Fresh Find: The Box Art Collection, a 2.5-Kilogram Love Letter

Not every arrival is a relic from the past; some are brand-new objects made to honour it. This one weighs two and a half kilograms and arrives in a silver box. It is Game Boy: The Box Art Collection, a modern encyclopaedia so lavish it is less a book than a monument to the little grey machine.

Bitmap Books Game Boy Box Art Collection silver edition

What It Is

Published by Bitmap Books in 2021, Game Boy: The Box Art Collection is a richly illustrated encyclopaedia gathering hundreds of Game Boy games from around the world, complete with interviews with collectors and a history of the console. Its lithographic printing, hardcover boards and sewn binding make the finished volume a genuine 2.5-kilogram centrepiece. The example here is the silver edition, presented in a designed silver art box and strictly limited to 1,500 copies, which places it among the standout modern publications in the collection.

Box Art as Art

There is a lovely idea at the heart of this book: that the humble cardboard sleeve of a Game Boy game deserves to be treated as art. For decades box art was disposable packaging, torn open and binned on the way to the cartridge. Bitmap Books, a British publisher that helped pioneer the modern wave of beautiful retro-gaming books, takes the opposite view, reproducing that artwork at scale and with real reverence. The result quietly makes the case that a generation of anonymous illustrators shaped how millions of children first imagined these games, long before they pressed start.

The strict limit of 1,500 silver copies is its own small story. Modern enthusiast publishing thrives on scarcity, funding these ambitious volumes through crowdfunding and limited runs aimed at devoted collectors, and a numbered, boxed edition is designed from the outset to become a collectible in its own right. It is a neat inversion of the collection's usual work: instead of preserving a fragile old object that was never meant to last, here is a brand-new one built deliberately to endure, a book about preserving Game Boy history that is itself made to be kept.

Why It Joined the Collection

A collection devoted to documenting the Game Boy naturally wants the finest modern documentation of the console too. This silver edition is both a reference work, hundreds of games gathered and contextualised, and a beautiful object in its own right, and its limited status makes it a genuine collectible. Keeping it acknowledges that preserving the Game Boy is a living, ongoing effort, one that today's publishers, artists and collectors are still actively shaping.

The silver Box Art Collection is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

Read the full story: the wild world of Game Boy merchandise.