New on the Shelf: The 1990 Game Boy Notebook

By 1990 the Game Boy had become popular enough in Japan that its silhouette started turning up on things that had nothing to do with playing games. This new arrival is a charming case in point: a Game Boy Notebook by Mori Toys, a piece of stationery cleverly disguised as the console itself.

A Game Boy that plays nothing but happily holds your homework and your cartridges.

What It Is

It is a clever two-in-one. From the outside the item is shaped like a Game Boy, complete with a Super Mario Land card slotted in where the screen would be, but it is really a notebook and, at the same time, a storage case for Game Boy cartridges. Made in Japan by Mori Toys and dating to 1990, it belongs to that first wave of official and semi-official Game Boy merchandise that appeared almost as soon as the console took off. Practical and decorative at once, it is exactly the sort of everyday object that rarely survives, which makes a clean example a pleasure to find.

The screen is a Super Mario Land card. The rest is blank pages waiting for you.

Why It Joined the Collection

A collection built around the DMG-01 is not only about consoles and cartridges; it is about the cultural wake the machine left behind. Early Japanese novelties like this notebook show how quickly the Game Boy became a lifestyle object as well as a toy, its shape recognisable enough to sell a book to fill in with your own handwriting. It sits alongside the other early Japanese Game Boy curios in the collection, a small, human reminder that the console was woven into daily life, not just switched on for play.

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