The race to make the Lego Game Boy play actual Game Boy games ended before it even began. The same day Lego officially launched the set, Natalie the Nerd revealed she’d already transformed it to play real Game Boy cartridges on real Game Boy chips.
Turns out she’s not stopping there! Natalie is now working on complete drop-in upgrade kits for the Lego Game Boy — no soldering required — and partnering with maker marketplace Crowd Supply to handle the logistics. She warns that this won’t be something you’ll want to play every day, but she’s still making it real.
She’s calling her kit the Build A Boy, and she says the completely pre-soldered version should truly be “drop in and play.” It’s her custom-designed board with everything you should need beyond the bricks, including:
Natalie confirms to The Verge that she’s planning to offer an optional glass lens if you hate the plastic window that Lego uses to cover the screen — and she might even offer some sort of video output so you can play on a TV or other external screen, though it’s not guaranteed. She’s not sure how she’ll make video out happen yet, though. “It could even be potentially be over Wi-Fi if that doesn’t affect performance,” she tells me.
While the original Game Boy offered a 160 x 144 10:9 aspect ratio display, Natalie says the 320 x 320 one will simply upscale the original images by 2x while keeping their relative shape and size the same.
Natalie doesn’t plan to wire up a Link Cable port for multiplayer play — “I don’t personally care for the link port,” she tells me — but says she’ll “probably” leave a pinout so modders can add their own.
As far as harvesting the chips goes, Natalie says she’s managed to buy damaged Game Boy Pockets in bulk, as they’re the “unloved sibling” of the Game Boy family, but she doubts she’ll have enough to satisfy demand. If you have a donor Game Boy Pocket yourself, she’ll also sell a version that only requires the CPU and RAM for around $60. She’ll also sell a completely DIY version for the “soldering iron pros” out there. She’ll also still release files for free.
It’s not clear what the entire drop-in kit will cost yet, given Trump’s tariffs. “I am aiming for $99 USD but y’know how the world is at the moment,” she writes. She’s hoping to start selling them in early 2026, and says she should receive the first test boards this very week.
Natalie’s kit won’t be the only way to play a Lego Game Boy for real. For example, tap the video below!
While it’s quite a feat to shrink an entire actual working Game Boy down to the size of a Game Boy cartridge, others are coming close — modder Hairo Satoh has been showing off an excellent Game Boy Color version on Instagram that uses real cartridges, though he tells me it required a lot of modification to the Lego “shell” and he’s not sure he’ll release a kit himself. Generally, Satoh sells one-offs on commission.
Meanwhile, the rival BrickBoy kit might be the easiest and most sustainable way to power a Lego Game Boy yet. It plays ROMs on an emulator, not actual cartridges on actual chips, which defeats some of the fun for me — but at least no Game Boy Pockets will be harmed in the making of that kit. We’re still waiting to share how much it’ll cost; it’ll launch on Kickstarter on October 28th.
