The Rarest Pieces in the Collection
Updated: 4 days ago
Every serious collection has its crown jewels: the handful of pieces that took years to track down, that command the highest prices, or that simply almost never appear on the open market. A collection is often measured not by how many common items it holds but by how many genuine rarities, the things that other collectors have been quietly hunting for just as long. These are some of the hardest-to-find pieces in the Game Boy Museum.
They range from lavish boxed bundles down to objects so small you could lose them behind a sofa cushion, and each is rare for its own particular reason. Taken together, they are a short lesson in what actually makes a collectible scarce.
The German Star Sets
Two German-only bundles sit near the top of the list. The Super Star Set paired the console with The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening and Super Mario Land 2, while the Super 3 Set bundled three games, Tetris, Mega Man II and The Amazing Spider-Man, in a single large box. Bundles like these were produced for one market, sold in limited numbers over a short window, and then almost always broken up, the games and console split off and used separately while the outer box was thrown away. That is why a complete, intact example of either is such a prize: survival depended on someone deciding, against all common sense at the time, to keep the whole thing together.
Tiny Japanese Treasures
Sometimes the rarest things are also the smallest. The original Japanese accessory line included a battery case and a soft case, humble everyday items that were used, scuffed, worn out and thrown away by the thousand. Nobody thought of them as collectibles, because at the time they were simply the packaging and protection around the thing you actually wanted. Precisely because they were treated as disposable, surviving boxed examples are among the toughest pieces to find in the entire DMG-01 world, and completing the original Japanese accessory line is one of the quiet great challenges of Game Boy collecting.
Promotional Oddities
Then there are the pieces that were never sold to the public at all. The collection holds a Game Boy Dragonzamasu coin, a promotional token from a Japanese campaign, and a Game Boy game display, the kind of point-of-sale unit that lived on a shop counter and was almost always thrown out the moment the promotion ended. Retail and promotional material like this was made in tiny quantities for a single, temporary purpose, and it was never meant to leave the shop, let alone survive for decades. That combination makes it disproportionately hard to find today, and disproportionately evocative when it does turn up.
What Rarity Really Means
It is worth being precise about what makes these particular pieces rare, because scarcity is not one single thing. Low production is only half the story; the other half is low survival. An item made in modest numbers can still be common today if people treasured it, and an item made in large numbers can become rare if it was used up and discarded. The pieces here sit at the intersection of both forces: they were produced in small quantities, often for one market or one campaign, and they were made of exactly the everyday, disposable material that nobody thought worth keeping. Rarity, in other words, is as much about how an object was treated as about how many were made.
The Long Game of Collecting
Chasing pieces like these is the patient, long-haul side of the hobby. They do not appear to order; you cannot simply decide to buy one and expect to find it that week. Instead you wait, sometimes for years, watching for the rare moment when an example surfaces in good condition, and then you have to be ready. That is what separates a collection with genuine depth from one that merely has the common highlights, and it is why finding one of these is the reward that keeps the whole hunt alive.
The rarest pieces, each photographed and documented, can be explored in the collection.
For the games specifically, see the rarest and most valuable Game Boy games.
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