Back when every toy, movie, and half-remembered mascot had a cart on the shelf, it is sort of surprising the massively popular Bop-It never made it to a cartridge. Maybe it was because the Bop-It was already relatively portable. Maybe it was because translating such a physical, tactile toy to a system with few controls would be a lackluster experience. Whatever the reason may be, it took until 2025 for a fan to finally fix that (okay, maybe there is now a Bop-It game for Nintendo Switch but who cares?). BopIt! GB is exactly what it sounds like: a homebrew demake that stuffs the Bop-It experience into a tiny ROM and somehow makes it feel right at home on Nintendo’s handheld.
Rob51Design’s pitch is delightfully straightforward. They were scrolling through their ROM collection, realized there was no late‑90s Bop-It cartridge to be found, and decided to do God’s work. The result is a essentially a rhythm game where you use the D‑pad and A button to highlight PULL IT, BOP IT, or TWIST IT on screen, then trigger the right input in time with the prompts. It is simple, fast, and about as pick‑up‑and‑hand‑to‑a‑friend as handheld games get.
The attention to detail is what sells it. BopIt! GB supports both original Game Boy and Game Boy Color, has voice acting clips like the original toy, and even bakes in rumble support if you run it in an emulator like SameBoy. There is single‑cartridge style “Pass It!” multiplayer, unlockable gameplay modes, and enough difficulty in the timing that it stops being a joke and becomes an actual “one more try” score chaser.
It is also wonderfully accessible. You can play it in a browser with keyboard controls, or download separate ROMs for GB/C and Analogue Pocket if you want to run it on hardware. For a lot of people, it will be a quick nostalgia hit, but it is also a neat reminder of what GB Studio and a weird idea can do when someone decides a toy from the mid-90s deserved a cartridge all along.
Source: itch.io
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