The Game Boy That Survived a Gulf War Bombing

In 1991, U.S. Army medic Stephan Scoggins was stationed with the 44th Evacuation Hospital during Operation Desert Storm. He had brought a Nintendo Game Boy to pass the time. When a bomb struck his barracks, the fire tore through the building and destroyed nearly everything inside. Scoggins survived. His Game Boy, he assumed, did not.

Nintendo Called It a Lost Cause

The damage was severe. The front casing was heavily scorched and warped. The Control Pad and the A and B buttons had melted away entirely, leaving the motherboard exposed to open air.

Scoggins wrote to Nintendo Power while still deployed, hesitantly asking if a replacement was possible, and shipped back what remained.

Nintendo's technicians took one look and wrote it off. Then, almost as an afterthought, someone slotted in a Tetris cartridge and swapped in a fresh battery pack.

The Game Boy produced its distinctive startup chime. The Start and Select buttons still clicked. The screen still lit up. It worked.

Nintendo Kept It

Rather than repair the unit, Nintendo sent Scoggins a brand-new replacement - what they called a special "Desert Storm courtesy." The charred original they kept, and it eventually went on permanent display at the Nintendo store in Rockefeller Center, New York - a store that didn't open until 2005 - sitting in a glass case with a looping demo of Tetris running on the screen.

The placard read: "This Game Boy was damaged when barracks were bombed during the 1990-1991 Gulf War. It still works."

Decades Under Glass

The Gulf War Game Boy became one of the most-photographed objects at Nintendo NY. Visitors would stop at the second-floor display to look at the melted buttons and scorched shell, and to watch Tetris play out on the screen.

Nintendo changed the batteries regularly and swapped the screen as needed, and the unit stayed on display there for close to two decades - part of the more than 30 years that had passed since Scoggins shipped it back from the Gulf.

Retired to Redmond

In mid-2023, a visitor noticed the case was empty. A staff member confirmed the console had been quietly removed and returned to Nintendo's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

The screen had finally degraded beyond display condition after years of running the same game on a loop. Whether it will return to public display, perhaps at the Nintendo Museum that opened in Kyoto in October 2024, has not been confirmed by Nintendo.