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The Game Boy's Hidden Powers, Part 4: A Bigger Memory

Marcel Pflug

Sep 9

4 min read

We usually picture a Game Boy cartridge as a sealed box. You buy it, the game lives inside forever, and that is that. But a small handful of cartridges and accessories quietly broke that rule. They turned the humble grey slab into something you could rewrite, expand, and back up, years before anyone said the words cloud save out loud. This is Part 4 of The Game Boy's Hidden Powers, and today the superpower is memory.

The cartridge you could rewrite

Take the Nintendo Power Memory Cartridge. If you owned one in Japan, you did not simply buy a game and carry it home. You bought a blank flash cartridge, took it to a Lawson convenience store, and stepped up to a Loppi kiosk. There you scrolled through a catalogue, picked the games you wanted, and watched the machine write them straight onto the cartridge in your hand. The clerk handed over a printed manual and a sheet of blank stickers so you could label what you had just downloaded. It was a games shop the size of a vending machine, and the cartridge was reusable.

Nintendo Power launched in September 1997, starting with the Super Famicom, and a Game Boy version followed. Under the hood, the cartridge's flash memory is divided into eight blocks. One block is normally reserved for the little menu that lets you choose between titles, which leaves room for up to seven games at a time. When you tired of your line-up, you could return to a kiosk and write a fresh set over the old one. The example in our collection dates from 1999, fairly late in the Game Boy's life, and it comes pre-loaded with Super Mario Land 3: Wario Land. That timing is part of the charm. It shows Nintendo still finding clever ways to keep an ageing platform feeling new.

The service wound down in stages. The kiosks and the Loppi ordering system were switched off in 2001, and Nintendo Power closed for good in 2007. For a few years, though, Japanese players had something the rest of the world did not: a cartridge that never really ran out of games.

A bank for your saves

If Nintendo Power rewrote what was on your cartridge, the ASCII Turbo File GB tackled a different problem: where to keep all your saves. Made by ASCII and sold only in Japan, it is an external storage device for Game Boy save data. It plugs into the link cable port, the same socket you would use to trade Pokemon or race a friend, and it runs on its own batteries so your data stays safe when everything is switched off. Instead of leaning on the tiny save chip inside a single cartridge, you could park your progress on the box and carry it around like a portable memory bank.

There was a catch, and it is a very ASCII sort of catch. The Turbo File GB only worked with games written specifically to talk to it, and that list was short, made up mostly of ASCII's own titles. This was not a universal backup tool that could copy any cartridge. It was a specialist accessory for a specific kind of player, most often someone deep in a role-playing or simulation game who wanted more room for saves than one cartridge could offer. Our example dates from 2000 and is one of the more unusual Japanese accessories in the collection, precisely because so few people needed it and even fewer games supported it.

Memory as a hidden superpower

Put these two side by side and you can watch an idea forming years ahead of its time. One cartridge you could rewrite on demand. One device that kept your saves outside the game entirely. Swap the convenience store kiosk for a broadband connection, and the battery-powered box for an account in the cloud, and you have described almost exactly how we play today. Japanese Game Boy owners were living a small, early version of that future in the late 1990s.

The idea never really died, either. Modern flash cartridges carry the same spirit forward: a single cartridge that can hold an entire library and let you rewrite it whenever you like, no kiosk required. We cover those elsewhere in the museum's hardware guide, and they are a direct descendant of the rewritable cartridge Nintendo was already selling in Lawson stores.

Memory turned out to be one of the Game Boy's quietest superpowers, and one of its most forward-looking. If you would like to see these curiosities up close, along with the rest of the hidden powers tucked inside that little grey machine, come and explore the rest of the collection at gameboymuseum.com. There is always another block of memory to fill.