Skip to main content

This guy managed to squeeze an entire game console into a Game Boy cartridge

Video Game Console INSIDE a Game Boy Cartridge!!

Anyone who remembers the original Nintendo Game Boy, which first shipped 30 years ago, will be fully aware of what a compact miracle it represented. Compressing an 8-bit game console into a durable, mobile design, the Game Boy seemed like an unsurpassable technical achievement at a time when a “portable” computer could weigh 16 pounds.

Well, time — and miniaturization — sure move on, as Houston-based hobbyist and animator Sage Hansen’s latest project makes abundantly clear. We’ve covered Hansen’s impressive work before. For his newest creation, 31-year-old Hansen has found a way to compress an entire game console inside an original Game Boy cartridge. That includes four buttons, speaker, display, battery, power button, and micro-controller with interchangeable games. While it’s not quite as powerful as the original Game Boy (less storage and worse sound), it’s still a pretty darn impressive tech demo.

Related Videos

“I loved playing the original Game Boy as a kid,” Hansen told Digital Trends. “But technology has advanced so much in that time that I had the idea that it might be possible to design a video game console that entirely fits inside [a single Game Boy] cartridge. I designed the circuit board layout and added the smallest electronics I could find. The Attiny85 microcontroller was the key to all of this. The console will play multiple games since each chip can hold a different game.”

Hansen said that he was inspired by his efforts by the multiple miniature homemade consoles he saw online. To the best of his knowledge, however, no one previously attempted this feat. “It seemed like a really fun and new idea,” he continued. “It was not at all easy for me, but I’m so happy with the end result.”

Hansen carefully documented the creation process and is putting together a comprehensive video showing the development of his miniature Game Boy (Game Baby?). He plans to share this to his 3DSage YouTube channel in the coming weeks — so if you’re interested in following in his footsteps you might want to subscribe so as to be reminded when it drops.

“[The original Game Boy] was before smartphones and the internet so the ability to play games anywhere meant everything to me,” he reminisced. “It was great for long road trips and vacations.”

Hey, if the kids of 1989 could have only seen us on the bus with a teeny-tiny games console like Hansen’s latest creation it would have blown their minds!

Editors' Recommendations

The best Final Fantasy games, ranked from best to worst
Final Fantasy X

While the role-playing game (RPG) has become a catch-all genre, now encompassing an almost silly range of games that don't share much in common, there was one video game franchise in the 1980s that was the quintessential RPG. Yes, we're talking about Final Fantasy from Square Enix.

The fantasy Japanese RPGs debuted on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1987, but they became cultural touchstones in the '90s as Super Nintendo games. From there, the series made an incredibly successful jump to 3D on the PlayStation 1 before the mainline series started to take more risks, including the elimination of turn-based battles and massively multiplayer online game (MMO) entries, and the latest game, Final Fantasy XVI, becoming a full-on character-action game.

Read more
The best upcoming Xbox Series X games: 2023 and beyond
A spacecraft in Starfield.

The Xbox Series X and Series S have now been out for over two years, bringing better resolution, higher frame rates, and ray tracing to gamers around the world. The upcoming Xbox Series X games on this list promise to continue to show off all those bells and whistles in fun, new experiences.

If you're eager to find out what Microsoft has in store for the years ahead, we've rounded up every game confirmed so far, including new offerings, franchise installments, and ports of existing titles. We're looking beyond the first-party projects here to encompass all the great games coming to this powerful piece of gaming hardware.
2023

Read more
Don’t start the Resident Evil 4 remake before playing these 5 games
Saddler looms in front of amber in the Resident Evil 4 remake.

Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 remake is just a few days away and the anticipation couldn’t be higher. After a wave of glowing reviews, fans of the GameCube classic are ready to have their heads chainsawed off all over again. That wait will come to an end on Friday, March 24, but impatient players may find themselves looking for a way to kill the time until then.

If you’re in the boat, or simply want to properly prepare yourself for the remake, we’re here to help. Part of the Resident Evil 4 remake’s appeal is the way it engages with not just the original game or the series’ past, but the 20 years’ worth of gaming history that would follow it. With a game as important and influential as Resident Evil 4, you don’t need to go far to see how it impacted the action-adventure genre. The remake shines because it’s seemingly aware of that idea, examining the original through a modern lens.

Read more