Nick Lever, video editor and Lego Masters Australia finalist, has recreated the original Nintendo Game Boy in bricks — and with such droolworthy depth that I hereby petition Lego to make it into an official set.
The perfect Lego Nintendo Game Boy doesn’t exist…
The perfect Lego Nintendo Game Boy doesn’t exist...
It’s just 364 pieces, only 115 different parts, most of them common enough you can find ‘em dirt cheap. Almost every recognizable facet of the Game Boy is represented, from the angled rice-grain Start / Select buttons to the distinctive tint of the screen — achieved here by placing lime green tiles underneath a trans-blue window.
While there’s no removable battery tray or front speaker, you can indeed press down on the D-pad and click in a “cartridge.” You might want to take a close look at those A and B buttons, too…
The one exception to the “let’s keep the build cheap” rule is that 6×6 lime green tile. “It used to be $0.40 but now they’re sold out worldwide thanks to my stupid build,” Lever tells The Verge. But he says you can simply use three 2×6 lime green tiles instead.
With that one tweak to my BrickLink shopping cart, it seems I could spend as little as $42 before tax and shipping to purchase all the parts I need. He’s selling the instructions for $5.65 at Rebrickable (which can also automatically populate your BrickLink shopping cart), in case you’d like to do the same.
This isn’t Lever’s first stab at the Game Boy; next time, he says he might try building the one that survived getting bombed in the Gulf War.
There’s always a chance Lego might make its own Game Boy. The company already sells a Lego NES, after all.