Fresh Find: The Naki Master Pack, Every Game Boy Add-On in One Box
- Marcel Pflug
- Aug 5, 2022
- 2 min read
The original Game Boy left a lot of room for improvement, and a whole industry rushed to fill it. Most makers sold their fixes one at a time. Naki had a bolder idea: put nearly all of them in a single box. This arrival, the Naki Master Pak, is one of the most comprehensive accessory sets the Game Boy ever had.
What It Is
The Master Pak gathers a small army of add-ons under one lid: an adjustable magnifying glass with a built-in light (the Brite Beam), a cleaning kit (the Eliminator), an AC adapter, a shoulder bag (the Pro Pouch), a battery pack (the Action Pak) and a replacement decorative screen cover (the Cool Screen). It is essentially a starter kit for taking the Game Boy seriously, everything a keen player might buy over months, sold in one go. Several of those Naki pieces, including the Cool Screen and the Action Pak, are also catalogued individually in the collection, which makes the complete set a satisfying centrepiece for them.
The Third-Party Gold Rush
The Master Pak only makes sense against the backdrop of the early-nineties accessory boom. The Game Boy's very shortcomings, its dim, unlit screen, its hunger for batteries, its tiny display, created an enormous market for third-party makers, and companies like Naki, Nuby and Joyplus competed to solve the same handful of problems in ever more elaborate ways. Naki's answer was to stop making the customer choose: rather than sell a light, or a magnifier, or a battery pack, it sold all of them at once. The playful sub-brand names, Brite Beam, Eliminator, Pro Pouch, Action Pak, are pure period marketing, each mundane accessory given a superhero-style title.
Complete boxed sets like this are far harder to find than the individual parts, precisely because they were meant to be broken open and split up: the light lived on the console, the bag went travelling, the cleaning kit ended up in a drawer. An intact Master Pak, with all its oddly named components still together, is a rare survivor and a perfect snapshot of an era when the accessories for a Game Boy could cost as much as the Game Boy itself.
Why It Joined the Collection
The third-party accessory scene is one of the richest and most overlooked parts of the Game Boy story, and the Master Pak captures it in a single object. It also anchors a little cluster in the collection, tying together the individual Naki pieces already catalogued and showing how a maker packaged its whole range. Keeping a complete set preserves not just the hardware but the ambition behind it, one company's attempt to sell the entire Game Boy experience in one confident box.
The Naki Master Pak is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.
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