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The Game Boy's Hidden Powers, Part 9: Getting Online

Marcel Pflug

16 hours ago

4 min read

Imagine checking your email on a Game Boy. Not on a phone, not on a laptop, but on the little grey handheld, tethered to the wall by a telephone cord. Around the year 2000, for a brief and strange moment, you could. The Shark MX was email for the Game Boy, and the company that built it was not a software house or a phone maker but the people behind the most notorious cheat device of the era.

Email for Game Boy

The Shark MX was InterAct's attempt to put the Game Boy online, and it worked in the most turn-of-the-millennium way imaginable. The cartridge came with a small adapter that plugged into an ordinary telephone wall socket, so the handheld could dial out and connect to InterAct's SharkWire service and send and receive real email. Every owner was handed their own address, in the tidy form yourname@gamesharker.com, and the box even bundled thirty minutes of access time to get you started. It was dial-up internet, shrunk down to fit in the palm of your hand.

The timing is the whole story. This arrived a few years before mobile phones made pocket email so ordinary that nobody would think twice about it. For a short window, the idea of tapping out a message on a Game Boy and having it actually reach someone across the country felt like a small miracle, and then the future arrived and quietly made the whole thing pointless. It is one of the most charming dead ends in the history of Game Boy connectivity.

The cheat company that gave you email

Here is the twist that makes the Shark MX so much fun. It was sold under the GameShark brand, the same name stamped on the cheat cartridges that let a generation of players give themselves infinite lives and walk through walls. So the company famous for helping you break games decided to hand you an inbox. And true to its roots, the SharkWire service did more than carry your messages: it also piped gaming news, tips and cheat codes straight to your handheld, which was a very natural fit for the people who lived and breathed cheat codes. Your Game Boy could receive a note from a friend and the latest cheats for a new game in the same session, all down the same phone line.

The Game Boy was not even InterAct's only online experiment. At almost exactly the same moment, on the first day of the year 2000, the company launched a sibling for the Nintendo 64 called SharkWire Online, sold only in the United States, giving the big console its own dial-up portal and email. GameShark, it seems, briefly wanted to get every game machine in the house talking to the outside world.

The original Game Boy could get email too

Look at the box and it promises only two machines: the Game Boy Color and the Game Boy Pocket. That was the marketing, aimed at whatever was current on shop shelves in 2000. But the Shark MX is a plain monochrome cartridge, and later hardware testing confirms what the packaging never mentions: it runs perfectly happily on the original 1989 DMG-01 as well. The first Game Boy, the big grey slab that started everything, was simply left off the box because it had been discontinued by the time the Shark MX appeared, not because it was incompatible.

Shark MX - Email for the Game Boy — Email for Game Boy, a telephone cord does the trick.

There is something quietly wonderful in that. A console designed in the late 1980s, a machine built for Tetris and a link cable, could sit on a desk in the year 2000 and send email across the country, and nobody ever bothered to put it on the box. The oldest Game Boy of all turns out to be a perfectly capable email terminal; it just never got the credit.

A machine that can never come back online

The Shark MX carries a melancholy that most cartridges do not. It was never a self-contained thing; it needed InterAct's servers and a working telephone number on the other end, and it would not even start until you activated it with a factory-issued registration code, called in over a toll-free line. Everything about it depended on a service that no longer exists. When the GameShark trademarks were sold to Mad Catz in 2003 and InterAct wound down, SharkWire went dark, and the activation number was eventually disconnected.

GB Shark MX - Email for an old grey brick — For Game Boy Color and Game Boy Pocket? That's only half the truth...

So the one thing the Shark MX was built to do, it can no longer do. The cartridge still boots, but the world it was meant to reach has been switched off at the other end, and short of someone rebuilding the service from scratch it will stay that way. It is a small monument to how fragile online gadgets really are: a game cartridge lasts for decades, but the service behind it can vanish in an afternoon. That is exactly why an object like this belongs in a collection, kept complete in its box, so the strange ambition of a Game Boy with an email address is not forgotten just because its inbox went quiet. To see it and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.