In the years prior to my hardcore vintage collecting addiction, I paid most of my attention to my Xbox. Within the last year and a half I’ve bought quite a few games for the NES, and when the games started to pile up I went searching for cases to put them in. All my NES games prior to this were in their own cases, whether it be a clear case with a big red Nintendo logo or a yellow, pink, purple or blue case that said Gameboy on it.

Wait, did I just say NES games in a Gameboy case? Yes, yes I did! Somewhere among my childhood I had acquired four Gameboy cases that were the same size as the NES (clam shell) cases.

Size comparison

I forget exactly where I got them and with all the local NES games that were floating around back then I could have gotten them from anywhere, but the fact is that I still have them. It came to me one night that I had a collection of game manuals stashed away inside one of them, so I started ripping through boxes to find out where they were. After I found them a whole new level of amazement dawned on me, which for some reason never dawned on me before, that I had never seen these things before and haven’t seen any since.

What I find remarkable is that these things are the exact same size and color as their NES counterparts, but emblazoned on the front is a black Gameboy logo, instead of Nintendo. Inside the case were 4 tiny corners, clearly cut out to fit a Gameboy game cartridge. I’m going to make a bold assumption that these were produced to accommodate the Gameboy players who wanted to keep the manuals with their games, as the manuals fit better in these cases than they would the smaller ones, obviously!

Sadly NES games wouldn’t fit inside these cases without a little modification, which I eventually did. Looking back I wish I hadn’t, but I needed more NES cases because I had plenty of the tiny Gameboy clam shells. You can still see the remnants of the corners that held the Gameboy game, but NES games and their manuals fit perfectly, although they do slide around a bit (sans the protection the Nintendo version afforded).

Remnants of the four corners that held the Gameboy games.

I can’t find information on these cases anywhere, so I have no clue how many were made and how many different colors were available. To my knowledge there may only be 4 different colors because I have been fooled by VHS cases that are the exact same colors as these, while gaming hunting, but I’ve never seen anymore for the Gameboy. I would love to own a full set of these (unmodified!), although I probably won’t use them for Gameboy games, I just want to own them because I find them fascinating.