Fresh Find: Game Boy Coasters, Box Art for Your Coffee Table

Decades after the last one rolled off the production line, the Game Boy keeps generating brand-new objects, and this arrival is a cheerfully modern example: a set of drinks coasters, printed with classic Game Boy cover art, made for grown-up fans to scatter across a coffee table.

What It Is

This 2018 coaster twin-pack, made by Pyramid International, features the cover designs of popular Game Boy Classic titles. It is a modern licensed item, part of the steady stream of tribute products that keep appearing long after the console itself was discontinued, and it joins the collection's other contemporary Game Boy homeware, including the Paladone mug and clock. Small and functional, it is really a way of putting the console's artwork on display in an ordinary living room.

Classic cover paintings, finally doing the important work of catching condensation.

Box Art Refuses to Die

There is a lovely theme running through the modern Game Boy merchandise the collection gathers: again and again, it is the box art that gets celebrated. From lavish coffee-table books to, quite literally, coffee-table coasters, the humble cover illustrations that once sold these games are being reframed as the console's real visual heritage. It is a striking reversal, because that artwork was originally disposable packaging, and here it is decades later, reprinted with care onto objects designed to sit out on display. The Game Boy's graphic identity, its logos, its cartridge shapes, its cover paintings, has quietly become a design language of its own.

Companies like Pyramid International, which specialises in licensed posters, mugs and homeware, exist because there is now a large, affluent audience of adults who grew up with the Game Boy and want a little of it in their homes. A coaster is a small, low-stakes way to buy back a piece of childhood, and gathering these modern items shows how the console has settled into a comfortable second life as nostalgic decor. They are not rare, but as a group they document something important: that the affection for the Game Boy is still very much a live, commercial force.

Why It Joined the Collection

Documenting the Game Boy's present is as important as documenting its past, and modern tribute homeware like this shows the console living on as everyday decoration. These coasters join the collection's other contemporary licensed pieces to chart the console's ongoing second life, and their focus on box art ties them to a recurring modern theme. Keeping them records how the Game Boy quietly became design heritage.

The Game Boy coaster collection is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.