Game Boy in Disguise, Part 4: Cards, Stickers and Sweets
The Game Boy never really stayed in its box. It leaked out into everything a 1990s child might touch on the way to school: the gum in your pocket, the stickers on your folder, the eraser rattling around your pencil case, even the tissue you sneezed into. Nintendo and its licensees had worked out something simple and slightly ruthless. If a small grey handheld could sell 8-bit dreams, it could just as easily sell sweets, stationery and novelties. This is a roundup of the sweet, papery, disposable side of the collection, the tie-ins that were never meant to survive, which is exactly why the survivors are so charming.
Gum that came with homework: the Amurol trading cards
In 1993, American confectioner Amurol released a set of Nintendo-licensed Game Boy trading cards and did the cleverest possible thing with them: it hid them inside gum boxes shaped like the console itself. There were 96 cards spread across four series, which meant no child was ever going to complete the set on pocket money alone. Each card pictured an iconic Game Boy title, from Super Mario Land to Metroid to Kirby's Dream Land, with a short game tip printed on the back. It was advertising dressed up as a strategy guide dressed up as candy, and it worked. The cards earned a genuine cult following and remain coveted by collectors today, a sugary little postcard from the 8-bit era.
Two hundred and seventy-six stickers: the Merlin collection
Over in the sticker aisle, Merlin put out its licensed sticker collection in 1992: a hoard of 276 stickers featuring characters and screenshots from the NES and Game Boy games of the day. Two hundred and seventy-six. That is enough to cover a schoolbag, a pencil case and a patient younger sibling, with doubles left over to trade in the playground. The set belongs to the same 1992 Nintendo licensing wave as the Merlin sticker album also catalogued in the collection, back when peeling a tiny Mario off a backing sheet and sticking him somewhere permanent counted as a completely legitimate hobby.
Two hundred and seventy-six Merlin stickers, zero self-control. Merlin Sticker Album Game Boy
The oldest of the bunch: Bandai's 1989 collector cards
For the true origin story we go back to Japan in 1989, the Game Boy's launch year, where Bandai issued a set of collector cards almost as soon as the console reached shops. Popular titles were spun into card series and other printed merchandise at remarkable speed, and these cards are among the very earliest pieces of Game Boy merchandise in the whole collection. Think about that timing for a moment. Before the Game Boy had even finished conquering the world, it was already being turned into things to collect, which tells you everything about how quickly people fell for it.
A mini Game Boy in an egg: the Pokemon Collectors Egg
By 1995 a certain pocket-monster fever was setting in, and it arrived in the collection inside an egg. This small collectible egg from Japan, made by Kyodo Co., Ltd., cracks open to reveal a miniature Game Boy tucked in alongside a set of Pokemon collector cards. It is one of several Pokemon-themed novelties here, and a neat little proof of a rule that seems to hold across this entire roundup: put a tiny Game Boy inside almost any object, and a collector somewhere will decide they need it.
Promotional tissues, honestly: the Wario Land handkerchiefs
Some tie-ins were designed to be used up and thrown away, which is exactly what makes them so hard to find now. Around the 1994 release of Wario Land, Nintendo handed out Game Boy-design handkerchiefs to fans in Japan. Tissues. With a Game Boy printed on them. It is genuinely difficult to imagine a more disposable piece of merchandise, and that is precisely the point: most were used the way tissues tend to be used and then vanished forever. A surviving, unused example is therefore a quietly satisfying thing to have in a collection.
Fifty yen of Mario: the Super Mario Land cap eraser
Back at the very beginning again, in 1989, Nintendo offered Mario fans in Japan a small cap eraser for 50 yen apiece, released around the launch of the hit Super Mario Land. It is cute, it is cheap, and it is precisely the kind of object that lives at the bottom of a pencil case for a year before disappearing without ceremony. Which is why a surviving cap eraser from 1989 is such a charming little fragment of early Game Boy history, a fifty-yen souvenir that somehow outlasted the games it was sold to promote.
The one that plays music: the Pokemon Game Music Collection
And last, the show-off of the group. The Pokemon Game Music Collection is a collectible miniature Game Boy, faithfully modelled on the original DMG-01, that actually plays music and sound effects from Pocket Monsters Red and Green, with Charizard glowering out from the packaging. Made by Game Freak and part of a broader collectible line, it is the rare novelty in this roundup that does more than sit still looking nostalgic. Every other item here is content to be looked at. This one hums the theme tune back at you.
That is the strange magic of the Game Boy. A games machine that somehow ended up as gum, stickers, cards, an egg, a handkerchief, an eraser and a little music box, and people kept, and keep, every last piece of it. If you enjoyed this rummage through the sweet and disposable end of the shelf, there is a great deal more waiting for you at 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 · Part 4: Cards, Stickers and Sweets (you are here)
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