Physical, Forever: Super Game Boy Put a Console Inside a Cartridge

Physical, Forever: Super Game Boy Put a Console Inside a Cartridge

Yo dawg, we heard you like consoles, so….

Physical media. What a great thing! We’ve looked at a whole bunch of things that physical media has done over the years that couldn’t have been replicated by a digital copy of a game downloaded from an app store, but this week we reach what may be the pinnacle of the form. The king chalupa. The apex of the acme. The Super Game Boy.

Or, technically, the Super Game Boy 2. Nintendo never released this model in America or Europe, but it’s very similar to the original Super Game Boy that we did receive. The main differences between the two cartridges are that the SGB2 fixes a minor timing issue in the original Super Game Boy that caused games to run about 3% too fast—not a world-ending disaster by any means, but it did affect the pitch of music and sound effects slightly. Also, the SGB2 supports proper Game Boy multiplayer with link cable support.

Yes, that’s right. This cartridge has a Game Boy link port so that you can connect it to another Super Game Boy 2, or to a Game Boy. You could even use the 4-Player Adapter that came with F-1 Race to connect four systems, though you definitely did not want to plug four consoles and their associated televisions into a single power strip. Your fire marshal is shaking his head with dismay at the mere suggestion. (Don’t even mention trying to link 16 Super NES setups together to experience that cool custom FaceBall 2000 rig that fans have come up with. That’s the kind of thing to make a grown man who comprehends the dangers of excessive power load weep with dismay.)

So what was the Super Game Boy, exactly? If you’re too young to remember a time when Nintendo separated its game systems into “consoles” and “portables,” you can think of Super Game Boy as a tentative first step toward the invention of the Switch and Switch 2: the first time that the TV gaming and handheld worlds converged. Super Game Boy descended from a premium gadget that Nintendo sold exclusively to licensed developers and media outlets called the Wide Boy, which allowed those partners to play Game Boy software on the Famicom/NES and Super Famicom/Super NES consoles and display handheld games on television. This was pretty useful for magazines, for example, because trying to get clean screenshots of Game Boy software on that murky, blurry handheld screen would have been a disaster for all parties. By displaying the Game Boy’s visuals through a standard television connection, the Wide Boy allowed reviewers to take cleaner screen caps that did a better job of showing the games in a (literal) good light.

The idea behind the Wide Boy was simple: just stick an entire Game Boy in a cartridge! The NES and Super NES’s creators built the console so that you could expand the system’s basic capabilities by packing coprocessors and other goodies into cartridges. The best-known of all Nintendo add-ons—Star Fox’s SuperFX chip—was literally a number-crunching chip that ran at three times the speed of the Super NES’s CPU. So how hard could it be, really, to make a cartridge that was just a Game Boy with no screen and connected to the console through the same principles?

And so, the Super Game Boy shipped in 1993, a peripheral that effectively consisted of a Game Boy system inside an oversized Super NES cartridge. A port along the top side of the cart allowed players to slide a Game Boy cartridge into the Super NES cart, using the same nesting passthrough concept that Sega would famously employ for Sonic 3 & Knuckles. The Super Game Boy sold like gangbusters and paired perfectly with some of the system’s more substantial adventures, like Metroid II, Gargoyle’s Quest, and The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Not only did playing through those meaty titles on a television screen save a lot of strain on players’ eyes, it offered some additional perks as well.

Although the Super Game Boy contained the actual guts of a Game Boy, the cartridge was still powered by Super NES software. The console code provided a front-end to the Game Boy software, which appeared as a windowed element surrounded by a frame. Players could switch up the design of their frame, which had different themes like “swamp” and “theater.” If you paused a game and let it sit inactive for a few minutes, each frame would even cycle through unique animations! You could also set dozens of different palette schemes to games, which assigned colors to the four shades of grey that Game Boy could render. It could take a little experimentation to find the ideal palette setup for a given game, which meant that you could stumble across some truly hideous matches, but overall it added a pleasant little embellishment to the handheld’s monochromatic visuals; Nintendo would even carry that feature into the Game Boy Color, which could display original Game Boy software in a variety of different palettes.

Since Super Game Boy arrived several years into the handheld’s lifetime, Nintendo also built special code into the peripheral that allowed it to recognize specific cartridges (like Tetris and Metroid II) and apply special, custom-built color palettes. Those game-specific palettes allowed the Super Game Boy to break its own rules, as it were: rather than simply setting four colors to those games, the device could single out elements of their program code in order to, for example, apply different palettes simultaneously to sprites and backgrounds. The peripheral had an impact on the overall Game Boy library: releases that came along after the Super Game Boy’s launch often included code for both custom palettes and one-of-a-kind borders. All of these peaked with Nintendo’s famous Game Boy release of Space Invaders, which included an entire Super NES game in the Game Boy cartridge that allowed you to perform a soft reset of the console to boot into the alternate ROM.

All of that from a single cartridge. When the Super Game Boy 2 came along in 1998, it added even more features. The Link Cable support was clearly added to capitalize on Pokémon mania, giving players the means to enjoy their grand monster-catching odyssey within the visual comfort of a television screen while still enabling them to seamlessly connect with friends to swap or battle their critters. It also included expanded palette options and more user-defined borders, along with those hardware accuracy tweaks. Presumably it never reached the U.S. due to its late arrival—by the time it would have shipped here, the Super NES had more or less disappeared. Plus, the Game Boy Color was out and had more or less been pitched to American kids as the ideal way to play Pokémon, which showed up here at the same time. But the idea behind the Super Game Boy didn’t go away, it just skipped a generation: GameCube fans could pick up the Game Boy Player, a Game Boy Advance-compatible peripheral that plugged into the bottom of the console and allowed them to play cool games like Ninja Five-O without the eyestrain.

That’s a lot to pack into a single cartridge, but it certainly happened and became a standout feature for the Super NES. Good luck stuffing an entire console into a digital download. Sure, emulation exists now, but that’s just not as cool as having an entire mini-system inside of what appears to be a game cartridge. Physical media had style, man.