Game Boy in Disguise, Part 3: Build It, Wear It, Frame It

Not every Game Boy is meant to be switched on. Some are meant to be built brick by brick, some to be shuffled like a deck of cards, and at least one to be perched on your nose while it takes a phone call. This is the Game Boy as costume, as furniture, as fashion accessory, four items from the collection that borrow the famous grey silhouette and then wander off to do something else entirely.

Welcome to Game Boy in Disguise, the corner of the collection where the console stops being a console. The DMG-01 has one of the most recognisable outlines in all of gaming, that stout grey brick with the round A and B buttons, and once a shape gets that famous, people start reproducing it in every material they can find. Plastic bricks, both licensed and not. Trading cards. Even eyewear. Here are four of our favourite disguises, and what each one says about how far a little grey handheld can travel.

The Official Brick Game Boy

The story starts, fittingly, with the most elaborate tribute in the whole collection. In October 2025 the Lego Group released the Lego Game Boy (72046), a full building set that treats the DMG-01 like a monument. The buttons actually press. There is a volume control and a cartridge slot, the small authentic touches that separate a toy from a love letter. The finished model measures 14 by 9 by 3 centimetres, roughly the footprint of the real hardware, so it reads as a Game Boy from across the room rather than as a novelty.

The original Lego Game Boy - Build your Game Boy piece by piece

The clever part is what goes in the screen. The set ships with two interchangeable game modules, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Super Mario Land, and each one carries a lenticular panel, so tilt it and the artwork shifts, about the closest a brick can get to pretending it is powered on. For a certain kind of collector this is the dream object, a Game Boy you get to earn one piece at a time, and the display can change its mind whenever it likes: Hyrule one week, Super Mario Land the next. We happily call it one of the most elaborate modern tributes we own.

The Unofficial Brick Game Boy

Every official icon eventually gets a rebel cousin, and here it is. The Game Consoles Building Blocks Set arrived in 2023, a full two years before Lego made its version canon, and it takes the unlicensed route to exactly the same idea: 191 pieces that click together into a replica of the Game Boy Classic. It is a construction-style tribute produced by a company with the gloriously un-Nintendo name of eVatmaster Consulting GmbH, and in our shelves it sits right beside the official Lego set like a bootleg twin.

Put the two brick Game Boys next to each other and you get the whole story of fan culture in a single glance: the licensed homage with its lenticular screens, and the scrappy 191-piece kit that got to the finish line first. Same beloved silhouette, rather fewer legal blessings. There is something honest about a building set that skips the branding and simply wants you to enjoy snapping a Game Boy together, and we would not want the collection without it.

The 191-piece Game Boy you have to earn, one click at a time.

The Game Boy You Frame in Miniature

Now we shrink things right down. Back in the Game Boy's heyday, Nintendo sold a miniature Game Boy replica with trading cards, bundling the little console together with a set of cards, and this is one of several Japanese card-and-replica collectibles the collection has held on to. The cards shown here feature characters from Donkey Kong, which turns the whole bundle into a tiny crossover event you can hold in one palm.

A Game Boy small enough to lose in your pocket, sold with Donkey Kong cards.

The charming detail is that this is an official product. Nintendo itself decided the Game Boy was iconic enough to reproduce as a keepsake, complete with cards to shuffle and a replica far too small to actually play. It is a reminder that the Game Boy was collectible long before the internet ever told anyone it should be. Frame it, display it, or simply enjoy the fact that Nintendo was making Game Boy merchandise of its own Game Boy while the real ones were still flying off shelves.

The Game Boy You Actually Wear

And then there is the item that wears you back. The Game Boy Smart Gaming Glasses are a pair of Bluetooth glasses by Mutrics that borrow the look of the Game Boy Classic and quietly hide a whole audio system inside. Speakers and a microphone are built into the arms, so you can take hands-free calls and play music with the grey-and-black icon sitting on your face, and the lenses swap out as needed.

Bluetooth glasses that heard about the DMG-01 and never got over it.

This is easily the strangest branch of the family tree. Not a console, not a toy, but a modern piece of wearable tech that looked at the DMG-01 and decided it was a fashion statement worth borrowing. There is no game inside these, only sound, and yet they are unmistakably Game Boy the moment you glance at them. Somewhere an eleven-year-old from 1989 is very confused and very pleased.

Build it, wear it, frame it. The Game Boy has spent decades quietly escaping the definition of a games console, and these four items are proof it just keeps finding new disguises. If you would like to meet the rest of the family, the ones you switch on and the ones you simply admire, come and wander through the Game Boy Museum.

The Full Series

Part 1: The Family of Fake Game Boys · Part 2: On the Desk and Around the House · Part 3: Build It, Wear It, Frame It (you are here) · Part 4: Cards, Stickers and Sweets