Kissing Game Boys: The Infrared Trick Hudson Hid Inside the Cartridge

Picture two Game Boys held face to face, close enough to touch, quietly swapping data through the air with no cable between them. It sounds like something the Game Boy Color made possible, but this trick is older than that. It was already happening in 1997, on the plain grey original Game Boy, and the secret sat not in the console but inside the cartridge. The company behind it was Hudson, and the feature had a wonderfully cheeky name: GB KISS.

A Kiss Between Machines

GB KISS was Hudson's own wireless communication system, introduced in 1997 through a special cartridge chip called the HuC-1. Instead of relying on the console for anything, Hudson soldered tiny infrared diodes straight onto the cartridge's circuit board. Line up two of these carts, hold the Game Boys within a few centimetres of one another, and they could trade data over infrared with no link cable at all. The name is a joke about exactly that: to make the connection work, the two machines had to get so close that they looked like they were kissing.

GB KISS: the infrared port that lived in the cartridge, not the console.

Why Building It Into the Cartridge Was Clever

The smart part is where Hudson chose to put the hardware. The original Game Boy, the DMG-01, had no infrared of its own and never would. By placing the transmitter inside the cartridge, Hudson handed that ageing 1989 machine a brand new wireless ability without touching the console at all. Any Game Boy that could accept the cartridge could suddenly beam data across a table. Nintendo would not build infrared into a handheld itself until the Game Boy Color arrived in late 1998, more than a year later, and even then only on that newer model. GB KISS, by contrast, worked on everything, right back to the very first grey brick.

There were catches. The range was tiny, only a few centimetres, and both players needed a copy of the same GB KISS game, so it was never going to replace the link cable for everyday multiplayer. But for passing small pieces of data back and forth, a character here, an item there, it was tidy, cable-free and faintly magical.

The Logo on the Box: Pocket Family GB

You can see that little logo in action on one of the more charming oddities in the collection: Pocket Family GB. It is a Japan-only life simulation by Hudson, a gentle game about looking after a household, furnishing its rooms and caring for the family that lives there, a sort of pocket-sized dolls' house. Tucked among the Japanese text on the box sits the GB KISS mark, and that is what turns an obscure domestic sim into a piece of hardware history.

Hudson beat the Game Boy Color to infrared by more than a year.

Thanks to GB KISS, two players could hold their copies together and pass things between their virtual families over infrared, the game quietly showing off a feature most of the world never knew the Game Boy had. And because it is a standard DMG cartridge, it plays, and kisses, perfectly happily on the original DMG-01, which is exactly why it earns a place in a collection built around that first machine. Complete Japanese copies like this rarely travelled abroad, which makes a boxed example all the more fitting as the face of the story.

An Idea Ahead of Its Time

Pocket Family GB was far from alone. Hudson shipped a whole run of GB KISS titles, from Super B-Daman: Fighting Phoenix, the very first HuC-1 game, to the Japanese Pokemon Trading Card Game and the ten-player Chousoku Spinner. In early 1998 the company went further still with the GB KISS LINK, an infrared modem that let a Game Boy talk to a home computer and download data through the same beam. It was, remarkably, one of the earliest examples of downloadable content on any handheld, arriving even before Nintendo's own Mobile Adapter GB.

Seen from today, GB KISS reads like a first sketch of ideas Nintendo would return to again and again: the Game Boy Color's infrared window, the wireless adapters that followed, and eventually the effortless local play of later handhelds. Hudson simply got there first, and did it with a soldering iron and a sense of humour.

It is easy to remember the Game Boy as a machine that changed slowly, yet hidden inside these cartridges was a genuinely forward-looking idea: wireless play, years ahead of schedule, made to run on hardware that was already old. That is exactly the kind of detail this museum likes to keep, the clever trick sitting quietly behind an unassuming yellow box. You can find Pocket Family GB in the collection, GB KISS logo and all, where its full details are catalogued.