New Arrival: Bandai's 1989 Game Boy Collector Cards

The Game Boy had barely arrived before Japan's merchandising machine turned its attention to it. This arrival is proof of just how fast that happened: a set of Bandai collector cards dating from 1989, the console's very first year, when popular titles were already spilling out onto printed collectibles.

What It Is

These Bandai collector cards date from 1989 and reflect the early wave of Game Boy collectibles in Japan, where popular titles quickly expanded into card series and other printed merchandise. Bandai, one of Japan's great toy and hobby companies, was perfectly placed to turn the new handheld's characters into something to collect and trade, and these cards are among the earliest pieces of Game Boy merchandise in the whole collection.

1989: the console was months old and Japan was already printing it onto cards.

Merchandise at the Speed of Light

What these cards really capture is the sheer speed of Japanese character merchandising. The Game Boy launched in April 1989, and already that same year companies like Bandai were producing collectible cards based on its games, no waiting to see whether the console would succeed, just an instant, confident assumption that its characters were worth collecting. That reflex, to spin any popular property immediately into cards, stickers, toys and snacks, is a hallmark of Japanese pop culture, and the Game Boy was swept up in it from the very start.

There is a neat foreshadowing here, too. Cards built around video-game characters would, years later, become one of the most valuable collecting categories in the world, as the Pokemon Trading Card Game turned little printed rectangles into serious money. These humble 1989 Bandai cards are an ancestor of that idea, an early sign that the audience for a game and the audience for its collectible cards were one and the same. As paper objects from the launch year, produced to be shuffled and swapped by children, they are genuinely scarce in good condition today.

Why It Joined the Collection

Merchandise from a console's launch year is among the most evocative material a collection can hold, and these Bandai cards are among the earliest Game Boy collectibles here. They document how instantly Japan's merchandising culture embraced the handheld, and they foreshadow the huge game-card industry to come. Preserving a fragile set of launch-year cards keeps a first-wave piece of Game Boy fandom intact.

The Bandai collector cards are documented, with photographs, on their own page in the collection.

More on this in the sticker and trading card craze.