A rare GBA cartridge for blood sugar measurement was included in the Game History Foundation

"Archaeology" success of the XXI century.

For those who are keen to collect old game cartridges, some short-lived modern products of the new century are more difficult to collect than the old ones of the last century.

In the GBA game cartridge collecting circle, there is a very special legendary rarity cartridge Glucoboy, whose legend has been passed down for several years, but few people have seen its real face. Nor is it a cross-century "artifact", but a product of this century. Such a rare collection was recently found by the Video Game History Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the research and preservation of game history.

The Glucoboy body is a blood glucose meter combined with a game cartridge, invented by a man named Paul Wessel. The purpose of the device is to encourage children with diabetes to actively participate in daily blood glucose testing and reduce their fear of blood glucose testing, which requires a finger prick to collect blood.

Glucoboy includes several games, players need to periodically provide blood glucose test strips for their equipment to measure and analyze data, and then the system will give players points based on whether the data is normal, and points can be exchanged for one of the games to play.

However, this interesting sounding design was not appreciated by Nintendo after Paul proposed it. Fortunately, the design subsequently gained favor from Australian investors, with an investment of $1.5 million. Glucoboy was released in Australia in 2007 – but it was at the end of the GBA's life cycle and, according to Paul Wessel, only 70,000 of these cartridges were sold.

Paul Wessel was lucky, and his company selling game cartridges was taken in and acquired by pharmaceutical giant Bayer, which released a Glucoboy-like device called Didget in 2009 as a recognition of his invention. The only pity is that the Glucoboy that was not sold that year was also destroyed by Bayer.

This led to the distress of collectors later. In 2018, Kelsey Lewin, a blogger who is keen to study the history of games, introduced the existence of this game cartridge in a video, which aroused the interest of many old players, but when everyone tried to find it, they found it as if it never existed.

The original Glucoboy is now preserved in Bayer and Paul Wessel himself, but other Glucoboys, which are supposed to be in circulation and second-hand market, are extremely rare, and most people have almost no access. This incident once confused netizens, and some even suspected that the product "never went on sale".

There are now answers to this question. Recently, veteran players found some photos of Glucoboy's internal circuit board uploaded in late May on the Internet Archive, and the word "found" appeared on the Internet lost media wiki.

According to the text on The Lost Media Wiki, the Game History Foundation has acquired at least one copy of Glucoboy, and the game content has been successfully dumped.

Perhaps for the Glucoboy itself, the game of unlocking without measuring blood sugar is somewhat "tasteless", but anyway, this magical game cartridge is finally no longer a legend.