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.
We finally put a bow on Game Boy's first year of existence with a recap: What came before, what the Game Boy accomplished, and what was up with all those games.
You can't really talk about the Game Boy without delving into the life and works of its esteemed creator, the late Gunpei (or Gumpei) Yokoi. This video was created as a six-month Patreon-backer exclusive. If you enjoyed it, please consider supporting Game Boy World for early access to the next bonus episode!
Power Mission (or rather, "Power Missiøn") was a reasonably decent strategy game that would be immediately overshadowed by superior and better-promoted takes on the genre, including Nobunaga's Ambition and (in Japan) the precursor to the Advance Wars series. A perfectly acceptable genre piece lost forever to history…
A strange and obscure little U.S.-only release for Game Boy in which the protagonist of equally obscure NES game Thunder & Lightning turns monsters into peaches and eats them. Developed anonymously and tied inexplicably to a completely unrelated game, this one's a real mystery. Sadly, the gameplay turns out to be far less interesting than the enigma surrounding Mr. Chin's existence.
It's here: The first true Game Boy collector's grail piece (and just in time for our recent "collector's bubble" episode of Retronauts - https://retronauts.com/article/699/ep.... Fish Dude is not a good or memorable game, but it is very, very rare and expensive. Which is… something, I suppose. Anyway, to mark the occasion, I tried to make this episode a little different than usual. Please enjoy.
Our second Game Boy Gundam game, and can you believe it? It's also not very good. This one is bad in a boring, predictable way: It's a game adaptation of a video series designed in the mold of Dragon Quest. You'd think an obvious formula for success as a video game would present itself based on that pretext, but…
Strategy and simulation powerhouse Koei makes its debut on Game Boy with… a strategic simulation game. Nobunaga's Ambition does a pretty respectable job of bringing a huge PC war simulation into a tiny, monochrome format. As the world's first proper handheld simulation game, it's pretty respectable, if not precisely something you'd want to spent a lot of time with today.
A pleasant surprise this week, as one of the most charming game boxes to have appeared in some time contains… a thoroughly pleasant and enjoyable little game. Astro Rabby turns out to be a little-known Japan-only release that isn't a puzzler, isn't shoddily made, and isn't painful to play. It's a good-natured top-down platformer for flexible controls and a decent difficulty curve that steadily ramps up from breezy to brutal. Not a classic, but in a way it's better than a masterpiece: It's just a fun little diversion with no frills and no expectations attached.
The series hits its 100th episode and to celebrate… uh, well, it's business as usual. Thankfully, this episode tackles a pretty good (if somewhat unfairly balanced) shooter by none other than Konami: Pop ’N Twinbee. This shooter originally appeared in Japan in 1990 as Twinbee Da! (pictured in the video); the European version showed up four years later and is almost impossible to find complete these days (hence the lack of European packaging photos).
Ah, here we go: The second set of 100 Game Boy Works episodes begins with the quintessential Game Boy experience. Yes, it's a mediocre puzzle-ish game that plays better on other platforms. Not an auspicious beginning, perhaps, but at least it's a realistic one. It appears I missed a play mechanic here (clearing rows by pressing down) due to the manuals to this game only being available in German and Japanese, so I will revisit this game in some capacity in the future to make a small note. Just a small one — the added mechanic makes it a little less difficult but doesn't fix the color ambiguity issue.
What a relief: A genuinely great game, and a licensed one to boot!? Yes, Ghostbusters II defies the odds by ditching all connections to Activision's other Ghostbusters games and going with a portable adaptation of HAL Labs' charming-as-heck Famicom game New Ghostbusters II. Sure, it has some rough patches, but it's sweet and entertaining — a nice, breezy, personality-packed rendition of the movie.
It's weird that someone in Japan made a game about the all-American pastime of monster trucks and didn't bring it to the U.S., right? Well, mystery solved: The game is a terrible Excitebike clone with inscrutable mechanics, and it would have bombed terribly here in America. It certainly didn't win many fans in its own home territory…
Who says Game Boy racing games have to be awful? Not TOSE and Tonkin House, who evidently took the likes of Monster Truck as a challenge. Roadster is everything previous Game Boy racers weren't: Fun, a joy to control, fairly balanced, thoughtfully designed. Will wonders never cease?
As if to prove there's no idea so good that you can't do it several times over in mostly identical ways, here is the third Battleship-like naval combat game for Game Boy. This one is from Nintendo themselves, which means that it's less offbeat than Use's Battleship/Navy Blue or NTVIC's Power Mission, but it's a lot more polished. And it includes an entirely original secondary sub combat mode, too! Just be sure to play with a friend, because the computer cheats like crazy in this one… as usual.
Another Game Boy puzzler? Yes, but at least this one is different. Rather than involving boxes and tiles, Amida-kun riffs on the traditional Japanese lottery game, amidakuji… the same game that inspired Konami's Amidar. It's pretty basic as games go, but the underlying principle is fun, and challenging, so this one's not so bad.
An interesting spin on the puzzle platformer as only Masaya could deliver: This time, you solve puzzles by blowing up stuff. Unfortunately, the unconventional premise is let down by the clunky tech and programming. It's pretty good, but it should have been great.
Game Boy gets its second quick-iteration sequel to a previous release for the platform, and it's even less noteworthy than Boxxle II. Like the original Trump Boy, this follow-up contains three card game variants based around a pack of 52. The visuals look a little nicer and have some personality this time, and there's a four-player mode (that we'll look at in a different episode), but it's pretty just, you know, Trump Boy. Again.
Namco buries the axe with Nintendo long enough to bring its classic maze-chase arcade hit to Game Boy, and the results are… mixed. A strong game gets a slow, cramped rendition here. It's playable, yes, but this icon loses a few vital details in the process of squeezing down to fit Game Boy's limits, which means this is far from the definitive handheld take on Pac-Man… something that was true even back in the day.
Game Boy shipped with the ability to allow two systems to link together for multiplayer sessions. But in late 1990, Nintendo took their portable multiplayer options one step further through the Four-Player Adapter, which shipped in the U.S. as a pack-in with the game F-1 Race. This week, we look at both game and peripheral.
Another Game Boy follow-up to an NES game appears this week, and it's just as compromised and frustrating as you've come to expect. The Rescue of Princess Blobette consists almost entirely of recycled material from A Boy and His Blob, but it's a much smaller game — and a more limited one. And slower. And more cramped. And it sounds a lot worse. But on the plus side, uh… well, it won't melt down your Game Boy, probably. So that's something.
The second volume of Game Boy Works comes to a conclusion (look for the book this fall!) with a look at the system's first Zelda-style game. Uhhh… kinda. Rolan's Curse offers a glancing tangent to the top-down action-RPG, but there's not a lot of substance here — just the appearance of the thing. A brief, clunky, fast-paced, and ultimately linear adventure, this feels like a relic from an older time. But at least the dialogue's weirdly amusing. That's something, right?
We return briefly to Game Boy Works to mark the system's 30th anniversary... not that this these games are necessarily glorious celebrations of Game Boy's existence. But then again, maybe they're perfectly apt? Square Deal combines two of the system's most common genres—puzzlers and casino games—and Parasol Henbee is a licensed platformer. Together, these comprise the fundamental Game Boy experience. And while they're not amazing, they're both above average for their genres. So... a concise summary of the Game Boy experience, I guess.
Next on the Game Boy agenda is an odd little puzzler with loads of personality, a great central hook, and some of the most frustrating gameplay imaginable. Go! Go! Tank flies a little too close to the sun, which maybe explains why you have to keep nudging your stupid little airplane down constantly. Also in this episode: A frustrating, grind-intensive role-playing game in which it's entirely possible to lock yourself into an unwinnable state after dozens of hours of play. Fun!
We're briefly jumping one month out of chronological order here in 1990, from Nov. 30 to Dec. 31, to look at a game that keeps showing up in Video Works: Namco's The Tower of Druaga. While admittedly it's the arcade game from 1984 and the Famicom port from 1985 that keep getting mention for their formative impact on Japanese games design (rather than this port from five or six years later), this is a more or less direct conversion of the original with a few quality-of-life tweaks. Anyway, with this episode in the can, I don't have to explain The Tower of Druaga every time I reference it. We all win.
They say you have to walk before you can run, and in Game Boy Works, we need to slog through some mediocrity before we get to the good stuff. Neither of these games is terrible by any means; Battle Bull feels like an update to Sega's Pengo or Irem's Kickle Cubicle, while Navy Blue 90 is, y'know, Battleship. However, both end up being let down by some questionable creative choices and frustrating technical issues. Neither lives up to its real potential.
Nintendo publishes a football game, and an arcade hit comes to Game Boy after being filtered through the soupy green monochrome of the Amstrad CPC. They're not great! This is not fulfilling video game content! Let's hurry through and get along to the next. OK, thank you, please drive through.
A portable gaming first—the first-ever handheld basketball game cartridge. Sadly, In Your Face is not precisely the game to lead the charge; it's more of a technical foul than anything else. Happily, the backup entry for this episode, Japan-only puzzler Koro Dice, is a pleasant diversion that makes up for it. Was I complaining about Game Boy puzzlers recently? Sorry, I don't know what I was thinking.
A second Double Dragon release for 1990 lands on Game Boy... except not really. In Japan, Double Dragon II was presented as an expanded remake of the original Renegade—which is to say, Kunio-kun's first adventure. Acclaim and Technos gave it a facelift for western release a year later, turning into a Double Dragon game in name if not in fact. Still, while this "sequel" lacks some fundamental essentials found in the arcade game, it does allow for simultaneous play—so that's something. Also this episode: An equally rocky Japan-exclusive conversion of German board game Scotland Yard.
Ah, Game Boy: The system that ruled the world on the strength of both its portability and its support for multiplayer gaming. Remember Tetris? Remember Pokémon? Remember F-1 Race and its four-player adapter? So naturally, when Taito brought Bubble Bobble—a cooperative arcade game designed to be played (and only fully completed!) with a second player—to Game Boy, naturally they made heavy use of its link capabilities for teaming up with a friend, right? Uh... right? Oh well. At the least the title screen music for this episode's import title rocks hard enough to make you forget your disappointment in Bubble Bobble.
A pair of games that share more in common than they might appear to at first glance. Power Racer traces its history back more than a decade: It's a portable conversion of an arcade dot-gobbler that predates Pac-Man by a year. That might not seem to have much to do with the Japan-only Painter Momopie, a game about a witch with a paint roller, but ultimately both these Game Boy releases belong to the same genre and do a great job of demonstrating the difference a decade made in how a specific type of game concept could be interpreted. These aren't the most beloved or best-known games on the system, but they're worth a look regardless.
The second entry in the Final Fantasy Legend series—or SaGa, if you prefer—amped up the features, narrative, mechanics, and overall design sensibilities of the groundbreaking first game. With new races, an elaborate cosmology, inventive dungeon design, an unconventional death mechanic, and all kinds of poorly explained gameplay systems to grapple with, Final Fantasy Legend II is in some respects a high point of the SaGa series. And with both a SaGa Game Boy compilation and remaster of SaGa Frontier for PlayStation due out in the near future, there's no better time to get acquainted with this sometimes-baffling role-playing series that is well and truly here to stay... whether you like it or not.
Game Boy turns its focus to the far east this episode, with an action game based on Chinese martial arts and an RPG centered on battling (and being) Japanese yōkai. Neither one is particularly world-shaking, though Kung' Fu Master does have a direct line to the early days of the NES, and ONI kicks off the Game Boy's most prolific exclusive game franchise that I'm aware of (there's probably some pachinko or mahjong franchise I'm overlooking) as the first of five adventures created exclusively for the platform. Of course, none of those ever reached the U.S. Americans? Playing RPGs!? What a strange notion.
Puzzle platformers are in their Game Boy; all's right with the world. Yes, this episode brings us not one but two—two!—puzzle action games for Game Boy. As if we'd have it any other way. As often happens, one of these is far more fun and playable than the other in hindsight, reflecting poorly on the lesser of the two. For once, the better game received a U.S. release while the merely-OK one remained stranded overseas. Nail'n Scale from Data East offers much: Two-player simultaneous action, fluid and friendly jump mechanics, and a fun platforming gimmick that also doubles as the key to the puzzle-like level designs. Pri Pri: Primitive Princess... doesn't have these things. It's not terrible, but its plodding pace does not pair well with its unforgiving, trial-and-error design. Weirdly, this one's from Sunsoft, whom you'd expect to have presented a more respectable showing than Data East... but there are no rules on Game Boy! Nothing makes sense!
A curious case here on Game Boy Works: A game that is somehow two games. While Klax on Game Boy plays about the same as the Klax we've already seen on Atari Lynx, it takes two very different approaches to its presentation depending on the region you bought it from. The American release from Mindscape, which actually shipped in 1991, has the same vanishing perspective seen in other versions of the game. The Japanese cart from Hudson, on the other hand, looks like no other rendition of Klax to be found on competing platforms. It's two separate takes on the same property by two different studios. Ah, but which fares better on Game Boy? As for Ginga, the game's full title is Card & Puzzle Collection: Ginga, and that's exactly what it is. It's a video version of all the disused traditional games your grandparents kept in a storage bin in their basement. But you can call it Tornado Appetizer, if you're nasty.
You come at the king, you'd best not miss. In this case, they've come at Godzilla, the King of Monsters, and stolen his horrible little son Minilla. I personally would be happy to let Minilla languish forever in captivity, but parental instincts run deep even for a skyscraper-sized atomic-powered dinosaur... and the result is one of the best Game Boy puzzle action games to date. So, hey, thanks for existing, Minilla. I guess. On the import tip this episode: Nekojara Monogatari, another of Kemco's reworkings of the Shadowgate engine into a role-playing adventure game. This one has a theme of kitty cats. It has never been fan-translated, a state of affairs I would love to see resolved; it's a pretty neat little game, from what I can tell.
Sunsoft returns to Game Boy with a soul-crushingly brutal take on a movie that's about as close to being a cult classic as a major blockbuster can be: Gremlins 2 - The New Batch. It really captures the experience of being a small, helpless little fuzzy guy with stubby arms making his way through a skyscraper filled with raving murder-monsters. Although you'd think with Gizmo's gigantic eyes, he'd have better vision than the original Game Boy screen provides. On the import tip, there's Pocket Stadium from Atlus, a curious baseball simulator... and by "simulator" I really do mean that it's a simulator. No timing or dexterity required!
Let's take a second look at Nintendo's second game console. Yes, I've already published a Game Boy system retrospective. About 10 years ago. However, this new video covers the U.S. launch of the system rather than the Japanese—obviously it touches on a lot of the same material, but from a different angle... and with the added insight and detail that I've gleaned in a decade of putting together weekly retrospectives on systems from this era.
We're back at Tetris again. And, just as the simple concept of blocks falling from the sky and piling up until you fill complete rows that cause them to vanish translates into a near-infinitely replayable game, the not-so-simple process of bringing a game created under Soviet collectivism to the West and including it the box with a video game system inspires near-infinite video commentary. Well, something like that. Suffice to say, here comes another one of those block-dropping beats.
Aw, just kidding with that title. Super Mario Land is great. I mean, yes, it is the smallest, slightest, simplest, and easiest of all the first-party Mario platform games. But that's kind of the point? Nintendo needed a Mario launch game for Game Boy's debut, and the console's own creators put one together quite ably. Super Mario Land doesn't hold up especially well when compared side-by-side to every other Mario game, but compare it to literally any action game you could play on the bus or in the backseat of a car in 1989 and it absolutely freakin' rules. Super Mario Land works smartly within the limitations of the system and maxes out the available ROM size—it's literally the biggest and best handheld action game that anyone had made or could have made in 1989, and it deserves respect for that. Also, there's Baseball.
This video comprises the last of the U.S. launch titles for Game Boy, as well as—somewhat surprisingly—about 85% of all Game Boy releases in America for the remainder of 1989. A bit of a slow start compared to the 20 or so games that showed up in 1989 for Japan, but that's localization gaps for ya. Not that either of these games required any localization whatsoever. They're simple, accessible titles that you can have a ball with (get it, like pinball/tennis ball??) regardless of your preferred language. Or even if you have not developed human language yet and exist in a crude, nonverbal state. You don't need to understand the basic grammar of "Me Tarzan" to grok "avoid missing ball for high score." Anyway, not precisely amazing games by modern standards. But these blew away any comparable portable experiences at the time. Like the man said: "That'll do, pig. That'll do."
I had hoped that revisiting Castlevania: The Adventure again a decade after I first covered the title on Game Boy World would shed some new light on it and perhaps soften my opinion on this portable take on a NES mainstay. Spoilers: It did not. However, I will say that I can better appreciate how much of a step forward for portable gaming ambition Castlevania: The Adventure represented at the time. It's a busted mess that demands you play the entire thing exactly one way with zero deviations from the optimal path and timing, yes, but it still looked and played way better than anything available at the time in handheld form. When your competition is the Tiger Simon's Quest LCD Game & Watch clone, it's hard not to come away looking pretty damn good.
A retrospective on the Game Boy hardware, along with a look at the creative culture at Nintendo that gave birth to the Game Boy, while trying to determine its place in the game marketplace of the 1990s.