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.

Some facts which might suprise...

Here are ten of the best, the kind of details that make collecting it so much fun, each one with the full story a click away.

Ten Surprising Game Boy Facts

1. A Game Boy has been to space. In 1993 a Game Boy travelled to the Mir space station, and it is considered the first games console in orbit. The story of the Game Boy that went to space is stranger than you would guess.

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, as explained in why the Game Boy screen was green.

4. The start-up logo was a legal trap. The Game Boy checks the Nintendo logo stored on every cartridge before it will boot, so unlicensed makers had to reproduce the trademark and exposed themselves to legal action. It all rides on the famous boot sequence.

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 cartridge 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 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.