Game Boy Works

You can see the Game Boy’s roots in the Game & Watch series on clear display in Nintendo’s first generation of releases for the system, and nowhere more than Alleyway. A dated take on the block-breaking genre even at the time of its 1989 debut – the far more sophisticated Arkanoid predates it by a good three years – Alleyway feels like a midpoint between Game & Watch and “real” portable video games. This isn’t to say it’s a poor game or badly made; merely unambitious.

Japan and America were (and are) Nintendo’s bread-and-butter. So in that light, of course one of the Game Boy’s launch titles would be Baseball. Japan and America are the only countries in the world that genuinely care about baseball. It’s our common language.

Super Mario Land was the big release for Game Boy’s launch – the can’t-fail hit designed to move systems by the million right as the world was caught in Mario Mania’s peak thrall – and that makes it a fascinating game on several levels.

When Game Boy launched in Japan, it arrived with four games (each sold separately, of course). Most of them made their way to the West – as did the overwhelming majority of game releases from Game Boy’s first year of existence, for that matter – with one notable exception: Yakuman. Yakuman‘s failure to venture beyond Japanese shores doesn’t require much explanation, though. It’s just that it would have been financial suicide. Yakuman would have been lucky to achieve triple-digit sales figures in the U.S. After all, Americans aren’t exactly clamoring for Japanese-style mahjong games.

Tetris. Has any game ever defined a platform so clearly? Tetris didn’t merely move systems – though it certainly did that – it established the tone and style of the Game Boy. Until Pokémon came along, Tetris served as the Game Boy’s statement of intent.

The classic puzzle game Soukoban has gone by many names here in America as it’s seen release by countless publishers hoping to put a unique face on the same idea (and often the exact same content): Shove It!, Boxy Boy, Sokoban… and those are just the official releases. You don’t even want to know about the clones. For Game Boy fans, however, the only name that matters is Boxxle.

Released in September 1989 in Japan, The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle stands as the Game Boy’s first licensed release (that is, the first to bear a license from another medium). However, the particulars of its license — or rather, licenses — and chronology of its release variants make a compelling case for all those prejudices people have against licensed games. Crazy Castle isn’t too shabby a game, but trying to keep track of all its manifold permutations is a job for an Excel file.

Lode Runner, as the name implies, sees players dashing through complex mazes in search of gold under the protection of deadly antagonists.