Everyone keeps saying print is dying. I have heard it so many times that it barely registers anymore, even though there’s a lot of proof in terms of book sales, paper conferences, and a lot of other events that prove otherwise. And then Red Bull goes ahead and drops a magazine cover you can actually play Tetris on, and suddenly the conversation feels a lot more interesting.
The GamePop GP-1 Playable Magazine System is exactly what it sounds like. It is the cover of Red Bull’s GamePop magazine, a publication dedicated to gaming culture, except this one comes with 180 RGB LEDs, seven capacitive touch buttons, a 32-bit ARM chip, and a flexible circuit board thinner than the width of a human hair. It is, by Red Bull’s own description, a “first-of-its-kind magazine-cover game system,” and I am not going to argue with them on that one.
Designer: Kevin Bates for Red Bull
The design was developed by Kevin Bates, the engineer behind the Arduboy, a credit card-sized gaming console that already had a cult following among hardware enthusiasts and open-source gamers. Bates sandwiched a custom flexible circuit board between layers of paper to create a cover that measures about five millimeters at its thickest point. That thickness? That is where four rechargeable coin-cell batteries live. The whole thing bends. It feels like a magazine. And yet it runs Tetris.
What I find genuinely impressive here is not the novelty, though the novelty is undeniable. It is the level of restraint in the engineering. The LED matrix is just 180 lights, two millimeters each, arranged to render the falling Tetris blocks cleanly enough that the game is actually playable. The circuit board itself is only a tenth of a millimeter thick. A deconstructed USB-C port, tucked into a small paper pocket along the bottom edge, handles charging and gives you about two hours of playtime per charge. Every single decision in this build was made with one goal: to make technology disappear into the paper.
That is where the real design story is. It would have been easy to make this clunky, to let the hardware show through in obvious ways that remind you of what you are holding. Instead, Bates and Red Bull chose the harder path, the one that asks the technology to serve the object rather than dominate it. The result looks and feels like a magazine first and a gaming device second, which is exactly the right priority.
Now, to be fair, the GP-1 is not going to replace your Game Boy. Reviews note that you cannot save pieces for later, the Tetris theme only plays at the start of a new game rather than through the whole session, and the experience is firmly on the novelty end of the gaming spectrum. But I do not think that is the point. The point is that Kevin Bates looked at a flat piece of paper and asked what it could actually do, and the answer he arrived at is both surprising and kind of beautiful.
The GamePop GP-1 was produced as a limited edition dust cover for the latest issue of the magazine, officially licensed by the Tetris Company, and only 150 numbered editions exist. That number feels both frustratingly small and also exactly right. This is not a mass-market product. It is a proof of concept, a collector’s artifact, a statement about where print design can go when the people behind it stop treating the format as a limitation and start treating it as a canvas.
Red Bull has always understood that the best marketing does not feel like marketing. It feels like culture. Sponsoring extreme sports, launching a Tetris tournament that played out across 4,000 drones inside the Dubai Frame, and now publishing a magazine that is also a game console. The throughline is the same: make the thing so interesting that people want to talk about it, collect it, and hold onto it. Print is not dying. It is just waiting for designers who are brave enough to ask better questions.
