Plenty of good Game Boy games never came out in English. Fans fixed that with translation patches. A patch is a small file you apply to your own copy of the game’s ROM (the game’s data, copied off the chip into a file), and it swaps the Japanese text for English. A romhack is the same idea pushed further, where somebody changes the game itself, like the hack that colorizes Mega Man World 5.
To play it on an actual Game Boy, you write the patched ROM onto a flash cart, a cartridge you can put any game on, where a store-bought one has its game burned in at the factory. And it looks like every other bootleg: a blank shell, or a sticker somebody ran off an inkjet. These are labels for those games, drawn to look like they belong. You went to all that trouble, so it might as well look the part.
Eleven labels
Six are for games, each linking to the patch it goes with:
- Balloon Kid: English translation (opens in a new tab) of Balloon Fight GB, the Japan-only Nintendo Power remake of Balloon Kid
- Game Boy Wars: English translation (opens in a new tab)
- Mega Man World 5 DX: the colorized hack (opens in a new tab)
- Pokémon Picross: English translation (opens in a new tab) of a game that never got a retail release
- Pokémon Trading Card Game 2: English translation (opens in a new tab) of the Japan-only sequel
- The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls: English translation (patch (opens in a new tab) plus addendum (opens in a new tab)) of the Link’s-Awakening-style adventure that never left Japan
Balloon Kid is the newest one, from June 2024, so it’s been a while.
The other five are for Mouse Bite Labs board types, which are named for the chip on the board that handles the game’s memory: MBC1, MBC3, MBC5, and the MBC3 and MBC5 multicarts (more than one game on a cart). Those don’t say Reproduction. There’s no game on them to fake, just the board type.
Printing them
Everything’s in the labels folder on GitHub, one print-ready PNG per label at 2100 by 1850 pixels. Unless you own a proper label printer, the README says to send them to MatthewMods on Etsy and let him do the printing.
The Reproduction thing
Every game label has the word “Reproduction” on it, and the license requires you to keep it there, or something equally obvious, if you modify a design. A good label on a flash cart is exactly how fakes end up on eBay as “authentic,” and I’d rather these be useful to people who know what they’re holding than to people who want to fool someone.
Drop it and the license is revoked.
Otherwise it’s CC BY-NC 4.0, which basically means share them, change them, credit me, and don’t sell them or anything you make from them. If you improve one, let me know in an issue on the repo.