Collection essentials #260 & #261: Super Game Boy (SNES) & Super Game Boy 2 (SNES)

Game Boy, as I’ve talked about, was a huge hit. But what if you were really into a Game Boy game and wanted to play it at home? It might feel wasteful to use up batteries playing a portable console when you’re not even on the go. You could get something called an AC adapter, which let you plug the Game Boy into a wall rather than use battery power. That was certainly a good option. But Nintendo had a better idea: what if you could play Game Boy games on your TV? With the power of the SNES, this possibility was made reality! 

Why would someone want to play Game Boy games on a TV screen? There are a variety of reasons. When you’re playing on the original Game Boy, the screen is not backlit, so you had to worry about how much lighting was in the room, and that could sometimes be annoying. Kids who used their Game Boys a lot could wind up with screens that were scuffed or even cracked, making the viewing experience less appealing. Not to mention the fact that viewing the games on a television provided a nicer and cleaner image in general. If someone wanted to watch you play a Game Boy game, it would be a whole lot easier showing them on a TV screen rather than huddling next to each other to see a small Game Boy screen.

But the most notable reason why you’d want to use a Super Game Boy is the enhancements it could provide! The Super Game Boy could take advantage of the SNES console’s power and spruce up Game Boy games in various ways. Not every game had these enhancements, and sometimes they were minor. Graphics and audio were sometimes improved, adding some color to games that were in black-and-white. But gameplay could be affected too, such as some multiplayer games that let two people simply pick up two SNES controllers rather than require two Game Boy systems, two cartridges and a link cable. Also, since the Game Boy image on the TV didn’t take up the whole screen, the graphical borders around the game screen were often customized based on whatever game was playing, and those borders were sometimes really cool-looking. Even when a game didn’t have special enhancements, uses could customize the (limited) color scheme used to display the game graphics, and pick from various generic borders.

So why are there two Super Game Boys? Well, the second one has a few small improvements. For one thing, the original Super Game Boy actually ran games slightly faster than they ran on the original system, and Super Game Boy 2 corrects this so they run at their intended speed. Also, there is a link cable port on the Super Game Boy 2 to allow for multiplayer connections with other Game Boy-playing systems, while the original lacks one. There’s other minor changes like a new set of default borders. Sadly, the SGB2 only was released in Japan, which is likely due to the fact that it came out in 1998, well into the following console generation, with the SNES being pretty much out the door by that point overseas. 

Sadly I never had a Super Game Boy growing up. By the time I did have one, I had already acquired a future Game Boy-playing device for a future Nintendo console and mostly used that. Though I have at times revisited the Super Game Boy 2 for certain games. I certainly am a fan of playing those games on my nice television screens. When I covered various Game Boy games for this list, I took my photos of the games running on a Super Game Boy 2.

Is a Super Game Boy 2 worth acquiring nowadays? If you have an interest in the original Game Boy, I’d say yes. It’s something I still break out every now and then. Though you may want to consider other methods of playing Game Boy titles that are compatible with more games, as Nintendo produced more systems in the Game Boy family whose games can’t run on a Super Game Boy 2. Still, this provides a unique way to enjoy the Game Boy library and to me it’s an absolute essential.