New on the Shelf: Frommer's Travel Guide for the Game Boy

Here is a Game Boy cartridge that will not entertain you at all, and that is exactly why it is here. Frommer's Travel Guide is one of the InfoGenius Productivity Pak titles, a small family of releases that asked the Game Boy to be a practical information device rather than a games machine. This latest arrival is a lovely example of the console being taken completely seriously.

What It Is

Published by GameTek in 1991 under the Frommer's travel-guide brand, the cartridge turns the handheld into a pocket reference for travellers. It carries practical data for major US cities, hotels, restaurants and attractions among them, all navigable on that little green screen. The idea sounds almost quaint now, in an age of phones that do the same thing effortlessly, but at the time it was a genuinely forward-looking use of hardware most people associated only with Tetris and Mario. It is information design squeezed into four shades of grey.

The pocket travel guide dream, decades before your phone made it look easy.

Why It Joined the Collection

The productivity titles are one of the most rewarding corners of the Game Boy's history to collect, because they show a road the platform only half-travelled: the Game Boy as everyday tool. Frommer's Travel Guide joins the collection's other non-gaming cartridges, sitting alongside the Frommer's Spell Checker, the Berlitz translator and the Japanese organizer carts. Gathered together, they make a quietly surprising argument, that the machine could have been a pocket computer as easily as a toy, and that a handful of publishers genuinely tried to make it one.

Frommer's Travel Guide is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.