The Game Boy's Hidden Powers, Part 3: Talking Cartridges
Updated: Sep 11
Most people picture the Game Boy as a sealed little world: a grey brick, a green screen, and a link cable if you were lucky enough to have a friend sitting next to you. Yet a handful of cartridges and accessories quietly gave the handheld senses it was never designed to have. In this third part of Hidden Powers we look at two of the strangest, both released only in Japan: a game that could beam data through the air by infrared, and a scanner that let the Game Boy read barcodes off the physical world.
They could hardly be more different, one a gentle life simulation and the other an unlicensed gadget with a scanner head, but they answer the same question. How do you get a tiny handheld from the late 1980s and early 1990s to talk to something beyond its own screen? Let us start with the one that asks two Game Boys to get very, very close.
A kiss in the dark: infrared without a cable
The star of this trick is Pocket Family GB, a Japan-only life simulation that Hudson released in 1998. On the surface it is gentle stuff. You look after a small household, furnish rooms, earn and spend money, and care for the family living there. It runs in monochrome on the original DMG-01 and is Super Game Boy enhanced, so it looks perfectly ordinary sitting next to any other cartridge of its era.
Look closer at the box, though, and you will spot a logo that most Game Boy owners never encountered: GB KISS. This was Hudson's own infrared system, and it worked in a way that still catches people off guard. Instead of building the infrared hardware into the console, Hudson put it inside the cartridge, through a special chip called the HuC-1 that carried infrared diodes right on the board.
The payoff was clever. Because the transmitter lived in the cartridge rather than the machine, two players could exchange data with no link cable at all. You simply held two Game Boys close together and let the games whisper to one another. Hudson leaned happily into how intimate that looked, naming the feature after the awkward little dance of bringing two handhelds nose to nose. The range was tiny, usually no more than a couple of centimetres, so a transfer really did feel like a private moment between devices.
The most striking part is when this was possible. The Game Boy Color, with its famous built-in infrared port, would not arrive until late 1998, yet a GB KISS cartridge could beam data on the original 1989 DMG-01, because the console itself was never part of the equation. Hudson later extended the idea with an accessory called the GB KISS LINK, an infrared modem that let a supported cartridge trade files with a Windows PC, pushing the idea of talking to the outside world about as far as it could go on this hardware.
A sequel, Pocket Family GB2, followed later on the Game Boy Color. For a cosy game about furnishing rooms and looking after a household, Pocket Family GB was hiding some genuinely forward-looking technology behind its calm little screen.
Pocket Family GB is not the only GB KISS cartridge in the collection. Pocket Bomberman, the Japanese 1997 entry that reinvents the series as a side-scrolling platformer, carries the same infrared trick. Hold two carts close together and players could swap and share their own custom-built maps through the air, a feature that exists only on the Japanese Game Boy release. It is a good reminder that GB KISS was not reserved for novelties; it sat quietly inside ordinary retail games too, waiting for two owners to bring their handhelds nose to nose.
Scanning the real world: the Namcot Barcode Boy
If infrared let the Game Boy reach out to another Game Boy, the Namcot Barcode Boy let it reach out to the physical world. Developed by Sofel and released by Namcot in 1992, and again sold only in Japan, it is a peripheral that clips onto the console through the link port and gives the Game Boy the ability to scan barcodes.
The concept was ahead of its time. Games such as Monster Maker: Barcode Saga used scanned cards to customise characters and battle opponents, and extra merchandise carried further barcodes that unlocked features. In practice that meant a simple strip of black-and-white lines, whether printed on an official card or hiding on everyday store packaging, could turn into a character or an item inside the game. Arriving in 1992, it was among the earliest card-scanning devices for a handheld, following in the footsteps of the standalone Barcode Battler.
There is a catch that has shaped how the Barcode Boy survives today. The hardware cannot do anything on its own, so it was almost always sold bundled with a game. The museum keeps all three variants together, which tells the whole story of how it was meant to be bought. The first of these is Barcode Boy 1, the classic 1992 boxed set that paired the scanner with its game.
Alongside it sits Barcode Boy 2, a second bundle that packaged the same peripheral with another title. And then there is the odd one out: the standalone Barcode Boy, the scanner sold with no game at all. Because the hardware is useless without software, very few were ever produced this way, which makes the plain box the rarest of the three and the hardest to track down.
Seen from today, when a phone reads a QR code without a second thought, the Barcode Boy looks almost prophetic. In 1992, though, teaching a battery-powered handheld to look at a barcode and turn it into a monster was a small marvel of lateral thinking. The device has such a colourful history that it has earned its own dedicated feature elsewhere in the museum, for anyone who wants to dig into the games, the cards and the quirks in detail.
Two little machines, reaching out
Infrared and barcodes, a kiss and a scan. Neither feature was ever likely to reach the West, and neither is famous today, but together they show a handheld that people kept nudging to do more than it was ever meant to. GB KISS reached out by light to another Game Boy nearby, while the Barcode Boy reached out by reading the world's own printed code. Two completely different answers to the same quiet question.
You can explore Pocket Family GB, Pocket Bomberman, all three Barcode Boy sets and plenty more of the Game Boy's hidden powers over at the Game Boy Museum.
The Full Series
Part 1: A Sense of Movement · Part 2: Eyes and Ears · Part 3: Talking Cartridges (you are here) · Part 4: A Bigger Memory · Part 5: Cheat Modules · Part 6: Making Music · Part 7: Getting to Work · Part 8: Every Game at Once
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