A guest post by Dr. Marcel Pflug – Game Boy Museum – gameboymuseum.com
Anyone who spends an afternoon at GamePlaza knows the feeling: you sit down at a console, pick up the controller, and suddenly your childhood is back. That is exactly what makes a game come alive. But there is a second way to honor these devices, and it begins where the game ends.
The Game Boy Museum calls itself an online museum, but the word “online” is almost misleading. Behind the website is a real, physical collection: over 330 real objects relating to the original Nintendo Game Boy, the grey DMG-01 from 1989, gathered over more than 25 years and carefully preserved for posterity. The website merely makes this collection visible—photographed, described, and categorized piece by piece.
The Entire Ecosystem, Not Just the Console
The real drive behind the museum is a broader idea: not to hoard individual treasures, but to preserve the entire ecosystem of the DMG-01. This includes the consoles and their countless color and regional variants, as well as the accessories, the peripherals, the games, the packaging, the official publications, and even the most curious merchandise. Nothing is too small or too banal, because only the whole picture tells the story of how this handheld conquered the world.
The goal behind it is deliberately ambitious: to become the largest and most thorough knowledge database regarding the original Game Boy. A place where, eventually, everything there is to know about the DMG-01 comes together.
Why Every Piece Counts in Its Original Form
The fact that the collection focuses so consistently on original packaging and complete condition has a simple reason: the box is part of the history. It reveals the region, the year, and the market for which Nintendo built a device, and it captures the moment when the item sat brand new on the shelf. A loose Game Boy tells half the story; a complete set tells the whole story.
And this condition is transient. Cardboard boxes yellow, protective foils become brittle, manuals get lost, and much was simply thrown away over the decades. Anyone who keeps these things completely intact today saves a piece of everyday culture that would otherwise quietly disappear, and preserves it for generations who would otherwise only know the Game Boy through stories.
More Than Photos: The Gaming Feel of Back Then
However, preserving here means more than just putting things into storage. For every area of the collection, extensive journal articles and detailed photo series are created, going far beyond a simple catalog entry. They tell the stories behind the objects, the backgrounds and curiosities, the lifestyle of the early nineties, and they make it tangible how playing on this small green screen felt back then.
This is how hardware becomes knowledge. Where GamePlaza makes the feeling of playing immediately experiential, the Game Boy Museum captures it in words and pictures so that it does not disappear with the old technology, but remains readable.
First Play, Then Immerse Yourself
The best way to experience video game history is therefore twofold. At GamePlaza, it becomes playfully and directly tangible. Anyone who then wants to dive deeper into the history of the original Game Boy will find the complete collection along with the journal at gameboymuseum.com, object by object and story by story.
Zurich thus has two points of contact for everyone who loves retro gaming: one for playing and one for preserving. And that is just the beginning.
Game Boy Museum – gameboymuseum.com
