The Company Still Shipping Boxed Game Boy Games
Updated: 4 days ago
Something that should not exist is sitting open in my browser: a pre-order page for a brand-new Game Boy game. Boxed, with a printed manual, a proper cartridge, releasing in 2026. The console was discontinued in 2003. Nobody appears to have told Incube8 Games, and the Game Boy is quietly better for it.
A Publisher for a Console That Was Supposed to Be Finished
Incube8 Games was founded in 2021 as a subsidiary of the modding specialist Retro Modding, and in barely five years it has signed close to thirty titles. Many collectors simply call it the gold standard of retro cartridge publishing, and the reason is boringly practical: they do the whole thing. Custom PCBs, the cartridge shell, the box, the manual, the little collector extras. What arrives on your shelf is not a loose board in a padded envelope but a complete, boxed release that looks like it could have sat next to Tetris in 1990.
That last detail is why a museum like this one pays attention. The Game Boy Museum is, more than anything, a museum about the box, the insert, the manual and the object as it was actually sold. A publisher that treats the packaging as part of the release, not an afterthought, is speaking our language. These new cartridges are being made complete-in-box from day one, which means the collectors of 2050 will have their own crop of pristine, sealed Game Boy titles to chase.
Finishing a Game That Waited Twenty Years
The story that best captures the label is Infinity. It began life as an ambitious role-playing game for the Game Boy Color around the turn of the millennium, then stalled and was quietly abandoned, one more beautiful ruin in the long history of unreleased games. Incube8 ran a successful Kickstarter to actually finish it and put it in boxes, roughly two decades after the original team set it down. There is something wonderfully in keeping with a museum in that: taking an object everyone had written off and giving it the ending it never got.
Since then the catalogue has grown fast, from the atmospheric Pine Creek to the moody The Year After, the run-and-gun of Wing Warriors and the action of Kien, and the current pre-order that started this whole train of thought, the gothic Dracula: Dark Reign for Game Boy Color. In 2023 the label absorbed Greenboy Cartridge Games, folding in crowd favourites like the Shapeshifter series, and in 2024 it acquired the rights to a game called D*Fuzed, steadily gathering up scattered pieces of Game Boy homebrew history under one roof.
A Genuine Horror Game on the Pea-Green Screen
If you want proof that this is real creative work and not just nostalgia in shrink-wrap, play Deadeus. It is an authentic horror game for the original Game Boy, made by the illustrator IZMA using Chris Maltby's GB Studio engine, with a score by Stuart Busby. You play a small boy who wakes from a prophetic nightmare: everyone in his village will die in three days. There is no map, no quest marker and no single correct path. You simply walk the village, talk to people, make choices, and live with them. It has eleven different endings, some of them genuinely unsettling, and it earns its Adult rating on hardware most people associate with Mario and puzzle blocks. That a machine with four shades of green can still make you feel dread in 2026 is the whole argument for taking this scene seriously.
It helps that the makers are the real thing. IZMA trained as an illustrator and works in comics and concept art; his macabre style is the reason Deadeus looks the way it does, and it is exactly the kind of specific, human authorship this collection likes to document. The original DMG-01 and its complete story live in our guide here, and games like this are simply the newest chapter of it.
Why a New Cartridge Belongs in a Museum of the Old
It would be easy to treat a museum as a place where a machine goes to be embalmed. This one prefers the opposite view. The Game Boy Museum documents the original DMG-01 and its world in obsessive detail, but that world is still growing: people are still writing code for it, still pressing cartridges, still designing boxes for a console that the industry declared dead more than twenty years ago. A brand-new, complete-in-box game is not a footnote to that history. It is the proof that the history never stopped.
So here is the good news, filed under the best possible heading for a museum: the Game Boy has a release calendar. As long as labels like Incube8 keep filling it, the grey brick from 1989 is not a relic at all. It is a platform, and it is still open for business.
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