Yesterday, the original Game Boy celebrated its 20th anniversary. The Game Boy is a lot more than just an irrelevant old hunk of wires and plastic, though: it's possibly the second-most important system Nintendo ever invented. In a lot of ways, the Game Boy pioneered a lot of today's most famous Nintendo-isms, things a modern gamer could easily take for granted.
With twenty years of Game Boy behind us, though, now's a good time to sit back and remember all the things that the Game Boy gave us Nintendo gamers: the highs, the lows, the frustrations. It's a little shocking now to think of all the great games and franchises that wouldn't exist without the Game Boy, even if very few modern gamers are going back to the old spinach-screened wonder to enjoy them.
20. Rolan's Curse 2
Okay, okay, I know I've gone on about this game a lot before, but I think it's really one of the lost gems of obscure gaming history. Rolan's Curse 2 was an action RPG that blended Zelda-style play with a multi-character party and a really interesting leveling-up system that discouraged mindless grinding. The monotone graphics haven't aged well, but give it a try sometime-- preferably when you're curled up in the back of a car traveling cross-country for hours of on end. That's when your Game Boy becomes your best friend.
19. Weird Peripherals
Most game peripherals come off as least a little bit odd, since there's very rarely a lot of games that support any given doodad. Still, I really think the Game Boy wins the award for all-time strangest peripherals, even topping the Wii's bizarre collection of controller add-ons. The Game Boy featured extensive support for the bizarre Game Boy Printer and that was just the first-party add-ons. When you get into unlicensed stuff like the now-infamous PediSedate, you're in nightmare territory.
18. Retro Rereleases
Releasing old games has always been an efficient way for a company to get a quick buck, but the Game Boy really transformed the market for retro re-issues. Someone who might feel ridiculous using their NES or SNES to play janky old Atari coin-op games might be more than willing to drop $40 to $60 on a cart that could be played on the go. Over the course of the Game Boy and Game Boy Color's lifespan a ton of old games were unearthed and prettied up (or uglied down, as the case may be) for portable consumption.
17. Devastating Demakes
The Game Boy was also the system that gave us one of the defining vices of the modern multi-platform era, porting current-gen games way, way the hell down onto hardware so weak that the game itself comes out unrecognizable. Sometmes you'd see it in the form of concurrent multi-platform releases that squeezed out a portable version for the sake of extra cash, or maybe a hit franchise would try to issue a Game Boy version to take advantage of clueless buyers. The end result is still Game Boy versions of games like Duke Nukem and Dance Dance Revolution that are almost too awful to be believed.
16. Cumbersome Cheats
As long as video games have existed, people have wanted to cheat at them. Once Game Genie won its court case against Nintendo of America, the floodgates were open to a long parade of cheat add-ons for every system on the market that continues to this very day. The Game Boy just established a long precedent in favor of portable cheat devices being huge freaky-looking things that squatted sternly over the cartridge slot. Seriously, the thing was so big that you could store a little book containing tons of cheat codes in it.
15. Hardware Hacks
Fans do crazy things to consoles as they age, but the Game Boy's compact (sorta) shape has allowed it to be subject to some of the craziest hacks of all. People have crammed it into graphing calculators, jammed iPhones into its shell, even performed delicate surgery on the LCD screen itself to install homebrew backlighting. With over 100 million Game Boys sold worldwide, there'll never be a short supply of old ones to dismantle, too.
14. Fantastic Chiptunes
The Game Boy stands next to the venerable old C64 as one of the chiptune artist's instruments of choice. With homebrew software like nanoloop, dozens of indy artists have generated bizarrely compelling techno just by forcing sounds out of the Game Boy's surprisingly nimble little soundchip. A lot of these artists are far too young to have ever played games on a Game Boy, either, but they keep the system's spirit alive.
13. Stylish Colors
Nobody really much cared how consoles looked back in the pre-portable era (at least, that's the only rationale I can think of for the Atari 5200). All that mattered were the games and whether or not the hardware worked. The Game Boy changed all that by developing the idea of a system that was a traveling companion-- in some ways, an element of fashion. So it should be no surprise that Nintendo's first real dirve into the world of multi-colored systems meant to reflect individual styles started with the Game Boy.
12. Limited Editions
Re-skinnng a whole console to promote the release of just one game? That's crazy talk! But the oldest instance of it I can find happening (for Nintendo, anyway) is with a special run of limited edition Pokemon-themed Game Boy Colors. From there the floodgates were opened wide for tons of limited edition consoles to follow, promoting everything from licensed tie-in games to games that DS fans have just been looking forward to.
11. Taking Pictures
Yeah, yeah, kids go crazy for the DSi camera, but it wasn't the first portable system to take pictures. For a brief, strange time the Game Boy Camera was a hugely-promoted peripheral, despite the Game Boy not having a color screen yet. If you had a Game Boy Printer, you could even print our your photos! Your sad, sad little dot matrix photos, on your sad little thin strips of super-expensive Game Boy Printer paper.
10. Backwards Compatibility
The idea of a new system that played an old system's games was pretty unusual back in the day, but the first time Nintendo pulled it off was with the original Game Boy Color. While this update of the original added in a 56 color screen and a lot more processing power, one of the biggest selling points early on was that it would let you play the old Game Boy's library in full color. After the Game Boy Color's success, backwards compatibility became a recurring feature in Nintendo's new hardware designs.
9. Long Battery Life
The Game Boy faced some apparently stiff competition when it burst on the scene in the early 90's, in the form of the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear. Both of the other consoles offered lit screens and full color... at the price of the systems gettng maybe four hours of life off of the around 6 or so batteries each demanded. The Game Boy's ten hours of battery life easily won the day and set an enduring standard for how much time a portable should be playable on a single battery charge.
8. Final Fantasy Legend
The games we knew as Final Fantasy Legend, the premier Game Boy RPGs, were originally called SaGa. They were some of the first Japanese console RPGs that tried to step outside of the Wizardry-shaped box the genre started in. In SaGa you saw Squaresoft playing around with alternate methods of leveling characters up and really crazy racial abilities. SaGa would become a series that spanned consoles from the SNES to the PS2, with a reputation for wild originality. (So original that, sometimes, they're kind of hard to play.)
7. Metroid II
Metroid II isn't the most fondly remembered game in the Metroid series, but its release for the Game Boy heralded a very important shift. With Metroid II, Metroid went from being one of Nintendo's many great one-off titles to a core Nintendo franchise. Metroid II paved the way for a lot of what would make Super Metroid feel like such a fantastic game, particularly the larger Samus sprite and the super-creepy soundtrack, and in some ways really set the stage for the Metroid Prime series.
6. Super Mario Land
Super Mario Land was a Game Boy launch title and in its own way a very memorable first: it was Mario's first portable outing. As would become standard for portable Mario games, Mario Land felt very familiar while also featuring insane new enemy designs and crazy vehicle levels. This paved the way for a lot of experimentation with the Mario franchise in portable form, which may have reached its peak with the GBA Mario RPGs.
5. Wario Land
In a lot of ways the Mario Land series is notable mainly for spawning Wario and the original Wario Land games, but that's one heck of an achievement. Wario is in his own way as memorable as Bowser or Luigi and at this point supports two different Nintendo game series. The Wario Land games set a new standard for portable platformer quality and for playing a lead character who was a total jerk.
4. Link's Awakening
Link's Awakening is fondly remembered, despite its crude graphics, for being the first game where Link played musical instruments, presaging the Ocarina of Time. The story is also touching and surprisingly sad, presaging the more heartbreaking story elements of Majora's Mask. This was one of the first original Game Boy titles to receive a color makeover and it holds up even better now than some of Link's later handheld adventures.
3. Kirby
The entire adorable Kirby franchise owes its existence to the Game Boy Kirby's Dream Land, which is itself a pretty good game. It's entirely overshadowed by how fantastic the Kirby franchise would later become on the NES and SNES, but if not for the demands of creating a game on a Game Boy's tiny monotone screen, Kirby probably wouldn't be the elegantly simple character he is. Right now Kirby is almost as much of a Nintendo mainstay as older characters like Mario.
2. Pokemon
This is mind-blowing to think back upon: Pokemon started off as a humble Game Boy game, just one of many original IPs Nintendo threw at the handheld. This is the one that took off in a huge way, spawnng a multimedia franchise that trucks on happily today, entertaining little kids all over the world. The games themselves are all amazingly complex RPGs that aren't likely to satisfy a completist but are the perfect game for someone who wants to play a single title for months on end.
1. Tetris
Tetris was, famously, the Game Boy's pack-in title. For someone of my generation, the Game Boy version of Tetris is the definitive. The simple game was perfect for the Game Boy's limited graphics capabilities and essentially pioneered the now-ubiquitous falling block puzzle genre. Tetris was the game that presaged Nintendo's current Touch Generations wave, proving that abstracted graphics and simpler concepts could hook adults into gaming as easily as Mario hooked ther kids. Now, of course, you can play multiplayer Tetris online for free, so it's a little hard to remember what a revolution the original Tetris was when it first came out.
