Radio Boy, the Game Boy That Plays the Radio

This one is fresh off the doormat, and it is a Game Boy that never played a single game. Radio Boy is exactly what it looks like: a working AM/FM pocket radio built into a shell shaped like a DMG-01, right down to the directional pad, the pair of round buttons and the speaker grille. Where the green screen would be, there is a radio dial instead. It is a small, cheerful thing, and it captures something important about the early 1990s better than almost any cartridge could.

What It Is

Radio Boy is a Game Boy AM/FM receiver with a stereo earphone, and despite the toy-like styling it is a proper little radio. The card lists everything on board: an AM/FM switch, a tuning control and dial scale, a combined on/off and volume control, an earphone jack and a belt clip. It runs on two AA batteries, delivering three volts, and the stereo earphone tucks into the blister alongside it. The whole device is the size and silhouette of the console it imitates, so it slips into a pocket just as the original did.

Where the green screen should be, there is a tuning dial. Peak early-90s.

Officially Licensed, and Proud of It

What lifts Radio Boy above the countless generic knock-offs of the era is that it is the real thing. The packaging is careful to say so: Nintendo and Game Boy are noted as trademarks of Nintendo, and Radio Boy itself is described as a trademark of Nintendo, licensed to Mani. It carries a 1993 Mani copyright, was manufactured by Mani Industries Ltd, wears the item number 83003, and was distributed in the United States by Prima Merchandise. That paper trail is exactly the kind of detail a collector loves, because it turns a fun object into a documented, officially sanctioned piece of Game Boy history rather than an anonymous look-alike.

Why It Joined the Collection

By the early 1990s the Game Boy was not just a console; it was a shape, a silhouette instantly recognisable to a whole generation, and licensees rushed to stamp it onto everything from stationery to lifestyle gadgets. Radio Boy is a lovely example of that phenomenon: the console's outline reused to sell a completely different product, a radio, on the strength of the Game Boy name alone. Finding it still sealed on its original card, earphone and all, makes it doubly appealing, a time capsule of the moment the Game Boy became a brand as much as a machine. It sits naturally alongside the other licensed Game Boy novelties in the collection, and it is one of my favourite recent finds.

Radio Boy will be catalogued, with photographs, on its own page in the collection shortly.