LEGO has been crushing it with its video game sets. I honestly can’t think of a single miss. The LEGO NES set, the LEGO Pac-Man arcade cabinet, and even the recent SEGA Genesis controller (which was only available as a Gift With Purchase) all paid loving homage to the source material and managed to squeeze in clever surprises and Easter eggs. I’m happy to say the LEGO Game Boy, in spite of its smaller size, still managed to sneak in a few surprises, but if you’re hoping for something as elaborate as the NES Easter Egg, or the hand-crank movement and hidden ’80s arcade scene of the Pac-Man set, definitely temper your expectations.
How Big Is the LEGO Game Boy?
At 421 pieces, the LEGO Game Boy is the smallest of the available video game console sets LEGO has issued over the years, but in spite of a relatively small brick count, its efficiency of parts still makes for an exceptional whole. When it’s fully assembled, it looks everything the part of the original, although it’s just a touch smaller.
It also comes with bricks to build a small display stand, and a second, smaller display stand that shows off a cartridge and also serves as a place to store the extra lenticular game screens.
There are three game screens in all: one for Super Mario Land that has Mario hitting a block to reveal a star, one for Link’s Awakening that shows Link and Zelda gazing to the sea as gulls fly over head, and one that’s just the Nintendo logo scroll when you power on the Game Boy.
Swapping screens is no factor at all, you just pop off the back panel and drop it in place. It’s held secure with a little lever that’s easy to move and has just the right amount of give to keep it from moving without pressing so hard as to deform the thin lenticular sheets.
Since this model is based on the original Game Boy and not its later revisions, the graphics are in the sickly greens of that original 160 x 144 display. They’re sharp, too, and look exactly like how you remember them. They’re lovely. I hope they make more.
How Long Does it Take to Build the LEGO Game Boy?
In order to get the most appropriate timing on the LEGO Game Boy as I could, I popped in my Blu-ray copy of the 1989 Nintendo feature-length commercial “The Wizard.” My goal was to see if I could complete the build before Fred Savage, Jenny Lewis, and the titular Wizard made it to California.
I’m happy to say, in spite of having to get up to let my dogs out and then back in, I snapped the final piece into place just as Jenny Lewis stepped onto the dry soil of California on the way to the world Nintendo championships, so just about an hour after I pushed play. Not a bad build time, and again, the final results are so much better than it feels like should be possible with a set this size.
Since it’s a 421-piece build, there are only five bags of parts inside the box, and they’re small bags. I have a little organizer basket from Walmart, the sort of thing you put on a shelf to store buttons and doo-dads for crafts, and I use it to organize parts bags when I build sets. For this build, it was overkill. I still used it, but really, there was no need to. I’m just a creature of habit.
I was surprised at the color selection of the bricks: lots of greens, browns, gold, and copper-colored pieces. Then it occurred to me the colors for the interior mimic the colors of a printed circuit board. That’s one of the first Easter eggs. As you’re putting it together, the parts on the inside you’ll never see again evoke the look of the inside of a real Game Boy, or any electronic gizmo of the era. It’s obviously not a 1:1 representation of the circuitry, but it’s a close enough approximation that I was suitably impressed.
The cartridges also follow this circuit board aesthetic on their insides, and the coolest Easter Egg in the set is in the Link’s Awakening cartridge. Now, LEGO didn’t need to do this at all, because again, once you put it together, you never see it again, but inside of the Link’s Awakening cart is a “back up battery” piece.
If you don’t know, in order to keep save files on those old carts, there had to be a small coin-cell battery providing a trickle of power to keep the electrons dancing soldered onto the board. Link’s Awakening was one such cart, and they went ahead and added that detail into the LEGO version, for no reason other than to please people like me. The Super Mario Land cart had no such battery back up and so the LEGO version doesn’t either.
The stickers for the carts are exact replicas of the ones on the originals, and I went into a state of hyper concentration to make sure I placed them exactly where they needed to be. Usually I put on LEGO decals with the same tweezers I use for scale models, but this time I just went raw dog on them and did pretty well.
LEGO Game Boy Controls
The power switch, D-pad, A and B buttons, contrast, and volume knobs, and start and select buttons are all functional. Well, “functional” meaning “they move.” The power switch in particular feels exactly like the one on the original Game Boy. When you switch it on, it’s so accurate to how you remember it feeling, you can’t help but expect to hear that familiar chime. Obviously it doesn’t, but your brain will fill in the details.
The rest of the buttons don’t feel exactly like they did on the original unit, but they still provide enough tactile feedback to get the job done. After the power switch, the A and B buttons probably feel the most accurate, with a little rubber band system rigged up to give them a little resistance and travel when you press them.
No LEGO Game Boy Tetris
If you’re going into the LEGO Game Boy hoping for a Tetris Easter egg, or any Tetris content at all, you’re going to be disappointed. While Tetris was the original pack-in game for the Game Boy, and no doubt helped to popularize both the console and the game itself, it’s nowhere to be seen here. My guess is it has to do with licensing, as Tetris wasn’t a Nintendo game but was merely licensed to Nintendo back in 1989 and it was almost certainly easier to include two first-party Nintendo titles with the kit.
So if you were hoping for a little Tetris homage hiding inside, I’m sorry to say there just isn’t one. Take it up with The Tetris Company Inc.
The LEGO Game Boy is scheduled for an October 1 release date, but Amazon and other retailers have gone ahead and broken street date. That means a lot of people spent their weekend putting together this delightful little LEGO Game Boy kit, and between its short build time and excellent final result, I recommend picking one up if you have any nostalgia for the good old days of the 4-battery OG Game Boy. The kit is also pretty reasonably priced at $59.99, and you can go ahead and pick it up right now and get it on, or even before, its October 1 release date.
Seth Macy is Senior Social Commerce Producer, and just wants to be your friend. You can find him online.
