this is the one where the tiny screen was, secretly, optional.

You can find Space Invaders and the Super Game Boy adapter in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.