Few characters carry as much history into the Game Boy as Donkey Kong. The big ape was there at the very beginning of Nintendo's rise, he gave a certain moustachioed plumber his first job, and decades later he starred in what many collectors regard as one of the finest games the handheld ever produced. Follow Donkey Kong onto the DMG-01 and you trace a neat arc from the dawn of the arcade era to the technical high-water mark of the little grey machine. This is the story of Donkey Kong on the Game Boy, from the cabinet that started it all to the cartridges that sit in the collection today. The Arcade Ancestor To understand the Game Boy games you have to start in 1981, in the arcade. The original Donkey Kong put a giant ape at the top of a construction site, a captured damsel above him, and a little jumping carpenter at the bottom tasked with climbing to the rescue while dodging rolling barrels. That carpenter, then called Jumpman, would soon be renamed Mario and go on to become the most famous character in gaming. Donkey Kong, in other words, is not just an old game; it is the origin point of Nintendo's entire mascot dynasty, and every Game Boy Mario title is descended from those four original arcade screens. Donkey Kong '94: The Great Reinvention The centrepiece of the ape's Game Boy story is the 1994 Donkey Kong, a game so beloved that collectors and critics still call it DK '94 to set it apart. It opens as a faithful, almost cheeky recreation of the 1981 arcade game, the same four screens fans knew by heart. Then, just as you reach what should be the ending, it pulls its masterstroke: the game keeps going, unfolding into a further ninety-seven original stages across nine worlds, for a total of around a hundred and one levels. From a 1981 arcade cabinet to one of the Game Boy's very best. Those new levels turned a simple climb-and-dodge arcade game into an inventive puzzle-platformer. Each stage became a small puzzle box in which Mario has to find a key and carry it to a locked door, borrowing ideas from Donkey Kong Jr. and Super Mario Bros. 2 along the way. To make it work, Nintendo gave Mario an athletic new moveset: handstands, backflips, high jumps and the ability to pick up and throw objects, even flinging his hammer upward to reach a higher platform. It is a game built entirely around clever design rather than horsepower, which is exactly why it has aged so gracefully. A Showcase for the Super Game Boy Donkey Kong '94 was also a technical flagship. It was the first game in the wider Super Mario family built with dedicated support for the Super Game Boy, the adapter that let you play Game Boy cartridges on the SNES and your television. Played that way, DK '94 gained colour and a decorative on-screen border designed to look like the original Donkey Kong arcade cabinet, a lovely nod to its own ancestry. The game did not just look enhanced; it was consciously designed to be shown off on the big screen, tying the handheld and the living room together. Donkey Kong Land: The Country Comes to the Handheld A year later the ape returned in a very different guise. Donkey Kong Land brought the look and feel of Rare's hit Donkey Kong Country to the Game Boy, squeezing that game's pre-rendered, three-dimensional style down onto the monochrome screen. It spawned its own short series and became a showcase for just how much visual detail a skilled studio could wring out of the hardware. For players who wanted to conquer it, the collection also holds a period Donkey Kong Land strategy guide, one of the printed companions that guided a generation through the tougher stages before the internet existed. The game that pushed Game Boy graphics to the limit The LCD Echo Donkey Kong's reach stretched even beyond cartridges. The collection includes a Mini Classics Donkey Kong Junior, a keychain-sized LCD game that revived the 1982 arcade sequel in miniature. Pieces like this show how the Donkey Kong name travelled across every format Nintendo could put it on, from full cartridges to tiny pocket toys, keeping the character in children's hands even when a Game Boy was not to be found. Why Donkey Kong Belongs in a Game Boy Collection Line up the ape's Game Boy pieces and you get a surprisingly complete history lesson. There is the character who launched Mario and Nintendo itself; there is DK '94, arguably the smartest use of the base hardware ever attempted; there is Donkey Kong Land, a demonstration of how far the visuals could be pushed; and there are the guides and LCD spin-offs that show how deep the brand ran. Few franchises connect the very first days of Nintendo to the technical peak of the Game Boy quite so directly. For a collector, that is what makes the Donkey Kong shelf special. It is not simply a set of good games; it is a through-line from the arcade cabinet of 1981 to the living-room-ready handheld of the mid-nineties, told through one enduring ape. Every Donkey Kong game and curio mentioned here is documented, with its packaging where complete, in the collection.

The Game Boy sold in the tens of millions, and it did so on the back of a surprisingly small number of games that became genuine cultural events. Most of the library sold modestly, as game libraries always do, with the great majority of titles shifting a few hundred thousand copies at most. But a handful of games reached numbers that still look astonishing today, the kind of figures that most modern blockbusters, with all their marketing budgets, never approach. Here are the best-selling games in the console's history, roughly in order, with the copies that sit in the collection. The totals given are the widely cited lifetime sales for each title on the Game Boy, and while exact figures vary between sources, the order and the sheer scale are not in doubt. Tetris: The Undisputed Champion Nothing else comes close to Tetris. Bundled with the console across the West, the falling-blocks puzzle sold in the region of 35 million copies on the Game Boy alone. That pairing is the single most important commercial decision in the handheld's history: Tetris is the reason millions of people who had never bought a video game bought a Game Boy, from commuters to parents to grandparents. Because it needed no instructions and no language, it sold everywhere, to everyone, and it remains one of the best-selling video games ever released on any single platform. It is the cornerstone of the console's success and of any serious collection. Unbeaten - Tetris Pokemon: A Phenomenon in a Cartridge The Pokemon games are the only titles that can share a sentence with Tetris. The first generation, released in the West as Red and Blue, sold well over 30 million copies worldwide, and the collection holds the original Japanese Red and Green alongside Blue. The follow-up, Pokemon Yellow, added around 14 million more on its own. Between them they did something remarkable: they took a handheld that much of the industry had already written off as ageing technology, late in its life, and turned it into the launchpad for one of the biggest entertainment franchises on earth. The whole trading-and-collecting design was, in a sense, the Game Boy's own social nature turned into a game. Super Mario Land and Its Sequel Mario's handheld debut was a giant in its own right. Super Mario Land sold roughly 18 million copies, a remarkable total for an early and slightly experimental platformer set in an unfamiliar world with a brand-new princess and some unusual shooting stages. As one of the earliest games available, it rode the console's launch momentum and became a system-seller in its own right. Its sequel, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, managed around 11 million, and as a lasting bonus it introduced the world to Wario, a greedy rival who would soon steal a series of his own. Both games are foundation stones of the library and proof that a strong first-party mascot could sell almost regardless of genre. Dr. Mario and the Puzzle Boom Puzzle games were perfectly suited to short handheld sessions, and Dr. Mario rode that wave to become one of the platform's strongest sellers. Matching coloured pills to clear viruses proved impossibly moreish, and its two-player link mode made it a fixture of playground rivalry. It sits squarely in the great tradition of Game Boy puzzlers that Tetris began, and its success underlines the pattern: on this console, a simple idea executed perfectly could outsell almost anything more ambitious. The Shape of the Sales Chart It is worth pausing on how lopsided this list is. A mere handful of games account for a staggering share of all Game Boy software ever sold, while thousands of other titles divide up what is left. This is the classic shape of a hit-driven entertainment business, and it explains why the same few cartridges turn up in almost every household that owned the console. When people remember the Game Boy, they are very often remembering this short list specifically. What the Chart Tells Us Look down these titles and a clear pattern appears. The biggest Game Boy games were not the flashiest or the most technically ambitious on the system; they were the most universal. A puzzle anyone could grasp in seconds, a creature-collecting world anyone could get lost in, a plumber everyone already knew by name. Accessibility beat spectacle every single time. That is the real lesson of the best-seller chart, and it is exactly why these particular cartridges, common as they are, belong at the heart of any serious collection: they are the games that actually defined the platform for the public. Each of these best-sellers is documented, with its packaging where the copy is complete, in the collection.

Ask almost anyone to describe a Mario game and the story writes itself: the plumber runs, jumps and stomps his way to a castle to rescue Princess Peach. It is one of the most familiar setups in all of entertainment. Which makes it all the stranger that on the Game Boy, the console that carried Mario into millions of pockets, that story is essentially wrong. The princess at the end of Mario's first handheld adventure was not Peach at all. This is the tale of Princess Peach and the Game Boy, and it is really a tale about the princess who took her place, the confusion that followed, and a curious absence that says a lot about how Nintendo used its most famous handheld. Super Mario Land and a New Princess When Super Mario Land launched alongside the Game Boy in 1989, Nintendo made a deliberate choice. Rather than set Mario's handheld debut in the familiar Mushroom Kingdom, the developers sent him to an entirely new land called Sarasaland. And because it was a new world, it needed a new ruler to rescue: Princess Daisy. She was created specifically as a stand-in for Peach, a fresh damsel to match the fresh setting, and she made her very first appearance in gaming history right here, on the Game Boy. Super Mario Land and Princess Daisy on the Game Boy - No princess Peach in sight At the time, hardly anyone noticed the swap. The Game Boy's tiny monochrome screen could not render enough detail to make one pixel-sized princess look meaningfully different from another, so a great many players simply assumed they were rescuing Peach as usual. Only in the game's box art and manual, where Daisy appears with her brown hair and orange dress, was it clear that this was somebody new. That quiet introduction is one of the great pieces of Game Boy trivia: the handheld did not just port Mario, it expanded his universe with a brand-new character. Daisy Versus Peach So who is Daisy, and how does she differ from the princess she replaced? In her 1989 debut she was drawn with long hair falling past her waist and a red crown set with a single jewel, a look that has evolved a great deal since. Over the years her personality was defined largely in contrast to Peach: where Peach is gentle and demure, Daisy is written as a spirited tomboy, more energetic and outgoing, and she eventually settled into the role of Luigi's counterpart much as Peach is Mario's. She is the ruler of Sarasaland, forever tied to the offbeat world where the Game Boy first introduced her. Still noch princess peach... it's Pauline That origin gives Super Mario Land a special status. It is not merely an early Mario platformer; it is the birthplace of a character who would go on to appear in decades of spin-offs, sports titles and party games. Every time Daisy tees off in a Mario golf game or races in a kart, the thread runs back to a single grey cartridge from 1989. Peach's Quiet Game Boy Years If Daisy owned Mario's Game Boy debut, who was minding the Mushroom Kingdom? The striking answer is that Peach largely sat the DMG-01 era out. Mario's handheld adventures leaned on new and supporting faces rather than on his usual leading lady. The sequel, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, was built not around rescuing a princess at all but around reclaiming Mario's own castle from a greedy new rival, Wario. That rival then stole the spotlight entirely in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, a game with no princess in sight. Look across the original Game Boy's Mario output and a pattern emerges: this was a proving ground for new characters, Daisy and Wario chief among them, rather than a stage for the established Mushroom Kingdom cast. Peach, the single most recognisable supporting character in gaming, was conspicuous mainly by her absence. Her domain remained the home consoles, while the handheld was used to experiment. When Peach Finally Took the Lead There is a neat coda to all this. For a character so central to the franchise, Peach waited a remarkably long time to headline a portable game of her own. Her first genuine starring handheld role did not arrive during the Game Boy years at all, but much later, in the Nintendo DS era, when a game finally cast her as the hero rescuing Mario for a change. Seen against that timeline, her near-total absence from the original Game Boy looks less like an oversight and more like the beginning of a very slow climb from perennial damsel to leading lady. Why This Story Belongs in a Collection For a collector, all of this turns a common cartridge into something far more interesting. Super Mario Land is not just an early platformer; it is the first appearance of Princess Daisy and the source of one of gaming's most persistent misconceptions. Hold that cartridge and you are holding the exact moment the Mario universe grew a new member, on hardware so limited that most players never even realised it had happened. It also makes a wonderful talking point. Tell a fellow enthusiast that Mario never actually rescues Peach on the original Game Boy, and watch them reach for their own memories. That is the kind of story a collection is really for: not just owning the objects, but knowing the small, surprising truths hidden inside them. The Super Mario Land games described here are documented, with their packaging where complete, in the collection.

Some genres simply belong to certain machines, and the puzzle game belongs to the Game Boy. A handheld you carried everywhere, played in short bursts on a bus or in a queue, and shared with a friend over a link cable was the ideal home for games about clearing lines, matching colours and filling grids. The hardware and the genre fit together so neatly that the result was nothing less than a golden age of the puzzle game, and the Game Boy was its capital city. The reasons run deeper than convenience, and we will come to them. But first, here is a tour of the puzzle kingdom, built from the cartridges in the collection. Tetris: The King It has to start with Tetris. Bundled with the console across the West, the falling-blocks puzzle sold in the region of 35 million copies on the Game Boy alone and turned people who had never touched a video game into obsessives. Its genius was universality: simple enough for anyone to understand in seconds, deep enough to play for a lifetime, and language-free, so it crossed every border effortlessly. More than any other single game, Tetris defined what the Game Boy was for and who it was for, reaching commuters, parents and grandparents who would never have bought any other game. Dr. Mario and the Colour-Matchers If Tetris was about lines, Dr. Mario was about colour. Flinging pills to line up and clear coloured viruses proved just as moreish, and its two-player link mode turned it into a fierce, giggling playground rivalry. It sits at the head of a whole family of colour-matching puzzlers that the handheld encouraged, each one a variation on the same irresistible, tidy-up-the-screen satisfaction. Nintendo understood that lending Mario's face to an abstract puzzle instantly made it approachable, and the formula was copied endlessly across the platform's life. Picross and the Logic Grid A different, slower kind of thinking arrived with Mario's Picross, a collection of nonogram logic puzzles in which you chip away at a grid to reveal a hidden picture. Where Tetris rewards fast reflexes, Picross rewards patience and deduction, and that quieter pleasure built a devoted cult following that endures today. It is a favourite among collectors precisely because it represents the thoughtful, unhurried end of the puzzle spectrum, proof that the genre on the Game Boy was far broader than falling blocks alone. The Competitive Edge What often gets forgotten about the Game Boy puzzle boom is how social it was. The link cable turned solitary time-killers into head-to-head duels, where clearing your own lines could send trouble cascading onto your opponent's screen. Two players hunched over a cable, each with their own console and cartridge, was one of the defining images of the era, and it gave these simple games a competitive depth that kept them on playground desks for years. The puzzle game on the Game Boy was never only a way to pass time alone; it was also, quietly, one of the platform's first great multiplayer genres. Ports and Oddities The kingdom had its imports and its curiosities too. Lemmings brought its beloved, brain-bending rescue puzzles to the small screen, asking you to guide hordes of hapless creatures to safety, while Pocket Bomberman turned the maze-and-bombs formula into pocket-sized strategy. Japan even produced dedicated brain-training puzzlers like Atama wo Yawarakaku Suru, whose title translates roughly as softening up your brain, years before that whole genre became a worldwide fad on later Nintendo hardware. The breadth on display is remarkable, and much of it never left Japan. Why the Game Boy Was Made for Puzzles There is a neat logic to all of this. The Game Boy's greatest strengths, its portability, its famously long battery life, its short pick-up-and-play sessions and its simple two-button control scheme, are exactly the qualities a great puzzle game needs. A puzzle does not require detailed graphics or a big screen; it requires a clear grid and an instant restart, both of which the hardware delivered perfectly. The console's technical limitations, so often lamented for action games, were no limitation at all here. The genre and the machine were made for each other. That is also why the puzzle shelf holds up so well decades later. These are the games people never really stopped playing: a good puzzler ages far more gracefully than a technically ambitious action game, because its appeal was never about spectacle in the first place. The design was the whole point, and good design does not date. The Most Rewarding Shelf to Collect For a collector, the puzzle corner is one of the most satisfying to fill. It runs from the most famous game on the entire platform down to obscure Japanese oddities that most players outside Japan never knew existed, which means it offers both the cornerstone pieces and the deep-cut rarities. And unlike much of the library, every one of these cartridges is still genuinely, dangerously playable, which is rather the point. Every puzzle game named here is documented, with its packaging where complete, in the collection.