New Item: Radio Boy, the Game Boy That Only Plays the Radio

Pick it up and your thumbs go straight to where the D-pad should be. It is the right size, the right grey, the right shape, and then you notice there is no cartridge slot, no start button, and where the screen belongs there sits a radio dial. This is Radio Boy, a Game Boy that plays no games at all.

Your thumbs reach for a D-pad that isn't there.

Officially licensed by Nintendo and released in 1993 as item number 83003, Radio Boy is a working AM/FM radio dressed up as the most famous handheld of its decade. It came with a stereo earphone and a tuning display sitting exactly where the Game Boy screen would be. Everything about it says Game Boy except the one thing a Game Boy is actually for.

A Game Boy that is not a Game Boy

The trick of Radio Boy is how completely it commits to the disguise. It is styled to look exactly like a Game Boy, down to the silhouette a whole generation could recognise from across a room. But it plays nothing. There are no cartridges, no falling blocks, no plumber. Under the familiar shell is a small radio and nothing more.

That it was officially licensed matters. This was not a knock-off trying to fool anyone. Nintendo signed off on turning its flagship product into a radio, which tells you how confident the company had become that the Game Boy shape itself was worth selling, quite apart from the games it was built to run.

Where the screen used to be

Look at where the screen should be and you find a tuning display instead, the dial you slide to hunt for a station. It picks up both AM and FM, and it came with a stereo earphone so you could listen the way you once would have played: head down, absorbed, out in the world. The muscle memory is all wrong and all right at once, your hands expecting a game and getting a radio station.

Where the screen should be, a tuning dial.

As a piece of design it is a small joke told with a straight face. Every cue points at gaming, and the payoff is the six o'clock news or a pop station. There is something quietly delightful about a device that looks so serious about being a Game Boy and then simply plays the radio.

The shape becomes the brand

Radio Boy belongs to a specific point in the Game Boy's life, the moment where the silhouette stopped being merely the outline of a product and became a lifestyle object in its own right. By 1993 the Game Boy was so widely recognised that its shape could be lifted off the games machine entirely and pressed onto something else, and people would still know at a glance exactly what they were looking at. The brand had escaped the hardware.

This is how genuinely famous objects behave. Their form turns into shorthand. A Game Boy-shaped radio works as both a gag and a keepsake precisely because you do not need a logo to know what it is imitating. The outline does all the talking.

A family of look-alikes

Radio Boy did not stand alone. It was part of a whole wave of Game Boy-shaped gadgets, alongside the Walkie Talkie Boy, a Time Boy clock and a Calculator Boy, each one taking the same beloved silhouette and hiding a different everyday function inside it. Seen together they are a small museum of one idea repeated: the Game Boy as radio, as clock, as calculator, as two-way radio, anything at all except a games console.

It is worth drawing one distinction, because it is easy to muddle. Radio Boy is a standalone radio that merely looks like a Game Boy. That is quite different from the accessories covered in the article Tune In: FM Radio Add-ons for the Game Boy, which are real tuners you plug into an actual Game Boy to turn the console itself into a radio. Radio Boy borrows the shape; those add-ons borrow the machine. If the idea of a Game Boy playing the radio appeals to you, both are worth a look.

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