New on the Shelf: A Nuby Game Boy Accessory Advertisement
- Marcel Pflug
- Sep 7, 2022
- 2 min read
Advertisements are the fossil record of a product's world. Long after the accessories themselves have been lost, the adverts that sold them survive in the back pages of old magazines, and they tell you what people were promised and how. This arrival is one such fossil: a United States magazine advert from Nuby, one of the best-known makers of Game Boy accessories of the era.
What It Is
This is a period print advertisement for Nuby's line of Game Boy add-ons, the kind of full-page pitch that ran in gaming and general-interest magazines to reach the console's enormous audience. It is one of several third-party accessory ads in the collection, sitting alongside campaigns from Naki and Joyplus, and it complements the many Nuby accessories that are catalogued individually. Where the products show what was made, the advert shows how it was sold.
Selling the Fixes
Nuby was one of the giants of the accessory trade, a name that turned up on light-magnifiers, carry cases, battery packs and every other gadget a Game Boy owner might want. Its advertising had a job to do that Nintendo's never did: it had to convince you that the console you already owned was not quite complete, that it needed a light to be seen, a magnifier to be enjoyed, a case to be carried. Reading these ads now, you can watch the entire logic of the third-party market laid bare, each one gently insisting that the real Game Boy experience was one upgrade away.
There is a preservation twist to advertising, too. Ads were the most disposable print of all, bound into magazines that were themselves thrown away, so a clean, isolated example is surprisingly hard to come by. Yet they are among the best evidence we have of which accessories existed, how they were priced and how they were marketed, sometimes the only surviving record of a product that itself did not last. As a set, the collection's accessory adverts from Nuby, Naki and Joyplus form a small gallery of how the Game Boy's after-market talked to its customers.
Why It Joined the Collection
Documenting the Game Boy properly means documenting how it was sold, not only what was sold, and advertising is the clearest window onto that. This Nuby advert pairs with the collection's Nuby products and its other accessory ads to tell both halves of the story at once: the object and the pitch. Keeping the paper alongside the hardware preserves a fuller, more honest picture of the busy commercial world that grew up around the little grey machine.
The Nuby advertisement is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.
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