New on the Shelf: The Record From the Game Boy TV Adverts

If you watched television in Britain in the early 1990s, you may have heard this arrival without ever knowing its name. It is a small slab of vinyl, a 1992 single called Playing with the Boy, and its bleeping, insistent hook was the sound of the Game Boy's own television commercials.

Technician 2 Playing with the Boy 1992 Game Boy vinyl single

What It Is

This is a 7-inch vinyl single from an electronic music studio project built entirely around the sound of the Game Boy. Released in the United Kingdom in 1992 on BMG Records, Technician 2's Playing with the Boy featured in the Game Boy television commercials of the early nineties, making it a genuine piece of the console's own marketing. It is an unusual crossover item, and it does not stand alone in the collection: the Ambassadors of Funk Super Mario Land CD is here too, its companion in a small sub-collection of Game Boy-inspired music.

The Sound of an Advert, Pressed to Vinyl

What makes this record special is the direction of the borrowing. Plenty of songs have sampled game sounds, but here the music and the advertising are tangled together from the start: a track built from Game Boy bleeps that then became the soundtrack to selling the Game Boy itself. It captures a very early-nineties moment, when the crackle and buzz of cheap electronics was fashionable, when rave and dance culture were hungry for exactly these synthetic, toy-like textures, and when a games company was happy to ride that wave to make its handheld feel cool.

Together with the Ambassadors of Funk CD, this vinyl marks the point where the Game Boy briefly became pop music, its distinctive sound escaping the handheld to appear on the radio, on television and in record shops. These crossover pieces are easy to dismiss as novelties, but they are strong evidence of just how deeply the console had penetrated the culture: not merely a toy children played with, but a sound the wider world recognised and danced to. Physical music from this era is also increasingly scarce, which makes a surviving single a satisfying rescue.

Why It Joined the Collection

Music is one of the most surprising measures of the Game Boy's cultural reach, and this record has a double claim on the story: it is both Game Boy-inspired music and part of the console's actual advertising. Paired with the Ambassadors of Funk CD, it anchors the collection's little archive of Game Boy pop. Preserving it keeps hold of a moment when the console's voice slipped out of the handheld and into the charts and the ad breaks.

The Technician 2 vinyl is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.

See the full feature: the Game Boy and music.