Zhou Yichen's GRANDMA is coming to a metal cartridge

Zhou Yichen made GRANDMA the way you keep a diary. After the artist's grandmother fell at home in March 2024, Zhou packed up a computer, moved in, and started recording their days together as a Game Boy game: bringing meals, buying the soda Grandma liked, the same small loops of care repeating with no reward and no goal. A dream became the ending. I wrote about it in April, and I still think it is one of the truest uses of GB Studio anyone has found.

The news is the announcement Zhou posted this week: a Kickstarter with PB Tails to press GRANDMA into a run of 5,000 metal cartridges, CNC-milled, laser-engraved, and playable on an original Game Boy. PB Tails is a Hong Kong hardware maker whose founder, Zoe, was also raised by a grandmother; the studio's argument is that "a story this permanent shouldn't live in plastic."

And one mournful tier: Send in a photo of someone you love, and Zhou will personally redraw them as a pixel character baked onto your individual cartridge. There is also the Grandma Wall, a living online wall assembled from backers' pixel portraits. Zhou spent days reducing a photograph of the real Grandma until the Game Boy's four shades could hold a face. Offering to perform that same act of compression for strangers turns a private memorial into a public one: grief work at cartridge scale. "I make games," Zhou writes on the campaign page, "not the kind you win, but the kind you feel."

The campaign is all or nothing, and it closes October 24. If GRANDMA wrecked you in April, this is the version you can hold.