Super Game Boy Secrets

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Some devices look as simple as it gets, but once you dig a little deeper, you find dozens of unexpected details. Super Game Boy is exactly that kind of thing. I’ve mentioned it more than once in other articles: it’s not just an adapter for running Game Boy games on a big screen, but a real tool that can still surprise even an experienced collector.

In this article I’ve put together a selection of genuinely interesting tricks and lesser-known SGB features. I’m sure at least one of them will surprise even seasoned gamers.

General secrets

1. Border animation

I’d like to start with one of the funniest features. Every Super Game Boy (both 1 and 2) has 9 different borders built in by default.

For example, here are two of them:

Super Game Boy: movie theater border with an audience

On the left is the standard border that appears by default. On the right is one of the alternative borders: people are sitting in a movie theater, watching you play Game Boy.

But the best part is that this border isn’t static! It hides a small secret. If you leave the game paused for about three minutes, strange things start happening: the lights come on, someone pulls out a newspaper, and two kids start playing Game Boy right there in the theater.

And most borders have hidden animations like this (except for the first two standard ones).

If you don’t feel like waiting, there’s a trick for that too. You can trigger the animation instantly with a special button combo: first select the border you want, exit the extended SGB menu (so you’re back in normal gameplay), then press in order: L L L L R.

If you did everything correctly, you’ll hear a distinctive sound—and the animation will start.

2. Credits

Besides the hidden animations, Super Game Boy also has developer credits tucked away. Funny enough, the creators listed aren’t just Nintendo engineers, but also a team from Hori Electric Co.—the same company that gave us a ton of unusual accessories for the Famicom and Super Famicom.

It’s almost impossible to open these credits by accident—you need a pretty convoluted combo: press L L L R R R L L L, and then just keep pressing R (usually 6–8 times) until the Super Game Boy credits appear.

3. Disabled SGB features

During SGB development, Nintendo planned one absolutely wild feature—the ability to replace Game Boy sprites with SNES sprites. In other words, you’d get a classic Game Boy game with heavily upgraded graphics.

Unfortunately, the feature was extremely unstable: sprites kept disappearing.

So it was disabled.

But Dr.Ludos created the game DMG vs. Super Game Boy, which implements those disabled features. It also shows why the function was cut. If you play it, you’ll see that the SNES sprites constantly disappear and reappear. That red-and-white cube on the right image simply vanished, even though it’s still flying forward.

DMG vs. Super Game Boy: the cube is flying

DMG vs. Super Game Boy: the cube disappeared

4. Slowing down the game

One of the strangest SGB secrets is a hidden combo that slows the game down. If you enter L R R L L R (six presses, no pauses), the animation speed and the gameplay itself slow down sharply.

But there’s a catch: on a standard SNES controller, pulling off this sequence is basically impossible. Seriously—it’s just not doable with human fingers!

However, the official Hori Super Game Boy Commander controller handles it perfectly: it has special buttons that let you input tricky combos like this with a single press.

Honestly, it’s not surprising that Hori is listed among the SGB creators—you can tell some of these features were clearly designed with their controller in mind.

SGB 2

All the secrets described above work on both SGB 1 and SGB 2. But the second version has a few exclusive tricks of its own.

1. Default border color

Super Game Boy 2 was released after the Game Boy Pocket, so the default border here is styled after the newer handheld.

If you press L L L L R, the border starts changing color: it turns pink, yellow, then green, then blue.

2. The SGB 1 border set

The SGB 2 developers didn’t just add new borders—they also included a way to bring back the “classic” set from the first version.

To do that, you need to select the black border.

Exit the SGB menu, then press the same combo: L L L L R.

You’ll hear the familiar sound—and if you go back into the menu, you’ll see that instead of the standard SGB 2 set, the old borders from the first model are now available.

Multiplayer

When people talk about Super Game Boy and multiplayer, SGB 2 usually comes to mind first—the only version with a proper link port. It’s hard to set up a link game when the SGB simply doesn’t have a connector for a Link Cable.

But even without a cable, you could still play two-player—right on a single console. For example, in Street Fighter 2 it’s enough to press Start on the second controller, choose a character, and fight on one screen, just like on a normal SNES.

Epilogue

Super Game Boy looks like a very simple accessory. But all these little tricks really show the SGB from a new angle. Sometimes it’s enough to press a simple button combo—or just step away from the screen for a while—and you learn something about the accessory you didn’t even suspect. In the end, it turns out that even the simplest device can still keep a couple of surprises up its sleeve.