A Tale of Two Game Boys - A Restoration and Modding Project Log - Part #3

Fresh off of my successful restoration project I was feeling confident and ready to take on my first ever Game Boy mod. I began by watching a few video tutorials and found myself wincing a little when it came to certain stages of the backlighting process. There would be no turning back after this, the mod would either be successful or the Game Boy would be killed in the process. Nevertheless I was determined to see it though and so undeterred I started shopping for parts.

A Tale of Two Game Boys - A Restoration and Modding Project Log - Part #2

My goal was clear in my mind and I was totally focused on achieving it. I knew nothing else would distract me over the next few days and so my mission to restore a broken Game Boy to its former glory and all out mod another was ready to begin...

A Tale of Two Game Boys - A Restoration and Modding Project Log - Part #1

The Game Boy modding scene has always been something that’s intrigued and concerned me in equal parts. Whilst I love the creative and colourful designs that new custom buttons, shells and backlights can provide, I can’t help but feel that with each mod a small piece of gaming history is forever lost. Yes, I know there are likely millions upon millions of unaltered Game Boys out there in garages and attics, and I know that the number of people who still see value in them is fairly small in the grand scheme of things. However I also know that over the years many others will have ended up in landfill, never to be seen again. More to the point; Nintendo aren’t making any more of them. Whatever we have now is all there will ever be, and that number can only ever get smaller. 

But does it really matter? Should we be preserving and restoring Game Boys to keep them as original as possible ‘warts and all’, or should we embrace the new ways of keeping our outdated handhelds relevant in this age of smart phones and tablets? To find out once and for all where I truly stand on the matter I decided I would take the plunge and try my hand at both restoring and modding an original dot-matrix Game Boy.

Don't want to mod your Game Boy/Pocket/Color/Advance? Here's how I made an external light that actually works!

Nintendo's Game Boy line is something very close to my heart. Over the course of my life, I've owned and enjoyed every iteration of the plucky handheld, from DMG to Color to Micro, and everything inbetween. As anyone who grew up with the earlier versions of the Game Boy will atest to however, the complete lack of an internal light was always, to put it politely, something of a hindrance. Various third-party companies tried to step in with numerous solutions, and these ranged from the bulky, battery-powered add-ons produced for the DMG to the small, flexible worm-lights that everyone with a Game Boy Color seemed to own.They all had one thing on common though; none of them really worked. Whether it was due to the light being, so small and focused that it merely illuminated one tenth of the screen, or because the light was so dim that it could give Paris Hilton a run for her money. The struggle for 90's kids was real.