Brain Training on the Game Boy, Years Before It Was Cool

Everyone remembers the brain-training craze that swept the Nintendo DS in the mid-2000s. Fewer people know it had a quiet ancestor on the original Game Boy. This arrival is one of them, a 1999 Japanese puzzle game whose title translates, wonderfully, as making your square head round.

Brain training before Brain Age was even a twinkle in the DS's eye.

What It Is

This is the pink version of Shikakui Atama o Maru Kusuru, a Japanese educational Game Boy series aimed at a broad audience, with a stated range from elementary-school level all the way up to adults. It is built around cognitive training through quizzes and problem-solving tasks, wrapping genuine learning in the friendly form of a game. The blue version of the game is also catalogued in the collection, the two colours marking different strands of the same educational series.

The Ancestor of a Craze

The fascination of this cartridge is how far ahead of its time it looks. When Nintendo launched Brain Age on the DS in 2005, the idea of a video game that trained your mind became a global phenomenon and sold in the tens of millions. Yet here, six years earlier, is the same fundamental pitch on the humble Game Boy: puzzles and quizzes framed as a way to sharpen your thinking, marketed to children and adults alike. Japan had a long, healthy tradition of educational software that the West largely ignored, and games like this show the brain-training genre quietly incubating on monochrome hardware long before it conquered the world.

Japan quietly invented the genre while the rest of us were busy stacking Tetris blocks.

The playful title is worth savouring, too. The image of a square head being rounded off, of rigid thinking made flexible, is a charming way to sell mental exercise, and it captures a very Japanese knack for making self-improvement feel light and fun rather than earnest. That the series came in multiple coloured versions, pink and blue among them, points to a whole family of these brain-limbering carts, a small genre unto themselves. Educational Game Boy titles rarely travelled and were rarely kept, which makes a surviving example a nice window onto a side of the library the West mostly never saw.

Why It Joined the Collection

The Game Boy's educational and non-game software is one of its most overlooked corners, and this brain-training title is a standout example, a clear forerunner of a genre that would later become a worldwide craze. Paired with its blue counterpart in the collection, it documents a distinctly Japanese strand of the library that rarely reached Western players. Preserving it keeps hold of an early, charming ancestor of the whole train-your-brain phenomenon.

The pink Shikakui Atama o Maru Kusuru is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.