Organization

When it comes to organizing Gameboy games a lot of times a simple box is the best and easiest way to go. However there are some downsides to the box method at least for me. First off its not that easy to find a good box if your looking for something that will fit your games without wasting space in the box, also you need to plan if you are going to have the games in the cases or just loose. Again this is likely the best way to go if your simply looking for storage but if your more interested in displaying your games your not going to be very happy.

While looking for some options for my own games I came across an idea that seemed really cool. Basically you buy a bunch of (or if you already have some) old cassette tape cases, you know those things from the 80's.  There are some pretty nice custom labels which I think look pretty good and of course you could always make your own if your into that kind of thing.

One thing to note is that the actual game is just thrown in the case so it rattles around. I thought about doing this method but I realized that I would want to put a place holder for the games and would most likely 3D print some but with the amount of games I have, not to mention I would need the Japanese art work which I would likely need to make myself. Ultimately I decided that while very cool the time I would need to put into the Japanese art, printing, cutting, 3D designing a place holder and 3D printing would just make this project not practical. That said if you are looking to just do a few games or have a small enough collection I would totally consider this option. Doing 10 to 50 games I think is manageable but when your talking about 100+ games that, for me, is simply too much time.

I had heard of people using baseball card sleeves, you know the 3x3 pages that are used to protect sports cards. This on paper seems like a good idea in theory however in practice I ran into a few issue. The biggest issue is that they slots for the cards are a little too big and there is a lot of wasted space. This empty space actually makes the games looser in the sleeve which means that if your not careful the games can slip out the top which needless to say is a huge pain in the butt. The other thing I wanted to mention is that being that there are only 9 games per page means depending on how many games you have the height and number of binders you will need could grow pretty quick.

Recently I came across a post somewhere (sorry I don't remember where) talking about the last method however instead of using the 3x3 sports card pages they were using 3x4 size 2.5x2.5 coin pages. These sleeves are used to hold large coins for collectors. These pages give a very tight but totally sufficient amount of space for your games. The Tightness also allows for upside down carrying with out having the games spilling out, not that I recommend you carry them upside down or anything. Also just as a reference I have had good success with the BCW pages but I have heard good things about a few other brands as well. You will still need to contend with the large binders and will need a few of them, again depending on how many games we are talking about, but at least this way your getting 12 per page.

This is currently the set up I am employing, it allows for storage of a lot of games with still being able to look at the label art pretty easily. Arranging the games in alphabetical order also make finding the games easy though that could be done with any of the other methods as well . I did some estimating and with 784 games, the total in the Japanese library, I think I will end up needing 66 pages and somewhere around 4 or 5 binders at 4 to 5 inches. So its still going to take up some shelf space to say the least.