The Game Boy's Hidden Powers, Part 1: A Sense of Movement

Ask most people what the Game Boy could do and they will describe a grey brick with four buttons, a directional pad and a screen the colour of pea soup. It could not tell which way you were holding it. It could not push back against your hands. It had no idea whether it was resting flat on a table or being waved through the air. On its own, all of that is true.

The quiet genius of the platform, though, was that the console never had to do everything itself. Nintendo learned to hide the missing hardware inside the cartridges, so that a plain plastic slot became a doorway for senses the machine was never built with. This first part of The Game Boy's Hidden Powers looks at two of those cartridges, both held in the museum, and both giving the handheld something it was never born with: a real sense of movement.

The slot as a secret compartment

A Game Boy cartridge is usually pictured as a container for a game and nothing more. Slide it in, the code runs, that is the end of the story. But the connection between console and cartridge carries power and signals in both directions, which means a cartridge can hold far more than memory chips. It can carry a genuine piece of hardware and then offer that hardware to the game as if the console had owned it all along.

It was an elegant piece of thinking. Rival machines tended to bolt their extras on from the outside, with cables and adaptors and boxes that hung awkwardly off the hardware. The Game Boy kept the magic tidy and out of sight, sealed inside the same grey cartridge you would blow the dust from before every session. Nothing about the console had to change. The new ability simply arrived in the post, ready to click into place.

Two accessories in the collection show the idea at its most charming. One lets the Game Boy feel how you move it. The other lets the Game Boy move you back.

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  Two cartridges, two superpowers: one feels your every wobble, the other wobbles right back.

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  Two cartridges, two superpowers: one feels your every wobble, the other wobbles right back.

A cartridge that feels how you tilt it

The Game Boy Tilt Sensor Game Pack was built for a single game, Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble, released in Japan in the summer of 2000. Inside the cartridge sits an accelerometer, a small component that senses the console's position and how quickly it is being moved. With that chip in place, the game no longer leaned on the directional pad to move its hero. You steered Kirby by physically tilting the whole machine, rolling him across each board as though the Game Boy were a little wooden maze balanced in your palms. A sharp flick of the wrist, rather like flipping a pancake, popped him up into the air. The cartridge even looked the part, moulded in a translucent pink shell with a shape all of its own.

The sensor was modest by the standards that would follow. It read movement in a handful of simple directions rather than measuring every fine degree of tilt, and it worked only on the Game Boy Color rather than the original grey model. Even so, it holds a peculiar place in the platform's history. Although it belongs to the Color era, it carries the old DMG numbering as DMG-20, and it is the very last accessory to follow that original coding scheme. It is, in a sense, both a glimpse of the motion controls to come and the closing entry in the Game Boy's oldest catalogue of parts.

The tilt sensor that turned the whole Game Boy into a joystick. No thumbs required.

A cartridge that shakes in your hands

Where the tilt sensor let the console read your movement, the Game Boy Rumble Pack Cartridge did the exact opposite. It gave movement back. Tucked inside the shell is a small vibration motor, the same basic idea behind the force feedback in a modern controller, so that a game could deliver physical feedback straight to the player's hands. There was a catch. A spinning motor is hungry, and the slender slot could not spare the power, so the cartridge carried its own AAA battery in a little compartment built into the top. The console supplied the game. The cartridge supplied the shaking, and if you preferred your Game Boy calm, you could simply switch the rumble off.

The most famous home for this trick was Pokemon Pinball, released for the Game Boy Color in 1999 and one of the first Game Boy games to buzz in your palms as you played. Every bumper struck and every ball lost came with a jolt you could feel through the plastic. Later titles such as Perfect Dark used the same rumble cartridge to add weight to their action. It remains one of the more unusual pieces of cartridge-based hardware in the collection, a happy reminder that a handheld with no rumble feature of its own could still learn to tremble, one game at a time.

Yes, that is a AAA battery bolted onto a game. The Game Boy could not afford the rumble, so the cartridge brought its own.

One slot, many senses

What ties these two cartridges together is a single, quietly radical idea. The Game Boy did not have to be finished when it left the factory. Its abilities could keep growing for years, not through software updates or bulky boxes clipped to its side, but through the humble slot on the back. A tilt sensor here, a rumble motor there, each one arriving disguised as an ordinary game. Long before phones learned to sense a shake or answer a tilt, this small grey machine was quietly doing both. The console that supposedly could not feel the world turned out to be full of hidden powers, each one waiting for the right cartridge to switch it on.

This is only the first part of the story. There are stranger cartridges still, and more hidden senses to uncover in the entries to come. If you would like to see the objects behind these tales for yourself, you are always welcome to explore the collection at the Game Boy Museum.