New on the Shelf: The Game Boy That Went Fishing

Ask a collector for the single strangest thing ever plugged into a Game Boy, and this arrival is a strong contender. It is not a game, not a light, not a printer, but a working sonar, an officially licensed device that turned Nintendo's handheld into a genuine fish finder for anglers standing at the water's edge.

The Game Boy's weirdest job: finding actual fish in actual water.

What It Is

The Pocket Sonar by Bandai, released in 1998, is one of the strangest accessories ever made for the Game Boy, and, remarkably, an officially licensed one. Built for fishing, it actually locates fish underwater. A chunky, battery-powered unit fits into the cartridge slot, and a float-equipped sonar sensor hangs from it on a long cable, ready to be cast or lowered into the water, with a dry bag included to keep the Game Boy itself from getting wet. The software adds a fishing mini-game and a fish database for identifying your catch. It works with the original Game Boy and the Game Boy Pocket, but not with later models.

A Toy That Was Also a Tool

What lifts the Pocket Sonar beyond mere novelty is that it genuinely worked. This was not a fishing-themed game dressed up as a gadget; it was a real piece of sonar equipment that happened to use the Game Boy as its screen and brain. Bandai, a company with a long history of ambitious and eccentric licensed products, looked at the best-selling handheld in the world and saw not a games console but a cheap, ubiquitous portable computer that millions of people already owned, and built an actual fishing instrument around it. The dry bag, the long sensor cable, the float, all of it points to a device meant to be taken out on a real riverbank, not played with on the sofa.

Comes with a dry bag, because Nintendo never designed this thing to go swimming.

It belongs to a wonderful category of Game Boy peripherals that tried to make the console do serious, unexpected jobs, the cameras, printers, organisers and translators that reimagined a toy as a tool. The Pocket Sonar is the wildest of them, and its very specificity, a device for one hobby, used outdoors, near water, is exactly why complete examples with the float, cable and dry bag intact are so hard to find today. It is the ultimate proof that people saw the Game Boy as a platform for almost anything, even for finding fish.

Why It Joined the Collection

The Pocket Sonar is one of the crown jewels of Game Boy oddity, an officially licensed sonar that stands for the whole idea of the console as a do-anything platform. Its outdoor, single-purpose design makes complete examples genuinely scarce, and it caps the collection's group of peripherals that turned the handheld into a serious tool. Preserving it keeps hold of perhaps the most gloriously unlikely thing the Game Boy was ever asked to do.

The Bandai Pocket Sonar is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.