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Born on the Game Boy, Part 1: Super Mario Land, Daisy and Tatanga

Marcel Pflug

5 days ago

3 min read

When the Game Boy launched in 1989, Mario came along for the ride, as everyone expected. What almost nobody expected was that his handheld debut would be one of the strangest games ever to carry his name, and that it would quietly introduce two characters who had never existed anywhere before. Part one of Born on the Game Boy is about Super Mario Land, and the new faces it smuggled into the series.

Game Boy Super Mario Land cartridge and box — A launch title that quietly introduced two brand-new characters.

A Mario game from a different hand

Super Mario Land was not made by Shigeru Miyamoto's team. It was built by Nintendo R&D1, the group led by Game Boy creator Gunpei Yokoi, and it shows in every corner. Instead of returning to the Mushroom Kingdom, the game invents an entirely new land called Sarasaland, split into four exotic worlds loosely themed on ancient Egypt, a sunken sea, Easter Island and a vision of China. The enemies are unfamiliar, the physics feel a little lighter, and Mario's fireball has become a bouncing Superball that ricochets around the screen collecting coins. Two of the levels abandon platforming altogether and turn into side-scrolling shooter stages, with Mario piloting a tiny submarine and then a little aeroplane. It is Mario as seen in a funhouse mirror, and it is all the more charming for it.

Game Boy Super Mario Land CiB — Mario's first adventure on the Game Boy

That eccentric little adventure was a colossal success, selling in the region of eighteen million copies and giving the new handheld a genuine Mario game to call its own. It even had its own catchy soundtrack, whose bright, marching main theme is still fondly remembered today. But the most lasting thing Super Mario Land left behind was not its music or its submarine levels. It was two characters, born on the Game Boy, who would take very different paths afterward. You can find this cartridge in the collection at the Game Boy Museum.

Daisy and Tatanga, born in Sarasaland

The princess Mario is racing to rescue this time is not Peach. It is Princess Daisy, the ruler of Sarasaland, appearing here for the very first time. For years afterward she all but vanished, a piece of Game Boy trivia more than a star. Then, around the turn of the millennium, Nintendo revived her as a regular in its sports and party games, and today Daisy is a fixture of Mario Kart, Mario Party, Mario Tennis and more, usually cast as the spirited counterpart to Peach and a frequent partner to Luigi. Every one of those appearances traces back to a single Game Boy cartridge in 1989.

Her kidnapper is the other newcomer: Tatanga, described in the manual as a mysterious spaceman, an alien who invades Sarasaland, hypnotises its people and carries the princess off. He is the game's final boss, met in an aerial showdown at the controls of his flying machine. Tatanga proved memorable enough that he returned as a boss in the sequel, Super Mario Land 2, which makes him one of the earliest examples of a Mario villain created specifically for the handheld and then carried forward. For a supposedly minor spin-off, Super Mario Land was doing real world-building.

This is the whole argument of the series in miniature. A game that looks, at a glance, like a scaled-down port of a console hit turns out to be the origin point of a princess who now appears in nearly every Mario spin-off, and of a villain who outlived his own game. The Game Boy was not just carrying Mario around. It was adding to his world. To see this cartridge and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.