Published 2 hours ago

What did Game Boy cartridges look like, again?

Lego fans keep accidentally building the Game Boy set wrong

Photo: The Lego Company

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Has it really been around 35 years since Nintendo released its seminal portable console? Apparently, that's long enough for people to start forgetting what the Game Boy actually looked like, based on social media posts and the Lego packaging for the recent set that recreates it.

The Lego Game Boy was released late last year, which evidently made the 421-piece set a popular Christmas gift this winter. As such, people have recently been proudly posting their new Lego sets for the world to see, only to get corrected by old-head fans who keep seeing the same mistake over and over again.

The extremely cool Lego set comes packaged with two non-playable cartridges that fans can insert into the system, just like the real thing. There's one long piece that gets placed at the end of the cartridge, which is meant to mimic the way the original games had an offset indent. The idea for the original was to make it easier to push and pull the games out of the Game Boy slot.

But if you've never played a real Game Boy before — or if you're just going off vibes — chances are high that you might just plop that last piece dead center on the cartridge. I mean, that seems like it should be right, doesn't it? While this oversight is arguably pedantry that most people may not notice or even care about, die-hard Lego fans have spent the last few days giving each other PSAs about the correct way to finish the set. Threads discussing the matter have people admitting that they initially built the cartridges wrong, even if they eventually corrected them. It's happening to people who grew up with the portable hardware, and newbies who are young enough to have never handled one in the first place.

"I put it in the center for my first cart, then noticed the proper placement when making the second cart," one commenter wrote in a Reddit thread discussing the hitch. "I didn’t have a Game Boy growing up so didn’t know that was what the carts were supposed to look like."

"So far, on every [Game Boy] post I've seen the cartridges are being built wrong," in a Facebook group dedicated to showing off builds. "Please stop [centralizing] the top tile and offset it so that it has the notch the original GB games have."