The Sound of the Game Boy, Part 2: When a Handheld Made the Charts

In the winter of 1992 a machine built to keep bored children quiet on car journeys did something no toy is supposed to do. It walked into a recording studio and came out with a hit single. The Game Boy's sound chip, four thin voices meant for jumping plumbers and falling blocks, escaped the plastic shell, picked up a beat, and marched straight onto the British charts. What follows is the story of the Game Boy's unlikely second career in music, told entirely through the records, players and radios that now sit in the museum's collection.

Novelty hits built from bleeps

The early 1990s were a golden age for the novelty single, the kind of record that lives or dies on one irresistible gimmick. A video game was the perfect source: instantly familiar, faintly ridiculous, and armed with a tune that had already burrowed into millions of heads. The Game Boy owed much of its fame to Tetris, and Tetris owed its hook to a Russian folk tune called Korobeiniki. A melody that catchy, welded to a machine that popular, was never going to be left in peace. Somebody was always going to bolt a dance beat onto it and see who danced.

That somebody was Doctor Spin, whose 1992 Tetris single is one of the collection's happiest oddities. Behind the silly pseudonym stood two men who were anything but silly: the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber and the producer Nigel Wright. Their record climbed to number six on the UK Singles Chart, backed with a B-side titled, with total honesty, Play Game Boy. The 7-inch pressing came out on Carpet Records as catalogue number CRPT 4, and you can read its own feature for the full tale of how the man who wrote Cats ended up scoring a puzzle game.

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  The Game Boy's greatest hits, pressed on vinyl and shipped on tape.

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  Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote this. We are not making that up.

The same release survives in the collection in a second form, the cassette single (catalogue number CRCPS 4), which carried the identical two tracks for anyone whose bedroom ran on a tape deck rather than a turntable. Its own feature covers the tape edition. Two formats, one gloriously daft idea, and proof that in 1992 you could buy the Game Boy's most famous melody in whatever format your Walkman preferred.

If Doctor Spin borrowed the Game Boy's most famous melody, Technician 2 borrowed the machine itself. Playing with the Boy, a 1992 vinyl single, was assembled from the actual sound of the Game Boy and then, in a neat piece of circular logic, used in the Game Boy's own television commercials. The advert's soundtrack was, in effect, the product singing about itself. It appeared on BMG Records in the UK as catalogue number MCS 1710, and the story of how a jingle became a record you could buy in a shop is told in its own feature.

Game Boy's soundtrack for television commercials

The following year the mascot took his turn. Super Mario Land, credited to Ambassadors of Funk featuring MC Mario, spun the little platformer into a dance-floor novelty. It became a UK top-ten hit, proving Doctor Spin had been no fluke, and it arrived on Warlock Records as catalogue number WARCD-135. We gave it its own arrival post when it joined the shelves. Three chart-bothering records in two years, all of them powered by a handheld that cost less than the studio time behind them.

The sound outlives the machine

Novelty singles come and go, but the Game Boy's music has proved unusually durable, outliving the very hardware that produced it. Take the Pokemon Game Music Collection player, a Japanese curiosity from Game Freak. It is a miniature Game Boy that faithfully copies the original DMG-01 down to its grey shell, except this one plays no games at all. Instead it plays the music and sound effects from Pocket Monsters Red and Green, the tunes that soundtracked a generation's first steps through the tall grass. The example in the collection wears Charizard on its packaging, and it belongs to a whole line of these collectible mini Game Boys made purely to be listened to. It is a strange thing to hold: unmistakably a Game Boy in miniature, yet stripped of the interactivity that made the original matter. All it keeps is the music, as if the machine had been boiled down to the one thing nobody could get out of their head.

Game Music Collection - Revival of the Pokemon Sountracks

Then there is proof that people are still recording this music from scratch. A chiptune, for the uninitiated, is music made from the deliberately limited sounds of vintage game chips, and it has grown from a hobbyist niche into a genre with its own vinyl releases. Disappearing Lines: Chiptune Music of Tetris is one of them, a 2021 record built on a sound already three decades old. Working under the name Gamer Boy, Dave Marino re-recorded the classic 8-bit Tetris themes: the A-side pairs the Main Theme with Tetris Game Boy A-Type, while the B-side offers B-Type and C-Type. It came out on Enjoy the Ride Records as catalogue number ETT030 and was pressed in the Czech Republic, as its own feature explains. A folk song became a game theme became a chart hit became a collectible vinyl. The melody simply refuses to stop travelling.

Disappearing Lines: Chiptune Music of Tetris (2021)

From making music to playing it: the Game Boy as a radio

So far the Game Boy has been the instrument. But collectors also chased the opposite trick, turning the handheld into something that plays music made by other people. In the world before smartphones, a pocket device that could double as a radio was genuinely useful, and since so many people already owned a Game Boy, a small cottage industry grew up to press that hardware into service. Why buy a separate radio when the grey brick already in your bag could be talked into the job?

The purest version was the third-party FM tuner. These cartridges and adapters plugged into a real Game Boy and turned it into a working pocket radio, borrowing its screen, its battery and its speaker to pull stations out of the air. We rounded up several of them in Tune In: FM Radio Add-ons for the Game Boy, and they remain some of the stranger accessories the system ever inspired.

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  FM Gameball for Game Boy (DMG-01)

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  GameTunes FM Tuner Cartridge

Do not confuse those with the Radio Boy, which approaches the same idea from the opposite direction. Radio Boy is a Nintendo-licensed radio shaped like a Game Boy: it looks the part, but there is no console inside and no cartridge slot to fill. The FM tuners made a genuine Game Boy behave like a radio, whereas Radio Boy is a radio wearing a Game Boy costume. You can read its own feature on the charming little impostor. Both, in their way, complete the circle. A machine that once sang its way onto the charts eventually learned to sit still and let other people's music come to it.

A FM radio wearing a Game Boy costume

The Other Side of the Sound: Making Music on the Game Boy

Everything so far has been about music the Game Boy inspired: the records it climbed, the tapes it filled and the vinyl it still turns up on. Yet there is a whole other story, about music made on the Game Boy rather than about it. Fitted with the right cartridge, the handheld stops being a muse and becomes an instrument in its own right, and the museum tells that side of things in a companion piece.

Cartridges like Nanoloop and Little Sound Dj turned the Game Boy into a pocket music studio, sequencing beats and melodies from the very same four channels that once bothered the charts. If you would like to see one up close, the collection's Nanoloop NL13 shows exactly what that looks like.

From bleeps that reached number six to a mini console that only hums Pokemon tunes, the Game Boy's musical life is far stranger and richer than its four little voices would suggest. Every record, player and radio mentioned here has a place on the shelves, and there is a great deal more to hear. Come and explore the collection.