Plenty of good Game Boy games never came out in English, and fans fixed that with translation patches. Romhacks go further and change the game itself, like the one that colorizes Mega Man World 5. To play one on a real Game Boy, you write it onto a flash cart, a cartridge you can put any game on, and it looks like every other bootleg. You went to all that trouble, so it might as well look the part.
Why
I got into making my own custom Game Boy cartridges, and I thought it would be fun to have labels. It actually started with making labels for the Mouse Bite Labs cartridges. When he rolled those out, I just thought those were so cool, and so I bought some, and I was thinking it’d be really cool if these had a label. I made those and I sent them to him, and he loved them.
I’ve been into ROM hacking and translations of games for a while, or at least familiar with them. So I think the first one I might have done outside of the Mouse Bite Labs ones was Pokémon Picross, because I love Picross and I love Pokémon. When I got the English translation for it, I just thought it’d be really great if this had an English label. Pokémon Picross never had a retail release, so it never actually had a label. So I had to invent one.
And then the next one was Mega Man World 5 DX. That was the only colorization hack of Mega Man 5 at the time. And then I just started making labels for the translations that I thought were really cool, like The Frog for Whom the Bell Tolls, Pokémon Trading Card Game 2, Game Boy Wars. Pokémon Picross had no label, so that had to be completely original, while the others were really trying to localize existing artwork.
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)
- 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
Game Boy Wars is the only one that credits its translator. There was no conscious reason, other than I just thought it would look cool on the Game Boy Wars one. I actually have a few more to add, but I just haven’t got around to it.
The other five are for Mouse Bite Labs board types, named for the chip on the board that handles the game’s memory: MBC1, MBC3, MBC5, and the MBC3 and MBC5 multicarts. Those don’t say Reproduction. There’s no game on them to fake.
Printing them
Everything’s in the labels folder on GitHub, one print-ready PNG per label at 2100 by 1850 pixels. If you don’t have access to a professional printer, the README recommends MatthewMods on Etsy.
The Reproduction thing
Every game label has the word “Reproduction” on it, and the license says to keep it there, or something just as obvious, if you change a design. I shared the Mega Man World 5 DX label in a Facebook group, and I think someone called out making fake labels, as if I was trying to rip people off. And so I added Reproduction. I made these labels because I wanted authentic-looking artwork on cartridges that I made, so they had something that looked professional, just because it would be cool, not to deceive anyone. 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.
That same Mega Man label still has the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality on it, with REPRODUCTION down the side. I guess I could have taken it off, because the game’s been modded. But whatever. It might have even just been an oversight, to be honest.
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.