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

Dr Marcel Pflug has spent several years turning his online Game Boy Museum into a searchable archive that runs from a cartridge on the original handheld. The project makes the museum itself an exhibit and shows how a much-loved piece of technology can be used to explore its own history.

The work was technically difficult because the 1989 Game Boy has a tiny display and can show only 255 blocks at a time, making it poorly suited to reading text. Pflug devised ways to fit the archive and QR codes onto the system, and drew the title screen pixel by pixel; the resulting ROM is available to download for free and can be transferred to a cartridge.