Game Boy

The Netherlands has given the medium more than its share of games, and in Zoetermeer it has given them a home. The Nationaal Videogame Museum is a national museum devoted entirely to video games, and like the best of its kind it does not ask you to admire the exhibits from a distance. It asks you to play them. A national home, hands on The museum sets out to tell the whole story of games, not only the famous titles but the social and cultural side: how we played, who we play

The original Game Boy, the grey DMG-01 from 1989, has one of the longest-lived cartridge slots in gaming. It kept accepting new games for well over a decade, long after newer and flashier handhelds had come and gone. But not every Game Boy cartridge will run on it, and the clue to which ones do is usually sitting right there in your hand: the colour and the shape of the plastic shell. This guide explains, in plain terms, which cartridges a 1989 Game Boy can play, which it can

A Game Boy does not know what day it is. Switch one on after ten years in a drawer and it starts as blankly as it did the morning it left the shop: no clock, no calendar, no sense that any time has passed at all. And yet a small family of cartridges could tell the time to the minute, keep a day and a night of their own, and in one case even wake you with an alarm. The clock was never in the console. Like so many of this machine's hidden powers, it was hiding in the cartridge.

In 1997 you could not walk past a schoolyard in Japan without hearing a Tamagotchi beep. Bandai's little egg-shaped virtual pets were a genuine craze, and like every craze of the age it spilled onto the Game Boy. Under the banner Game de Hakken!!, which means roughly "Discover it in a game!", Bandai turned the keychain pet into a full handheld experience. Three of these Japan-only cartridges now sit in the collection, and while they look like near-identical merchandise tie-in

On the right-hand edge of the Game Boy, under a small rubber flap, sits a little trapezoid socket that is easy to overlook. It does nothing on its own. But plug a cable into it, run that cable to a second Game Boy, and something quietly historic happens: two handhelds become one shared world. That socket, the Game Link port, is how the Game Boy stopped being a solitary toy and became social. It made two-player Tetris a playground obsession, it made trading Pokémon not just po

The single most important thing about the Game Boy was not its screen or its processor. It was the fact that it ran for a very long time on batteries you could buy in any corner shop. Its rivals had sharper, colourful, backlit screens, and they drained their cells in a couple of hours. The Game Boy kept going and going, and that endurance, more than anything, is why it won. This part of the series looks at how the console is powered: the four AA cells in the back, the clever

Switch on a Game Boy and before a single game appears you hear it: that two-note “ba-ding” as the Nintendo logo drops down the screen. That little chime is the console clearing its throat, and it is produced by the same tiny sound hardware that will later carry every melody, laser and footstep you hear. The Game Boy's audio is astonishingly simple, just four thin voices and a speaker the size of a coin, yet those four voices became one of the most recognisable sounds of the l

Hold an original Game Boy in a bright room and the first thing you notice is the window: a small, calm, olive-green rectangle sitting behind a plastic lens. It is the part everyone remembers, and the part that gave the machine its official name. The letters DMG stamped on the board and printed on the box stand for "Dot Matrix Game", a reference not to the processor or the cartridges, but to this screen and the grid of dots it is built from. This part of the series is all abou

Part 2 goes to the heart of the Game Boy: the custom Sharp LR35902 processor and its SM83 core, the glob-top chips under their copper heat spreader, 8 KB each of work and video RAM, the 4.194304 MHz crystal, and the cartridge connector.

Part 1 of the Game Boy hardware series stays on the outside: the ABS shell and its six Phillips screws, the cross D-pad and rubber-dome buttons, the wheels and switches, the EMI shields, and why the grey brick is so tough and so easy to repair.

Finland is, per head, one of the most game-obsessed countries on earth, and in Tampere it has built a museum to prove it. The Finnish Museum of Games opened in 2017 inside the Vapriikki museum centre, and it tells the story of how a small northern country became a giant of play, from the games people made on paper and dice to the ones that ended up in billions of pockets. A museum the public willed into being The museum has an origin story that suits its subject. It did not

The original Game Boy was, on paper, weaker than its rivals, and it crushed them anyway. Here is a detailed, component-by-component technical breakdown of the DMG-01, with a full specification table.

When a game studio closes, the code is often the last thing to disappear. The first things to go are the boxes, the manuals, the press kits, the internal memos and the concept art, the ordinary paper that nobody thought to keep. The Video Game History Foundation exists because someone decided that paper was worth keeping, and that decision turns out to matter enormously. Preserving the things around the game The Foundation is a non-profit, started in 2016 by the preservation

The first ten parts roamed the 1990s. The finale turns to the modern makers, Staacks, insideGadgets, EverDrive, Flash Boy, Zeroboy and more, still handing a 1989 handheld powers it never shipped with.

GBS Windows runs a loving recreation of Windows 3.1 on the Game Boy Color, on a boxed cartridge with a floppy-disk label. A gift to the museum from Jose Manuel Lucas, with a Minesweeper joke hidden on the DMG-01.

A young hero is shipwrecked on Koholint, an island of singing girls and sleeping whales that hides a heartbreaking secret. Great Game Stories No. 13 retells The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening as the fairy tale it always was.

How two 1996 cartridges about catching creatures saved a dying handheld, and a guide to every Pokemon game, accessory and fan piece in the collection.

The Game Boy Printer could print photos and Pokédex entries, but never anything its owner typed. LABEL BOY, the third cartridge built here, turns it into a label maker, 28 years late and fully aware of it.

Years before a phone in every pocket, a cheat-device company gave the Game Boy its own email address at the end of a telephone cord. Meet the Shark MX, a monochrome cartridge that quietly worked on the original 1989 Game Boy too, and that can never come online again.

In a castle on the shore of Lake Geneva, between Vevey and Montreux, there is a museum devoted to the one thing almost every human culture has in common: play. The Swiss Museum of Games is the oldest institution of its kind, unique in Europe, and its collection runs from ancient board games to the screens of today. For a Game Boy archive in the same small country, it is both a neighbour and an inspiration. Ten thousand games under one roof The Musee Suisse du Jeu sits inside

I run a very small and insignificant museum that does not have a building. The Game Boy Museum lives online, which lets me show you an item from every angle and never once let you hold it. That is the one thing a website cannot give you, and it is exactly the thing video game muesums do better than anyone. So I keep an eye out for new ones and check in on the ones I already know, because those are the places where gaming history is not sealed behind glass but switched on, war

Most museums ask you to keep your hands off the exhibits. The National Videogame Museum in Sheffield asks the opposite. Its collection is meant to be switched on and played, more than a hundred games across the decades, from Space Invaders to Monument Valley, all there to be picked up rather than admired through glass. For a place devoted to a medium you experience by doing, that is exactly right, and it is a large part of why the NVM is one of the most important homes games

In 1998 Nintendo gave the Game Boy a printer. It used no ink, printed on sticker paper as wide as a thumb, and came in a Pikachu edition that most of the world never saw.

The Game Boy Zelda was not a smaller Hyrule. It was a wholly original dream, set on an island that exists nowhere else, with characters found nowhere else: Marin, Tarin and the sleeping Wind Fish. Part four of Born on the Game Boy.

An abstract arcade classic with no story and no ending, just a blank rectangle to claim and a restless line to dodge. Qix is pure score-chasing tension in short bursts, and part six of our pick-up-and-play series.

The biggest example of all. An entire generation of 151 creatures, Pikachu among them, plus Professor Oak, Team Rocket and Mewtwo, all debuted on the Game Boy in 1996. One of the largest franchises on earth began as a handheld experiment. The finale of Born on the Game Boy.

Most collections in this field are one person, a shelf, and a lot of stubbornness. The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, is what happens when that same instinct is given a building the size of a city block and half a century to grow. It is the largest museum of play in the world, and inside it sits the single most important home video games have anywhere: the International Center for the History of Electronic Games. The world's most comprehensive game co

A handheld villain almost never becomes a star. Wario did. He first appeared as the greedy antagonist of Super Mario Land 2, then took over a franchise of his own. Part three of Born on the Game Boy.

Super Mario Land did not just shrink Mario, it sent him to a strange new kingdom called Sarasaland and introduced two characters who had never existed before: Princess Daisy and the alien warlord Tatanga. Part one of Born on the Game Boy.

A cartridge that flips the Game Boy on its head: slot it in and the handheld stops being a console and becomes a wireless controller. With the right receiver it can drive a PC, a NES, a SNES, an N64, a GameCube or a Wii. A look at the insideGadgets transmitter and the family of receivers around it.

As of today, the Game Boy Museum is a supporting member of EFGAMP, the European Federation of Game Archives, Museums and Preservation Projects. Here is what that federation is, why preserving games is harder than it sounds, and the honest reason a single-device collection wanted a seat at that table.

A small USB box that reads an old Game Boy cartridge like a book: it copies the game, rescues the save before the battery dies, and can flash the right kind of blank cart. Here is exactly what the Flash Boy does, which software it needs, and which cartridges it works with.

For years the Game Boy came in any colour you liked, as long as it was grey. Then Nintendo let it shout. The story of the Play It Loud line and the coloured and transparent consoles in the collection.

From its very first summer the Game Boy was a sports machine: tennis, baseball, golf and four-player racing. And in some of those cartridges Nintendo hid a familiar face. A tour of the sports games in the collection, and the Mario cameos tucked inside them.

In December 2021 a short video started making the rounds among retro tinkerers. It showed an original 1989 Game Boy, pea-soup screen and all, slowly pulling up a Wikipedia article. Not an emulator, not a mock-up. A real grey brick, reading live text off the internet through a cartridge that someone had built by hand. That someone was Sebastian Staacks, a physicist in Aachen who runs a gloriously nerdy blog called There Oughta Be, and his little cartridge is one of the most de

Pokemon did not just revive the Game Boy, it spun off a whole world of Pikachu-branded hardware. A tour of the Pokemon games, the yellow-and-black accessories and the fan pieces gathered in the collection.

From original hardware to flash carts, FPGA clones and emulators, here is every way to play the original Game Boy in 2026, and where to find brand-new games.

The Game Boy cartridge slot was a doorway. Part 5 of Hidden Powers looks at the cheat and memory modules that plugged in and rewrote the rules, from the Game Genie and Action Replay to the Mega Memory Card.

More than a hundred games can talk to the Game Boy Printer, but many of them need a Game Boy Color. Here is what an original DMG-01 can still print, from Pokédex pages to Photo Shop snapshots.

I’m Marcel, the collector and curator behind the Game Boy Museum in Zurich, Switzerland. What began as a childhood fascination has stayed with me for more than 25 years. The Game Boy has accompanied me through very different stages of life, while the collection has grown slowly and deliberately along the way. For me, the museum is the natural continuation of that journey: a way to share what I have collected, learned and discovered with others who are equally curious about

Opened in 1997, the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin was the world's first games museum, and the perfect broad counterpart to our single-device archive.

The Game Boy was discontinued in 2003, yet in 2026 people are still making, pressing and boxing brand-new games for it. Meet the studios keeping the grey brick alive.

A cartridge you could rewrite at a convenience store, and a battery-powered bank for your saves: how a few Japanese accessories gave the Game Boy something very like cloud saves, decades early.

Two Japan-only oddities show the Game Boy reaching past its own screen: Hudson's GB KISS infrared, hidden inside cartridges like Pocket Family GB and Pocket Bomberman, and the Namcot Barcode Boy, which scanned real barcodes straight into your games.

The Game Boy's silhouette escaped the games aisle and ended up on radios, clocks, mugs, building bricks and bubble gum. This is the hub for our four-part tour of the Game Boy in disguise.

Gum, stickers, cards, a toy egg, promotional tissues, an eraser and a mini Game Boy that plays music. A rummage through the sweet, papery and disposable tie-ins that prove the Game Boy sold absolutely everything.

The finishing touches. In the final part we give the game a voice with simple sound effects, add a pause function, and hand you the whole leveled-up Snake to download.

Every game deserves a good ending. In part five we replace the frozen screen with a real GAME OVER screen that shows the final score and invites another go.

Film franchises, cartoon stars and ported arcade classics all found their way onto the Game Boy. A look at the licensed and pop-culture games that turned the handheld into a piece of nineties popular culture.

One mistake should not end everything. In part four we give the snake three lives, lose one on each crash, and keep the game going until the last life is gone.