In the age of AI, one man spent years squeezing an entire museum onto a Game Boy - Why? For the most human of reasons

"Let me be honest from the start: nobody was waiting for this. The world has many needs, and a Game Boy cartridge with no game inside it was not high on the list." So begins Dr Marcel Pflug's explanation for one of the most unexpected projects I've come across in a while: a Game Boy reference museum that isn't just a Game Boy reference museum; it's one that works on a Game Boy cartridge.

"I run this museum, a project that catalogues everything around the little grey machine," Pflug writes on the Game Boy Museum website, "and one day a thought took hold that I could not shake, mostly because it made me laugh. Every object in the collection is a museum piece, so what if the museum itself became one of them? A cartridge that plays nothing, that you slot into a real Game Boy, and that turns the machine into a guide to its own world. An exhibit about the collection, living inside the collection."

The Game Boy Museum, in its original website form, features a museum's worth of knowledge and exhibitions focusing on Nintendo's classic handheld. There's a dizzying array of Game Boy product shots, all neatly presented and organised; there's an entire archive of peripherals, including things as incidental as cables; there's a guide charting every micro-adjustment to the Game Boy's hardware over the ages; and there's a journal area collating hundreds of articles about the handheld. There is, in other words, a lot.

As comprehensive as it is, though, presenting it all online to browse using modern computers and devices is relatively straightforward. But cramming that onto a cartridge for a device made in 1989 is an entirely different matter. So there were immediate obstacles for Pflug's project. The Game Boy, Pflug discovered, is "a spectacularly bad e-reader", due to the limited 255 "blocks" it can show on screen. That's not a lot when you consider several blocks are used for every letter of text, and the museum is primarily a text-based affair. "Reading a museum on a Game Boy, it turns out, is a game of inches," Pflug notes.

He also wanted the Museum to display QR codes, as a way to point people towards photographs he couldn't show on the Game Boy, feeling there'd be something "quietly wonderful" about getting a piece of tech from the 80s to talk to a phone from the 2020s. But, of course, QR codes were never meant to be displayed on a Game Boy. As Pflug explains, they were created in 1994, well after the handheld's release, "to track parts on a Japanese car-factory floor". It was Toyota's factory, if you're wondering (that's your quiz bonus point).

Similar bespoke solutions were needed for things like displaying an image of Pflug in the credits, because apparently you can't simply convert a photo into the tones of a Game Boy screen. "The face becomes one pale blob, the eyes turn into two black holes, and you have accidentally drawn a skull," says Pflug, which sounds rather appealing to me. He also ended up drawing the cartridge's title screen by hand, pixel by pixel, which took a lot of work - so much that he quickly abandoned plans to include an entire museum hall with display cases. And on some days, nothing he tried worked at all. "That is rather the point of building on hardware this old," he notes. "It makes you earn every screen."

"That is rather the point of building on hardware this old. It makes you earn every screen" -Marcel Pflug

In the end, as he tells me when we chat over email, it took several years of tinkering before he finally cracked it; squeezing the entire archive onto an actual Game Boy cartridge. His handiwork is also available as a ROM you can download for free and then put onto a cartridge yourself if you have the means. Slot it into a Game Boy and you'll be provided with a searchable archive of everything you might ever want to know about Nintendo's debut handheld console. Curious about its innards or the accessories that were released for it? What about the games, the merchandise, even the advertisements? The Game Boy museum has you covered. Pflug calls it "a proper little encyclopedia of the Game Boy's world that you read chapter by chapter like a paperback". I think that's a lovely description, though it's more of a hardback in actuality.

"It is a homage to the machine," Pflug elaborates in his write-up, "and a small attempt to keep this knowledge where it came from in the first place, on the Game Boy itself, so that whatever happens to websites and servers and me, the little grey brick can still tell you its own story." That feels like a particularly relevant sentiment in 2026, when the world is on the cusp of an AI makeover, or perhaps takeover, and when projects such as these are theoretically achievable in minutes rather than years.

How long the project took to complete, Pflug isn't able to easily calculate, because it apparently "came together over many evenings and weekends across several years", with significant gaps in between. He builds things as a hobby when he has the time and the inclination: this isn't his day job, nor his only project. He has a fairly important-sounding corporate role and he also runs a free guitar portal called Sticky Tunes in his spare time. That's alongside a passion for being out in nature, and they all compete for his attention, so there's never quite enough time to go around.

"The truth is that programming and tinkering relax me," he says. "They let me forget the world for a while. And since - if we are honest - nobody has been waiting almost 40 years for the particular solutions I chase, there is something very freeing about it: I am doing it purely to satisfy my own curiosity and to challenge myself." And doing something for the sake of doing it, for the pleasure of doing it, feels like a fierce forehand return against the expediency of AI-generated results if ever I've heard it.

"It carries the feeling of a whole generation, the way a Walkman or a particular pair of trainers does" -Marcel Pflug

Pflug's Game Boy project feels proudly human in the face of AI, which I admire, and I tell him so when we speak. "For me, the Game Boy is not just a handheld," he offers by way of explanation, "it carries the feeling of a whole generation, the way a Walkman or a particular pair of trainers does for people who grew up then."

It's now been several months since Pflug's account of the Game Boy project first surfaced, and I was keen to hear how the world had responded to it since then. "The reaction surprised me," he reveals, "in the nicest way." He was especially warmed to see the project spread beyond the English-speaking parts of the world, all the way to the Game Boy's birthplace in Japan. "That it resonated at the source felt like a small gift," he says.

The Game Boy Museum cartridge project is essentially finished at this point, barring a few small twiddles, but the work doesn't ever entirely cease. Pflug plans to update the build "at least" once a year to keep it current with the Game Boy Museum's archive, "so the little cartridge grows as the game does". Nor is this the end of Pflug's Game Boy adventure; although the cartridge project has wound down, the lessons he learnt making it have led to something else - something equally unexpected. A second cartridge: the GB Test Lab.

"It does the opposite of a game," Pflug explains. "You slot it into a Game Boy and it examines the console itself. It can name the exact cartridge slot contact or memory bit that misbehaves; measure how worn the buttons are; test the printer and the link port. The idea is to give the people who collect, restore, and repair these machines something genuinely useful." People, in other words, like him.

Pflug says he's also learnt a lot about the Game Boy Printer while wrestling with QR codes, so he's working on another tool that turns it into a "a proper label printer". Why? Well, why do anything? To learn, to connect with other people doing the same, to honour something you like. To be human; to be curious.