New Arrival: The Time Boy, a Game Boy That Tells the Time

A Game Boy that plays nothing and just tells the time. Peak 1995 logic.

The Game Boy's silhouette is so iconic that companies have spent decades stamping it onto things that have nothing to do with games. This arrival is a charming early example: a tiny Game Boy that hangs from your keys and, instead of playing anything, simply tells you the time.

What It Is

The Time Boy is a Nintendo-licensed miniature replica of the Game Boy that works as a keychain clock with an alarm function. Mani Industries offered it in a range of colours from 1995, turning the console's shape into a small, wearable gadget. The same maker also produced the Calculator Boy, a matching miniature that turns the Game Boy into a working calculator, and which is catalogued alongside it in the collection.

The Game Boy as a Shape

What the Time Boy really demonstrates is how quickly the Game Boy stopped being just a console and became a recognisable form, an outline so familiar that it could carry any function at all. A clock, a calculator, a keychain: the actual purpose barely matters, because the whole appeal is that it looks like a Game Boy. As early as 1995, while the real console was still selling strongly, its design had already become a piece of pop-culture shorthand that other products could borrow to feel fun and current.

Does everything a Game Boy does, except the games. But it is adorable.

The pairing with the Calculator Boy is the delightful part. Together they form a tiny family of Game Boy-shaped gadgets that do everything except play games, a little joke about a games machine repurposed for the most mundane office tasks. Small novelties like these, made to dangle from a keyring and take daily knocks, rarely survive in good condition, so a clean example with its colour intact is a nice, and genuinely uncommon, find. It is a miniature monument to the moment the Game Boy became a design icon.

Why It Joined the Collection

Novelty items that borrow the Game Boy's shape document how completely the console entered popular culture, and the Time Boy is a lovely 1995 example. It pairs directly with the Calculator Boy from the same maker to form a small set of Game Boy-shaped gadgets, and preserving it keeps a charming, easily-lost piece of the console's rise from games machine to design icon.

The Time Boy is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.