LEGO Gameboy

July 31st 1989 was the year the original Nintendo Gameboy was released. I was not around at that point in time but I do vividly recall the moment I first discovered portable handheld video game systems with the release of the Nintendo Gameboy Color back on October 21st 1998. Holiday season of 2001 my parents took my sister and I to Springhill mall to do some holiday shopping. I remember stumbling upon this strange looking kiosk in the middle of a clothing department store. It seemed out of place being located right alongside clothing and home goods. The kiosk had a bold out of place presence with a little colorful device like an appendage coming out it I had seen nothing like it before. The gameboy sat there with a small animated screen and I couldn’t comprehend how it worked. I grabbed hold of it and started playing and almost immediately knew that this was something big. I had no other intro to the device other then this moment.

October 1st 2025 Lego released set #72046 — a 1:1 replica of the original Nintendo Gameboy. I immediately knew that this Lego set would be something worth turning into the real thing. I have wanted to own an original Gameboy for some time but thought what a better way then to merge two things that brought me so much joy as a kid.

I first scoured the internet to see what others had done and came across Natalie’s post . She’s a very talented Melbourne based retro modder who created one of the first . For my project I wanted to approach it in a similar way using the Gameboy Pocket motherboard. The Gameboy Pocket was basically an original DMG Gameboy brought to a smaller form factor.

I really wanted to avoid adhesives and Ideally wanted everything to drop into place and give the same lego building experience but with a technical twist. I ran into my first challenge. This was with the fact that despite the Lego gameboy being a 1:1 model in theory, the models dimensions in reality were constrained by the Lego brick dimensions. I ordered a Gameboy game and tested the cartridge slot. Unfortunately I noticed bowing of the Lego set as I slid the game in. But honestly Lego really got close here and to be clear it was never their intent to actually slot in a real gameboy game. I decided that in order to slide a game in properly, I needed to design custom 3D printed lego pieces.

The buttons themselves had real clickyness and felt like pads could be placed underneath. I knew that this was a very do-able project. I can’t say it enough but Lego really made an impressive set and took the time into adding so much great detail. For instance ports existed for the volume and contrast wheel. There was also a detailed spot for the power switch and EXT port. The one major limitation to this set however was the fact there was detail for some internals but that was all space that was taken up to add structure or maybe they were actually trying to virtually add some of the internal motherboard detail. Regardless I knew that further modification of the Lego model would be necessary, but I wanted to minimize this as much as possible to maintain a fun building experience.