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Nintendo’s tiniest console ever was a Pokemon handheld the size of a Tamagotchi, and after 24 years it’s suddenly a wildly impractical way to play Game Boy games

Dustin Bailey

16 September 2025

The Pokemon Mini lives on

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(Image credit: Nintendo/The Pokemon Company)

What was Nintendo’s tiniest console? If you’re thinking Game Boy Micro, you wouldn’t be far off, but the actual answer is the Pokemon Mini, a Tamagotchi-sized device that the publisher built in collaboration with The Pokemon Company. This console is largely forgotten today, but it nonetheless still has a homebrew scene continuing to push the hardware’s limits, and now somebody has gone and turned it into a Game Boy.

More precisely, a homebrew Game Boy emulator is now available for the Pokemon Mini, courtesy of developer zwenergy. “GB mini – Game Boy games on the Pokemon mini,” zwenergy explains on Bluesky (via Time Extension), “The emulator is running on the PM2040 flash cart. As the PM has built-in rumble, GB rumble games (like Pokemon Pinball) use the PM’s rumble. Save games supported as well. Next step audio emulation.”
Take note of the bit about the flash cart, because as noted on the project’s GitHub page, “the emulator actually does not on the Pokemon mini itself, but on the RP2040 microcontroller which is on the PM2040 flash cart.”

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Five years later, I can’t believe Nintendo’s Game & Watch tribute handhelds are available to buy new, and I still use one to spontaneously play Link’s Awakening

This tiny Atari console is naturally great for Pac-Man, but I use it to play one of the most cursed retro games from the ’80s

The best Game Boy games of all time

GB mini – Game Boy games on the Pokemon mini. The emulator is running on the PM2040 flash cart. As the PM has built-in rumble, GB rumble games (like Pokemon Pinball) use the PM’s rumble. Save games supported as well. Next step audio emulation.— @zwenergy.bsky.social (@zwenergy.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-09-16T19:10:13.744Z
Even with that caveat in mind, the results are still impressive, with the video above showing OG Pokemon running in all its glory on a screen that absolutely should not be able to support it. Sure, the text is a little hard to read, but let’s be real – if you’re old enough to care about old hardware devices running original Game Boy games, you’re probably going to need glasses to see this thing anyway.

If you’re a sucker for tiny ways to play Game Boy games, the Pokemon Mini might even be a worthwhile companion piece to the Game Boy Micro, which played GBA titles but never offered backwards compatibility for the older generation of handheld carts. Is getting a Pokemon Mini and loading it with Game Boy games wildly impractical? Yes. Does it still sound fun as hell? Also yes.
Why yes, we do have a list of the best Game Boy games of all time.

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Dustin Bailey

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Staff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He’s been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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Five years later, I can’t believe Nintendo’s Game & Watch tribute handhelds are available to buy new, and I still use one to spontaneously play Link’s Awakening

This tiny Atari console is naturally great for Pac-Man, but I use it to play one of the most cursed retro games from the ’80s

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After 42 years, someone has finally worked out a way to make a mini version of my favorite ’80s console, and it involves an AMOLED screen

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Did I wake up in 1982? A new Commodore 64 is coming, and the nephew of the ZX Spectrum creator is making a handheld

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