Pikachu's Hardware: The Pokemon Accessories of the Game Boy

When a phenomenon gets big enough, it stops living only inside the games and starts colonising everything around them. Pokemon reached that scale on the Game Boy almost instantly, and the clearest proof is not the cartridges but the accessories. Nintendo took its ordinary, everyday add-ons, the cables and printers and cleaning kits, and re-dressed them in Pikachu's unmistakable yellow and black. The result is one of the most charming and collectible sub-worlds in the whole hobby.

When a mascot takes over the hardware, not just the games.

Here is a tour of Pikachu's hardware, the Pokemon-branded accessory line as it appears in the collection, and why these themed variants matter so much.

The Link Cable: Poetry in Yellow

Start with the most fitting piece of all. The collection holds a Pikachu-edition link cable, and there is something almost poetic about it. The entire design of Pokemon was built around trading over the link cable, so a Pikachu-branded version of that exact accessory is the theme wrapping back on itself. It turned the single most important piece of Pokemon hardware into a collectible object in its own right, and it is the natural cornerstone of any Pikachu accessory shelf.

Pikachu Game Link Cable

The Pocket Printer

Next comes one of the most beloved peripherals of the era in its rarest coat. The collection includes a Pikachu-edition Game Boy Pocket Printer, the little thermal printer that let players print out screenshots, team rosters and Game Boy Camera photos on narrow sticker-backed rolls. In its standard grey form the printer is already a favourite; in Pikachu yellow it becomes a genuine showpiece, tying the printing craze directly to the mascot that drove the whole Pokemon boom.

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  Pikachu Pokemon Printer for Game Boy

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  Pikachu Pokemon Printer for Game Boy

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  Pikachu Pokemon Printer for Game Boy

The Cleaning Kit and the Everyday Extras

The branding reached even the most mundane corners of ownership. The collection holds a Pikachu-edition cleaning kit, the sort of maintenance accessory that almost nobody thought to keep, which is exactly why a surviving example is such a treat. It is a perfect illustration of how total the Pokemon takeover was: not just the exciting hardware but the humble housekeeping gear got the Pikachu treatment, because there was seemingly no product a child would not want more of if it had the mascot on it.

Keep the Game Boy clean with a little help of a yellow friend

A Cartridge That Rumbles: Pokemon Pinball

Not every piece of Pokemon hardware is bolted on from outside; one of the most unusual sits inside a game. Pokemon Pinball turned the Pokedex into a pinball table, and to sell the fantasy it carried Nintendo's first built-in rumble motor, powered by its own AAA battery in a slot on the back of the cartridge.

Because that rumble cartridge counted as new hardware in its own right, it was even assigned its own Game Boy hardware number (DMG-13), which is why it sits among the accessories in the collection rather than the games, an unusual fate for a title built with the Game Boy Color in mind. The full story is in Pokemon Pinball: The Cartridge That Shook in Your Hands.

Pokemon Pinball with built-in rumble pack

Every time the ball cannoned off a bumper, the whole console shook in your hands. Because the motor lives in the cartridge rather than the console, it buzzes an original 1989 Game Boy just as readily as a Game Boy Color, and although the game was sold under the Color banner it still plays on the grey brick in monochrome. It is a neat reminder that Pokemon pushed not only the Game Boy's software but its hardware, right down to making it shake.

Beyond the Official Line

Pikachu's presence spilled past Nintendo's own catalogue, too, and the collection embraces that wider world. It includes a one-off Pikachu fan-art Game Boy console, a custom, hand-decorated machine that is not an official product but earns its place because fan devotion is such a huge part of the Pokemon story. Alongside it sits a Pokemon music item, a small sign of how far the brand travelled beyond the console and into every corner of a child's daily life.

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  Pikachu Game Boy Console Fan Art

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  Pokemon Game Music Collection

Why Themed Hardware Is So Collectible

Themed variants of ordinary accessories occupy a special place in collecting. On the one hand they are functionally identical to their plain counterparts; on the other, they are far scarcer, tied to a specific craze and a specific window in time. Because they were bought to be used rather than preserved, clean, complete, boxed examples are genuinely hard to find, and the more everyday the accessory, the less likely anyone kept it. A Pikachu cleaning kit that survived in its box is, in its own quiet way, rarer than many a game.

There is a deeper reason they matter, too. The Pikachu hardware line documents the exact mechanism by which a game becomes a phenomenon: the moment the mascot leaps off the cartridge and onto every object in the ecosystem. You can read the scale of Pokemon's success directly from how many ordinary things got the yellow-and-black treatment, which is why this shelf tells the story better than the games alone ever could.

Building the Pikachu Shelf

For a collector, gathering the Pikachu accessories is one of the most rewarding themes to pursue, because it combines desirability with genuine scarcity and a clear, joyful visual identity. Set the link cable, the printer, the cleaning kit and the fan pieces side by side and you have a compact history of the single most important thing that ever happened to the Game Boy, told entirely through its hardware.

Every Pikachu-edition accessory named here is documented, with photos, in the collection.

This piece is part of Pokemon and the Game Boy, the museum's guide to the whole Pokemon corner.