Did You Know? Ten Surprising Game Boy Facts for Collectors

After more than thirty years, you might think the Game Boy holds no more surprises. It does. Behind that familiar grey shell sits a pile of genuinely strange and wonderful stories.

Here are ten of the best, the kind of details that make collecting it so much fun.

Ten Surprising Game Boy Facts

1. A Game Boy has been to space. One flew to the Mir space station in 1993 and is considered the first games console in orbit.

2. It could find fish. The Bandai Pocket Sonar turned the Game Boy into a working sonar fish finder, recognised as the first sonar peripheral for a games console.

3. The green screen was an accident of economy. That pea-green look came from a cheap, reflective LCD with no backlight, chosen to keep the price and battery use low.

4. The start-up logo was a legal trap. The Game Boy reads the Nintendo logo from each cartridge before it boots, forcing unlicensed makers to copy the trademark and exposing them to legal action.

5. Its killer app came from the USSR. Tetris, bundled with the Game Boy in the West, was invented by Alexey Pajitnov in the Soviet Union.

6. It sold in staggering numbers. The monochrome Game Boy and the Game Boy Color together sold a combined 118.69 million units worldwide.

7. It held a world record camera. The Game Boy Camera was certified by Guinness World Records in 1999 as the world's smallest digital camera.

8. You could play with barcodes. The Namco Barcode Boy let you scan barcodes, even from supermarket packaging, to create and battle characters.

9. Mario's handheld debut had no Miyamoto. Super Mario Land was made by Gunpei Yokoi's hardware team rather than Mario's usual creator, which is why it feels so unusual.

10. Japan had game downloads in the year 2000. Through the Nintendo Power service you could write Game Boy games onto a blank cartridge at a convenience store kiosk, long before digital stores existed.

More Than a Toy

Every one of these Game Boy facts points to the same thing: a simple grey handheld that people kept stretching into something bigger, stranger and more enduring than anyone expected. It is exactly that depth that makes the original Game Boy so rewarding to collect.