The Unofficial UK Price Guide to Game Boy Cartridges in 2025

Tom Hargreaves — Hardware Reviewer, RetroInHand

Someone Paid £180 for a Copy of Pokémon Crystal Last Week. Here’s What It’s Actually Worth.

I know this because I was watching the same auction. I’d set a maximum bid of £95 — which I already thought was pushing it — and got outbid with four seconds left by someone who clearly wanted it more than I did. The cartridge had a faded label, no box, no manual, and the seller’s photos were taken under what appeared to be a single forty-watt bulb in a garage. That buyer paid nearly double what I’d call a fair price, and eBay’s completed listings will now treat that transaction as market data.

This is the fundamental problem with using eBay as a price guide for Game Boy cartridges in 2025. The platform records every sale, but it has no mechanism for flagging the Sunday-night panic bids, the auction snipers who got into a war of pride, or the frankly baffling purchases that happen when two collectors decide the same cartridge is the one they absolutely must have this week. Sold listings are historical facts. They are not valuations. There’s a difference, and if you’re buying or selling Game Boy games in the UK right now, that difference could cost you a significant amount of money.

I’ve been collecting Game Boy cartridges seriously since around 2016, and I’ve watched the market shift in ways that still surprise me. I’ve tested games on original hardware ranging from a 1990 DMG unit my brother James sourced from a car boot in Coventry to a brand-new Analogue Pocket that lives on my desk. I commute to London Bridge three days a week, and I have had a Game Boy of some description in my coat pocket for the better part of a decade. I know these games. I know what plays well, what holds value, what gets reprinted, and what eBay consistently misprices. This guide is what I wish had existed when I started.

How the UK Market Differs from Global Pricing

Before we get into specific titles and price brackets, this point needs making clearly: UK Game Boy cartridge prices are not the same as US prices, and they are not simply US prices converted at current exchange rates. The markets behave differently for structural reasons that are worth understanding.

First, PAL Game Boy software was manufactured in smaller quantities than North American NTSC equivalents for most of the platform’s life. The UK population in 1990 was around 57 million people. The US population was roughly 250 million. Publishers pressed cartridges accordingly. This means that for many titles — particularly first-party Nintendo releases from the original DMG era — genuine UK cartridges are rarer than their North American counterparts, even though you’d never guess it from how the internet talks about these games.

Second, the UK retro market was slower to professionalise than the US one. American collectors were using dedicated pricing databases like PriceCharting from the late 2000s. British collectors largely relied on eBay and word of mouth for much longer. This created a period — roughly 2010 to 2018 — where UK prices lagged behind US prices considerably, and a lot of stock quietly migrated overseas. Dealers who spotted the gap bought in bulk here and sold abroad, and the UK market has been recovering from that inventory drain ever since.

Third, and this is one that newer collectors often miss entirely: Nintendo’s regional cart designs varied. The European Game Boy cartridge shell is a slightly different shade of grey from the Japanese and North American versions, the label dimensions are marginally different, and many titles have distinct European part numbers stamped into the plastic. A genuine UK copy of Tetris from 1990 looks subtly different from a US copy, and anyone assembling a region-specific collection needs to know this. Counterfeiters, almost without exception, copy North American cart designs because the reference material is more widely available online. This actually makes some genuine PAL carts easier to authenticate — but it also means PAL collectors need to educate themselves separately from the guides written for American audiences.

The Counterfeit Problem Is Worse Than You Think

I have a small box under my desk that contains seven cartridges I’ve pulled from purchases or trades over the past four years that turned out to be fakes. Seven. And I know what I’m doing. I’ve physically opened cartridges, I own a UV torch, I know the tell-tale signs of the most common reproduction boards, and I still get caught occasionally because the quality of counterfeits has genuinely improved year on year.

The titles most commonly faked in the UK market right now are almost entirely predictable: the Pokémon series across all three Game Boy platforms, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX, Kirby’s Dream Land, Metroid II: Return of Samus, and — increasingly — Game Boy Color titles like Dragon Warrior Monsters and Shantae. The last one is alarming because a genuine Shantae is legitimately one of the rarest Western-released Game Boy Color games, worth £400–600 for a loose cartridge in good condition. Fakes are flooding in, and not all of them are obvious.

I’ll cover authentication in detail in its own section below. But the reason I’m mentioning counterfeits here, in the market overview, is that they are actively distorting UK prices. When a buyer pays £85 for a fake Pokémon Gold and then relists it as genuine three months later because they needed the money, that sale also becomes market data. The contamination runs both ways: inflated prices from bidding wars and deflated credibility from fraud. eBay’s sold listings contain both, unlabelled.

The Original Game Boy (DMG): What’s Actually Worth Money in 2025

The original grey brick. The DMG. Released in the UK in September 1990 at £79.99 — which is approximately £200 in today’s money, incidentally, making it a very different proposition from what it seems in retrospect. The software library spans from launch titles like Tetris and Super Mario Land right through to the mid-nineties, when Nintendo was already pushing the platform’s successor.

Titles That Are Genuinely Worth Their Current Price

Kirby’s Dream Land (1992, UK release 1993) consistently sells for £25–40 loose in the UK, and I think that’s fair. It’s a short game — most adults can finish it in under an hour — but it’s charming, it plays beautifully on original hardware, and it’s a first-party Nintendo title with genuine shelf appeal. The label fades badly on played copies, so genuinely clean cartridges justify the upper end of that range.

Metroid II: Return of Samus is a more interesting case. Loose copies sell in the £30–55 range, and they’ve been creeping upward since Nintendo’s 3DS eShop closed in March 2023, removing the most accessible legitimate way to play the game digitally. I’ve watched the price tick up incrementally every three months since that closure. The game itself is genuinely excellent — atmospheric, demanding, and unlike anything else in the DMG library — and I don’t think the current pricing is unreasonable for what you’re getting. Just make sure it’s genuine. See the authentication section.

Tetris, the pack-in title, is a peculiar one. It sells for £5–15 loose, which makes it one of the cheapest first-party games you can buy. It’s also one of the most produced, which explains the price. But here’s what most guides won’t tell you: label condition makes an enormous difference to eventual resale value because the DMG Tetris label was printed on a low-quality stock that yellows and peels with age. A genuinely clean label copy — bright colours, sharp edges, no lifting — is worth more than the average price suggests. I’d pay £18–22 for a perfect-label copy without hesitation. I wouldn’t pay £15 for a grotty one.

Donkey Kong (the 1994 platform-puzzle hybrid, not the 1982 arcade port) is one I feel is actively underpriced by the current market. It sells for £12–25 loose, and it is, without exaggeration, one of the most ambitious games ever released for any version of the Game Boy. It contains mechanics that weren’t replicated on the platform for years. If you don’t own it, buy it at current prices while the market hasn’t caught up. I play this game regularly on my commute and it still feels fresh thirty years after its release.

DMG Titles That Are Overpriced Right Now

Kid Dracula regularly reaches £40–65 on eBay, and I find this increasingly hard to justify. It’s a decent action-platformer, well-regarded by fans of the Castlevania series, but it was not a rare game. Large quantities were produced, and the price reflects collector interest in the IP rather than genuine scarcity. You’re paying a Castlevania tax. If the game were called something else, it would sell for £15.

Gargoyle’s Quest is in the same category, regularly hitting £35–50 for a worn loose cartridge. The game is good — genuinely good, I want to be clear — but the price has been driven up by a combination of YouTube retrospective coverage in the early 2020s and the general “hidden gem” discourse that followed. Before roughly 2019, this game sold for under £15 consistently. The game hasn’t changed. What changed is that more people know about it. That’s a legitimate market force, but it’s worth understanding you’re partly paying for hype.

Game Boy Color: The Most Volatile Part of the Market

The Game Boy Color launched in the UK in November 1998, and its library sits in an odd position in the collecting world. It’s too new to have the nostalgic cachet of original DMG titles, too old to feel like a recent purchase, and split between games designed specifically for GBC hardware and “dual-mode” cartridges that run on either platform. Pricing across the library is genuinely all over the place, and this is where I see the most mistakes made by buyers.

The Pokémon Premium and Why It’s Justified (Mostly)

Let’s get this out of the way because it’s what everyone asks about. Pokémon Gold and Pokémon Silver sell for £35–65 loose in the UK, genuine copies in reasonable condition. Pokémon Crystal — which launched in the UK in November 2001, nearly a year after Japan — sells for £60–120 loose, with condition making a significant difference. The auction I lost that I mentioned at the start of this article was a Crystal cartridge, and honestly, the winner paid too much for the condition. But the baseline price range is real.

Here’s why the Pokémon premium is mostly justified, which I know is a slightly controversial position: the games are not merely collectible, they are actively played. People buy Pokémon Crystal loose to actually play it, not just to put it on a shelf. Demand for playable copies keeps prices elevated in a way that doesn’t apply to, say, a copy of Worms Armageddon GBC. The problem is that genuine playable copies are becoming harder to find because the SRAM battery that saves game data typically lasts 15–20 years, and most cartridges from 1998–2001 are now at or past that threshold. A copy with a dead save battery is worth considerably less than one that saves correctly — but you often can’t tell from photos, and sellers don’t always disclose it.

My test process: if I’m buying a GBC Pokémon game, I ask the seller to photograph the save screen showing a saved game file with a playtime. If it’s blank — no saved files at all — that’s a yellow flag. If they can’t do it or won’t, I either factor in a battery replacement cost (about £3 in parts if you do it yourself, around £15 if you pay someone) or I walk away. On my last three Pokémon purchases I’ve replaced the battery on all of them regardless of whether they appeared to save, because the peace of mind is worth more than the cost.

Game Boy Color Games That Are Absurdly Overpriced

Shantae. I need to write about this carefully because it’s become almost a sacred cow in collecting circles and I genuinely don’t want to cause anyone to lose money on a bad sale. Shantae, developed by WayForward and published by Capcom in 2002, is legitimately rare. It launched at the very end of the GBC’s commercial life in North America and was published in smaller quantities than almost any other licensed western GBC release. Genuine copies do command high prices, and in the UK, a verified authentic loose cartridge in good condition is worth £400–600. I’m not disputing that.

What I’m disputing is the wisdom of paying that much for a game you can play officially and legally on a modern device via the WayForward Collection on Switch, or emulate trivially. The collector rationale — owning the physical object — is valid and I understand it, but the price has been so thoroughly destroyed by fakes that buying a Shantae cartridge without a professional authentication is, in my opinion, financially reckless. I know three collectors personally who paid over £300 for fakes. Three. The authentication section later in this guide covers what to look for specifically.

Dragon Warrior Monsters is another one I’d flag. Genuine copies sell for £45–85 in the UK, and fakes are widespread. The legitimate game is genuinely excellent — it’s essentially a proto-Dragon Quest monster-collecting RPG that predates how the genre would later develop, and it plays surprisingly well on original hardware. But the price has been inflated by the combination of Dragon Quest IP enthusiasm and scarcity theatre. A lot of copies you see at the higher end of that range are fakes. Be careful.

GBC Titles That Are Undervalued Right Now

Metal Gear Solid for GBC — a genuinely separate game from the PlayStation original, developed by Konami’s internal teams — sells for £15–30 loose, and I think this is too cheap for what it is. It’s a technically remarkable achievement for the hardware, it tells a distinct story, and it’s the kind of game that gets rediscovered every few years by someone who writes a passionate article about how overlooked it is, briefly spikes in price, and then settles back down. Buy it now, before the next rediscovery cycle.

Wario Land 3 is one of my favourite games on any platform — I’ve completed it four times across different hardware over the years — and it consistently sells for £12–25 loose, which feels criminal. It’s a longer, more complex game than most of the GBC library, it uses the hardware’s colour capabilities beautifully, and it has genuine replay value from the non-linear world structure. If you don’t own this, you should. At current prices, it represents probably the best value in the entire GBC library.

Game Boy Advance: The Sweet Spot for Collectors in 2025

The GBA library is, in my opinion, the most interesting part of the Game Boy collecting market right now, for a simple reason: it’s in transition. Prices are rising, but slowly enough that there are still genuine bargains to be found. The hardware is excellent — I prefer playing GBA games on an AGS-101 backlit SP, which produces the best screen image of any original Nintendo handheld — and the library is deep enough that there’s something for every taste.

First-Party Nintendo: Mostly Holding Steady

Mother 3 never received an official Western release, and fan-translated cartridges — reproductions, legally speaking — circulate widely. I’m not going to price guide you on those because their value is tied to the quality of the specific reproduction, and that’s a different conversation. What I will say is that legitimate Japanese imports of Mother 3 sell for £40–70 in the UK and play identically on any unmodified GBA, and if you’re a fan of the series, a Japanese original is a more satisfying object than a reproduction.

Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen are the GBA entries most distorted by counterfeiting, and the situation has become genuinely bad. I’ve seen what appeared to be clean, authentic copies at markets and car boots fail basic authentication checks. The GBA Pokémon titles — FireRed, LeafGreen, Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald — are probably the most counterfeited cartridges in the entire western retro market right now. Loose genuine copies of the common titles (Ruby, Sapphire, FireRed, LeafGreen) sell for £20–40 each in the UK. Pokémon Emerald, the standout, sells for £45–80. None of those prices are worth paying for a fake, and the authentication work is non-negotiable for these titles.

The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap sells for £25–50 loose and is, I’ll just say it outright, better than its price suggests. It’s a Capcom-developed Zelda that plays like a love letter to the SNES games, it looks gorgeous on a backlit screen, and it was never quite as popular as the Capcom Oracle games, which means it’s slightly less picked over. Good value at the lower end of that range.

Third-Party GBA: Where the Real Bargains Hide

Final Fantasy VI Advance (released in the UK as Final Fantasy III on GBA in 2007) is one of my favourite things to demonstrate to people who aren’t sure about collecting. It’s the definitive portable version of one of the greatest RPGs ever made, it sells for £20–40 loose, and the cartridge is almost never faked because it’s not valuable enough to justify the effort. You are essentially guaranteed a genuine copy when you buy this game, which is a refreshingly simple proposition in a market full of authentication anxiety.

Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow sells for £30–55, and this one I do think is appropriately priced. It’s the best Castlevania on GBA, possibly in the series up to that point depending on your preferences, and demand is sustained because it’s actually played rather than just collected. The sequels — Harmony of Dissonance and Circle of the Moon — are cheaper (£15–30 each) and while they’re not quite as polished, they’re worth buying at those prices.

WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ sells for £8–18 and is frequently overlooked by collectors focused on traditional game types. This is their loss. It’s one of the most original games of its generation, it plays brilliantly in five-minute commute bursts, and at those prices it’s practically disposable. I’ve bought three copies over the years — one died, one went to a friend, one is in my bag right now.

GBA Games with Inflated Current Prices

Gunstar Super Heroes by Treasure is a genuinely brilliant game — one of the best action titles on the platform — but it sells for £40–75 in the UK, which I think has got slightly ahead of the content. The game is about three hours long. It’s exceptional, but it’s short, and a meaningful portion of the price is Treasure IP premium rather than pure quality assessment. I paid £28 for my copy a few years ago and I thought that was fair. At £65, you’re paying a lot for something you’ll likely complete in a weekend.

Drill Dozer is another one. A rare-ish Game Freak title that sells for £35–60, and the rarity is genuine — it was a limited run — but the game itself is a fairly straightforward action platformer. It’s good. It’s not £60 good. The price is almost entirely about collector interest in Game Freak as a developer and genuine scarcity, not about the intrinsic quality of the experience. If you want to own it, that’s entirely valid, but go in knowing what you’re actually paying for.

Authentication: How to Know What You’re Actually Buying

This section is the most practically useful thing in this guide, and I want to write it without being condescending, because I’ve been caught out myself and the methods for detecting fakes have had to evolve as the fakes have improved.

The Physical Checks

Start with the screw. Original Nintendo cartridges use a proprietary tri-wing screw — not a standard Phillips head. If you see a Phillips head screw on the back of a Game Boy cartridge, stop immediately. That cartridge has been opened at some point, either for a legitimate battery replacement or, more commonly, because the board inside is not the original. This is not conclusive — genuine carts do get opened for battery work — but it changes your approach entirely.

The label. Original Nintendo labels have a specific texture and finish that’s hard to replicate perfectly. Run your thumb across it gently. Genuine labels have a slight paper texture and are not perfectly smooth. Many fakes use glossy printed sticker stock that feels slick in a way that’s immediately noticeable once you’ve handled enough genuine carts. The label edges should be flush and straight, not lifted at the corners. Colour saturation on fakes is often slightly off — the reds are sometimes too vivid, the greens slightly wrong. This is subtle and requires experience, but it’s reliable once you’ve calibrated your eye.

The shell. Original Game Boy cartridge shells are slightly translucent when held up to a strong light source. Not obviously transparent — you can’t see the board clearly — but there’s a faint light transmission that solid-injected reproduction shells typically don’t have. This works better on some colours than others. The grey of DMG carts is easiest to check. GBC carts, which are clear-coloured by design for most titles, require a different approach.

The UV test. Under a UV torch, original Nintendo PCB boards — the green circuit board inside the cartridge — will fluoresce slightly. Counterfeit boards often use different PCB stock that either doesn’t fluoresce or fluoresces differently. You don’t need to open the cartridge for this: shine the UV light through the cartridge’s label window or the ventilation slots and observe the glow. I’ve been using a basic £8 UV torch from Amazon for three years and it’s caught more fakes than any other single method.

Board-Level Authentication for the Committed Collector

If you’re spending over £50 on any Game Boy cartridge, you should be comfortable opening it. You’ll need a tri-wing screwdriver (they’re cheap — around £5 for a decent one) and basic knowledge of what the genuine board for your specific title looks like.

The key things to look for inside: the Nintendo copyright stamp on the PCB, the specific chip configuration, the manufacturer date codes stamped on individual chips, and the overall build quality of the soldering. Genuine Nintendo PCBs are immaculately assembled. They are factory-clean with precise, consistent solder joints. Counterfeit boards often show hand-soldering marks, inconsistent flux residue, or chips that are clearly not original Nintendo part numbers.

For GBC Pokémon games specifically, the save chip configuration is important. Genuine Pokémon Gold and Silver cartridges use a specific MBC3 memory bank controller with a particular RTC (real-time clock) chip for the in-game clock functions. Fakes frequently use MBC5 controllers because they’re cheaper and more available. If you open a Pokémon Gold cartridge and see an MBC5 chip, it’s a fake. This is definitive, not circumstantial.

For Pokémon Emerald, the genuine cartridge uses a specific save chip that, on authentic copies, should show a particular pattern under magnification. The counterfeit boards for Emerald have become very good at mimicking the genuine board layout, but they almost always use a different flash storage chip. If you’re spending £60+ on an Emerald cartridge, ask the seller to photograph the board before buying. Any legitimate seller will do this. Reluctance to provide board photos for an expensive cartridge is, in my experience, itself a red flag.

Testing on Hardware

Some fakes pass visual inspection but fail on hardware. The tells I look for when testing:

• Save battery life: a fake cartridge with a new battery will often show unusual save behaviour — saving correctly sometimes but not consistently, or showing the wrong save file size in the menu.
• Load time: some fake GBA cartridges have marginally longer splash screen durations because the flash memory read speed is slower than original Nintendo ROM chips. This is subtle but noticeable if you’ve played the game on verified hardware before.
• Audio: on some GBC fakes, the sound output is fractionally different in pitch or tone. This is the hardest to detect and the most subjective, but experienced players often notice it.
• The title screen test: for Pokémon GBA games, the title screen should be interactive — press A on the title screen of Emerald and specific animations should trigger in a specific sequence. Fakes sometimes get this wrong.

Where to Actually Buy in the UK in 2025

eBay is not the only option, and in some ways it’s not the best option, particularly for buyers who want authentication confidence. Here’s my honest assessment of the main channels available to UK buyers right now.

eBay: Use It Right or Don’t Use It

eBay is fine if you know how to use it correctly. The key is filtering sold listings by condition, reading feedback carefully (not just the score — the actual text of recent feedback), and being willing to ask questions before bidding. Sellers who have sold multiple retro items and maintained specific positive feedback about cartridge authenticity are much safer than one-time sellers clearing out a relative’s collection. That said, some of my best purchases have been from exactly those one-time collection clearances — the key is that their carts have no reason to be fakes, just be sure to authenticate on receipt regardless.

Buy It Now listings are often better value than auctions for common titles, because you’re not competing with Sunday-night impulse bidders. For rarer titles, auctions can occasionally go low if they’re listed poorly — bad title, bad photos, ending at an inconvenient time. I’ve bought Metroid II for £22 from a poorly photographed auction that ended at 6am on a Tuesday. That was luck, but it was educated luck — I was tracking the listing because I knew the title deserved more attention.

CEX

CEX is interesting and underrated by many collectors. Their buy prices are low, which means they can price for retail at margins that sometimes undercut eBay when you factor in postage and the possibility of fraud. CEX tests cartridges before buying — their staff aren’t experts, but they will run a basic functionality check — and they grade by condition reasonably consistently. For common GBA titles, CEX is often the most straightforward option. They’re also widely distributed across UK high streets, which means you can inspect before buying.

The downsides: their authentication for higher-value titles is not reliable enough to substitute for your own checks. I’ve seen genuine fakes in CEX shops — not many, but some. And their pricing for genuinely rare items can be high because they benchmark against eBay sold prices, which, as we’ve established, aren’t always trustworthy.

Retro Game Shops and Markets

The independent retro game shop scene in the UK is better now than it’s been at any point in my collecting life. There are specialist shops in most major cities, and the best of them have genuinely knowledgeable staff who authenticate stock before putting it out. These shops typically price above eBay average, but what you’re paying for is the authentication work and the physical inspection opportunity. For anything over £40, I’d rather buy from a good independent shop at a slight premium than from eBay with anxiety.

Car boots and charity shops still exist as a source, but the days of finding a Pokémon Crystal for 50p are over. Awareness has risen dramatically — charity shop staff increasingly check eBay prices before pricing games, and the best car boot traders know the market. You might find common titles cheaply, but the rare ones get listed or sent to specialist dealers. I still go regularly because I enjoy it and I occasionally get lucky, but I don’t factor it into any kind of serious buying strategy.

Discord and Reddit Communities

The UK Retro Gaming communities on both platforms have active buying and selling channels, and for authenticated cartridges between collectors who know what they’re doing, this is often the fairest market of all. Prices tend to sit between eBay average and retail, there’s genuine accountability because your username is your reputation, and disputes are rare because everyone involved usually actually cares about the hobby. I’ve made several of my best purchases through these communities and I’d recommend joining them regardless of whether you plan to buy.

UK Price Reference: Specific Titles and Realistic Valuations for 2025

What follows is my honest assessment of current UK market values for loose, cartridge-only copies in Good condition (functional, complete, moderate label wear). Boxed complete copies command a premium of 50–150% depending on the title. Mint/near-mint loose copies sit at 20–40% above these figures. Damaged or heavily worn copies should be discounted 30–50%.

Original Game Boy (DMG) — UK Loose Prices 2025

• Tetris — £8–15 (inflated copies sell for more but aren’t worth it)
• Super Mario Land — £12–22
• Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins — £18–30
• Kirby’s Dream Land — £22–38
• Kirby’s Dream Land 2 — £25–45
• Donkey Kong — £12–25 (undervalued in my opinion)
• Metroid II: Return of Samus — £30–55
• Kid Dracula — £35–60 (overvalued in my opinion)
• Gargoyle’s Quest — £28–48 (partially inflated by hype)
• The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (original, not DX) — £20–38
• Final Fantasy Adventure (UK release) — £35–65

Game Boy Color — UK Loose Prices 2025

• Pokémon Red/Blue (technically DMG but commonly traded alongside GBC) — £25–50
• Pokémon Yellow — £30–55
• Pokémon Gold — £35–65
• Pokémon Silver — £30–60
• Pokémon Crystal — £65–120 (wide range reflects condition variation)
• The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX — £25–45
• Wario Land 3 — £12–25 (genuinely undervalued)
• Metal Gear Solid GBC — £15–30 (undervalued)
• Dragon Warrior Monsters — £40–80 (authenticate carefully)
• Shantae — £400–600 verified genuine (do not buy without authentication)
• Resident Evil GBC (cancelled prototype — not commercially available)

Game Boy Advance — UK Loose Prices 2025

• Pokémon FireRed/LeafGreen — £20–40 (authenticate; fakes common)
• Pokémon Ruby/Sapphire — £18–35 (authenticate)
• Pokémon Emerald — £50–85 (authenticate rigorously)
• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap — £25–50
• Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow — £30–55
• Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance — £15–30
• Final Fantasy VI Advance — £20–40
• Golden Sun — £15–30
• Golden Sun: The Lost Age — £15–28
• Metroid Fusion — £20–38
• Metroid: Zero Mission — £20–38
• WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgame$ — £8–18
• Gunstar Super Heroes — £40–70 (partially inflated)
• Drill Dozer — £35–60
• Advance Wars — £18–35
• Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising — £20–40
• Fire Emblem (GBA, UK release) — £25–50

Boxed Copies and Complete-In-Box: Is the Premium Worth It?

A question I get asked constantly, and my honest answer is: it depends entirely on why you’re collecting.

If you’re collecting to play — if the point is to have games you can take on a commute, load into an original piece of hardware, and enjoy — then boxed copies are largely irrelevant. The game is in the cartridge. The box is cardboard. Beautiful cardboard, sometimes, with excellent original artwork, but cardboard nonetheless. Spending £120 on a complete boxed Metroid II when a £40 loose copy plays identically is a choice about object appreciation, not about the game itself.

If you’re collecting as a form of investment, boxed copies do retain value better and appreciate faster than loose ones. The Complete In Box premium has historically run at 50–150% above loose prices, and for rarer titles it goes higher. A CIB Pokémon Crystal in excellent condition is a £300+ item. A loose one is £80–120. The box and manual account for more than double the value of the cartridge alone.

If you’re collecting for the aesthetic pleasure of the objects themselves — if you want shelves that look like a museum of Nintendo history — then complete copies are the only copies worth having. I understand this completely, even though my own collecting is primarily player-focused. There’s a specific satisfaction to holding a complete, original Game Boy game in its original packaging that a loose cartridge simply doesn’t replicate.

My practical advice: unless you’re specifically building a CIB collection, buy loose and spend the money saved on more games. The market for loose games is much larger, which means more opportunities to find genuine copies at fair prices. And critically, loose cartridges are easier to authenticate than boxed ones, where a dishonest seller can put a fake cart in a genuine box and charge full CIB prices.

The Repro and Fan-Translation Market: Where Does This Fit In?

I’ve deliberately not covered reproduction cartridges as a buying guide topic in the price sections above, but they deserve acknowledgement because they’re a real part of the market and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

Reproduction cartridges — typically unlicensed PCBs in either original shells or new-manufacture shells, running ROM images — exist in a legal grey area that I’m not going to fully navigate here. What I will say is that there is a meaningful distinction between good-faith reproductions that are clearly labelled as such and sold transparently as reproductions, and fraudulent counterfeits sold as genuine originals. The former I have no strong objection to, particularly for games that have never received a Western release. The latter is fraud and harms everyone in the collecting community.

If you want to play Mother 3 on original hardware with the excellent fan translation — and it is excellent, years of work by dedicated people — a clearly labelled reproduction cartridge bought from a transparent seller is a reasonable way to do it. I own one. It plays perfectly and the quality of the translation is such that it’s the definitive English-language experience. Just don’t buy it thinking it’s an original Japanese cart, and don’t list it as one if you ever sell it.

The pricing for good-quality reproductions in the UK sits at approximately £15–35 for most titles, varying with the complexity of the build and whether a custom label has been produced. For fan-translation projects like Mother 3, the price often reflects the labour of the person who assembled it rather than raw component costs, and I don’t begrudge them a reasonable return for that work.

Where This Market Goes From Here

I want to end with some genuine assessment of where I think Game Boy cartridge prices are heading, because a price guide that only describes the present without acknowledging the direction of travel isn’t particularly useful.

The overall trajectory is upward, but unevenly. Common titles — your Tetris, your Super Mario Land, anything that was produced in very large quantities — have probably found something close to their floor and their ceiling already. They’re not going to dramatically increase in value because there’s no scarcity argument to be made. There are a lot of copies of Tetris in the world and there always will be.

Rarer genuine titles — the Shantaes, the Metroid IIs, the late-run GBC exclusives — will continue to rise, but the ceiling is increasingly being set by the quality of emulation alternatives rather than pure demand. When a game is available legitimately on a modern platform for £7.99, the argument for paying £400 for the cartridge becomes purely about the physical object. That argument is valid for some buyers, but the population of buyers willing to pay it isn’t infinite.

The GBA market has the most headroom, in my opinion. It’s the most playable of the three platforms — the AGS-101 hardware is genuinely excellent, the Analogue Pocket supports it natively, and the games are complex enough to sustain adult attention. As the generation who grew up with GBA reaches their peak earning years — we’re talking about people who were 10 years old in 2001, who are now in their mid-thirties — disposable income will meet nostalgia in a way that tends to push prices up. I’ve been saying this for three years and the data consistently backs it up.

The counterfeit problem will get worse before it gets better. The economics of producing high-quality fakes have only improved as component costs have fallen and reference material has proliferated online. The authentication skills that are currently held by experienced collectors will need to become common knowledge, and community efforts to document and share authentication data — like the excellent work being done in dedicated Discord servers — are more important than any price guide.

My practical advice for 2025: buy what you want to play at prices you’re comfortable with, authenticate everything over £30, and don’t treat eBay sold listings as gospel. The real value of a Game Boy cartridge is what it gives you — the game, the experience, the object — not what someone else paid for one at 11pm on a Sunday when they were feeling impulsive. Know the difference, and you’ll spend your money well.

If you want to discuss specific titles or get a second opinion before making a purchase, the RetroInHand community Discord is open to exactly those conversations. We’ve talked more people out of bad purchases than I can count, and we’ve helped people identify fakes they’d already bought in time to dispute the sale. That kind of knowledge-sharing is what this community is actually for.