New on the Shelf: When the Game Boy Tried to Be a Spell Checker

It is easy to forget that some people genuinely tried to sell the Game Boy as an office tool. This arrival is a monument to that earnest, slightly hopeless ambition: a 1991 cartridge that turned Nintendo's games machine into a pocket spell checker and calculator.

A dictionary, a calculator and zero boss fights, bravely crammed into a games cartridge.

What It Is

Spell Checker and Calculator is part of the InfoGenius series, a line that presented the Game Boy as a practical everyday tool rather than a toy. It combines a large built-in dictionary with basic calculator functions, all running from a single cartridge. It is one of several non-gaming productivity titles in the collection, sitting alongside the Frommer's Travel Guide and the Berlitz French Translator from the same broad family of reference cartridges.

The Game Boy as Office Assistant

The InfoGenius line, published by GameTek, is one of the most endearing dead ends in the Game Boy's history. In an age before smartphones, the idea of carrying a dictionary, a translator or a travel guide in your pocket was genuinely appealing, and the Game Boy was the pocket computer millions of people already owned. The logic was sound; the execution ran headlong into reality. Spell-checking a word by thumbing through menus on a directional pad, with no keyboard and no backlight, was slower and clumsier than simply using a paper dictionary, and the series never found much of an audience.

Can the Game Boy improve your spelling? A heroic, hopeless no.

That commercial failure is exactly what makes these cartridges so collectable now. Because they sold poorly, they are relatively scarce, and because they are so wonderfully at odds with what the Game Boy was actually good at, they are irresistible curiosities. Spell Checker and Calculator joins the collection's other InfoGenius and productivity titles to map this whole optimistic, doomed corner of the library, the moment when people looked at the best-selling handheld in the world and asked whether it might also help you with your spelling. The answer was no, but the attempt is a delight.

Why It Joined the Collection

The Game Boy's productivity software is one of its most charming and least-understood corners, and the InfoGenius line is its clearest expression. This Spell Checker and Calculator joins the collection's Frommer's Travel Guide, Berlitz translator and other non-game cartridges to document the attempt to turn a toy into a tool. Preserving it keeps a lovable failed experiment, and a very pre-smartphone dream, on the shelf.

The InfoGenius Spell Checker and Calculator is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.