Fresh Find: A Brand-New Game Boy Cartridge, Made in 2019

Here is a puzzle for a collector: a Game Boy cartridge that is brand new and thirty years old at the same time. This arrival is a modern, factory-fresh reissue of the 1992 Star Wars game, manufactured in 2019 to run on real Game Boy hardware, a genuinely new object made to feel like an old one.

Han shot first; Limited Run shipped later.

What It Is

This is a physical re-release of the original Star Wars Game Boy game, bringing the handheld film adaptation back onto real Game Boy cartridges many years after it first appeared. The important detail for collectors is that it is not an original Capcom retail copy. It is an officially licensed reissue produced by Limited Run for the Game Boy and compatible hardware, sold in more than one format, including a Classic Edition and a Premium Edition. That gives it a collector profile entirely of its own, separate from the original DMG release, which the collection also holds alongside the UK Star Wars console bundle.

New Games for an Old Machine

The very existence of this cartridge tells a remarkable story about the Game Boy's afterlife. Limited Run is part of a modern movement to give beloved older games proper, official physical releases again, pressing real cartridges and printing real boxes for a hardware generation the mainstream industry abandoned decades ago. That such a thing is commercially viable, that people will pay for a newly made Game Boy cartridge in an age of digital downloads, is proof of how deep the affection for the console runs. The console stopped being made long ago; the appetite for holding its games never did.

Brand new and thirty years old at the same time. The Force is strong with this loophole.

The multiple editions, Classic and Premium, are a very modern collecting wrinkle. Where the original 1992 game simply existed, this reissue was designed from the outset as a collectible, with tiered packaging aimed squarely at enthusiasts, and often produced in deliberately limited numbers. Holding the original Capcom cartridge and this modern reissue side by side is a fascinating study in how the meaning of a Game Boy game changes over thirty years, from a toy sold to children into a curated object made for collectors.

Why It Joined the Collection

A collection that documents the whole life of the Game Boy has to include its present, not only its past, and this modern reissue is a vivid piece of that present. It pairs with the collection's original Star Wars cartridge and UK console bundle to show the same game across the decades, and it stands as evidence that people are still lovingly manufacturing for the platform today. Preserving it keeps a record of the Game Boy as a living object of desire, not a dead one.

The Limited Run Star Wars reissue is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

See the full feature: the new-cartridge renaissance.