The Sound of the Game Boy, Part 1: The Game Boy as an Instrument

A synthesizer in your pocket

Most of the cartridges in this collection are games. This one is not. Slot the Nanoloop NL13 into a Game Boy, flick the power switch, and instead of a title screen you get a glowing grid of little squares. There is no princess to rescue and no high score to beat. Instead, the machine invites you to make music. In that moment the Game Boy stops being a console and becomes an instrument, a tiny synthesizer and drum machine that runs on batteries and slips into a coat pocket.

The little grey cart that turned a toy into a techno machine.

It works because the Game Boy was always a small musical machine in disguise. Nintendo gave it a dedicated sound chip with four voices, two pulse-wave channels for melodies and basslines, one programmable wave channel, and one noise channel for percussion and hi-hats. Game designers used those voices for jingles and sound effects. Nanoloop simply hands them to you and asks what you want to do with them.

Oliver Wittchow and the birth of Nanoloop

Nanoloop is the work of one person, the Hamburg artist and musician Oliver Wittchow. It began as a study project at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg in the late 1990s, when Wittchow started programming the Game Boy to generate sound directly from its own hardware rather than playing back pre-recorded music.

The first public performance took place at the Liquid Sky club in Cologne in early 1998. The venue is long gone, but the idea stuck. Word spread, and Nanoloop cartridges became commercially available within Germany in late 1999, with worldwide sales starting in 2000. In 2002 the first album made entirely with the software, simply titled nanoloop 1.0, appeared on the Disco Bruit label, followed by a long trail of other releases.

How you actually make music on it

Nanoloop is a step sequencer wrapped around a synthesizer, and its interface is famously minimal. Instead of menus and words, you get a grid. Each of the four sound channels has its own set of steps, sixteen little cells arranged in a tidy square, and you switch cells on and off to place notes in time. It looks less like a music program and more like a puzzle, which is part of the charm.

That silver foil label, marked NL13 in the corner, is the badge of a hand-made instrument.

From there you sculpt the sound by hand. Hold a button and tilt the D-pad, and a single cell changes its pitch, its volume, its length, or its timbre. The palette is deliberately narrow, raw rectangular waves, noise, and a simple four-bit waveform, with no presets and no effects racks to hide behind. That restriction is the whole point. With so few ingredients, every small tweak matters, and people quickly discovered they could coax surprisingly deep, hypnotic techno and dub out of a children's toy.

The scene it helped launch

Nanoloop did not stay a private experiment for long. It arrived just as a new musical movement was taking shape, one that treated ageing game hardware as a serious instrument. That movement became known as chiptune, and Nanoloop sat at its foundation.

Its great companion was Little Sound Dj, usually shortened to LSDj, written by the Swedish developer Johan Kotlinski and released in 2000. Where Nanoloop is spare and grid-based, LSDj is a dense, tracker-style program with more control and a steeper learning curve. Between them, the two cartridges gave a generation of musicians everything they needed to compose on a Game Boy, and most players still swear by one or the other.

Around these tools grew a whole culture. The New York collective and netlabel 8bitpeoples, founded in 1999, gathered artists such as Nullsleep and Bit Shifter, and from 2006 the Blip Festival brought chiptune performers together on stage in New York and beyond. Suddenly the Game Boy was not a relic in a drawer, it was a live instrument glowing under the lights of a club.

The NL13 in the collection

The cartridge in the museum is a Nanoloop unit marked NL13, and it wears its homemade origins openly. A silver foil nanoloop label is stuck to the front, with the marking NL13 tucked into the corner. The shell itself is not a Nintendo shell at all. It is a plain grey-brown third-party case, moulded on the top grip with nothing but the single word GAME, rather than the usual Nintendo Game Boy lettering. Turn it over and you find PAT. PEND. moulded into the back, held together by a single screw.

That is a lovely detail once you know the story. Early Nanoloop cartridges were hand-made homebrew, assembled in small batches and sold in blank aftermarket shells, because there was no factory stamping out official cases for a one-person music project. On an ordinary game, a non-Nintendo shell with a generic GAME logo would be a red flag, the classic warning sign of a bootleg. Here it is the opposite, an honest badge of a small-batch instrument built by hand and sold to the people who wanted it. We are not dating this particular NL13 revision precisely, since that detail is unconfirmed.

The idea proved durable enough to keep evolving. Over the years Nanoloop grew through several versions on the original Game Boy, gained a special mono cartridge with a real analog filter, moved to the Game Boy Advance as a more powerful software synthesizer, and later reached modern phones as iOS and Android apps. In 2019 Wittchow returned to where it began, launching a successful Kickstarter campaign for a standalone, Game-Boy-inspired hardware groovebox that puts the whole instrument in a dedicated little box, no console required.

That is the joy of a collection like this one. A cartridge that looks almost like a mistake, wrong shell, no logo, one lonely screw, turns out to be a small landmark in the history of electronic music. If you would like to see more of the Game Boy's stranger and more wonderful side, come and explore the rest of the Game Boy Museum.