New Arrival: Game Boy Scouts, a 1990 Famitsu Supplement
Updated: 4 days ago
By early 1990 the Game Boy library was growing fast enough that someone needed to keep track of it, and Japan's biggest games magazine took on the job. This arrival is the result: the first volume of Game Boy Scouts, a supplement that set out to round up and promote everything arriving on the young handheld.
What It Is
Game Boy Scouts Vol. 1 was distributed with the Japanese magazine Famicom Tsushin in early February 1990, published by ASCII Corporation. It covers early post-launch titles such as Nemesis, Selection, Asmik-kun World and Baseball Kids, offering short previews and platform news. In effect it is one of the earliest structured efforts to catalogue and promote the growing Game Boy library, a job the collection itself now does. All four volumes of the series are catalogued here, and this is where it begins.
Famitsu and the Birth of Games Coverage
Famicom Tsushin, universally known today as Famitsu, was and remains the most influential games magazine in Japan, the publication whose review scores could make or break a title. That such a heavyweight devoted a dedicated supplement to the Game Boy barely half a year after launch says a great deal about how quickly the handheld was taken seriously. Game Boy Scouts was, in a sense, the professional press catching up with a phenomenon, trying to impose order on a flood of new cartridges before players drowned in choice.
The titles it previews are a snapshot of the moment: Nemesis, the handheld version of Konami's beloved Gradius shooter, sits beside now-obscure curiosities like Asmik-kun World and Baseball Kids. That mix is exactly what makes early coverage so valuable, because it treats the famous and the forgotten alike, as equally new. Supplements like this were bound into a magazine and rarely kept separately, so a surviving standalone volume is a genuine find, and having the full run of four is the kind of completeness the collection is built for.
Why It Joined the Collection
Early games journalism is a primary source for how the Game Boy was understood as it happened, and Game Boy Scouts is a particularly pure example: a document whose whole purpose was to survey the library at a single moment in early 1990. As the first of four volumes already in the collection, it anchors a complete little run that traces the handheld's Japanese software scene as it expanded. Preserving it keeps a first-hand record of the Game Boy's fast, chaotic early growth.
Game Boy Scouts Vol. 1 is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.
See the full feature: the Game Boy in print.
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