Sports on the Game Boy: The Early Nintendo Line, and the Plumber Hiding In It
The Game Boy is remembered for falling blocks, a plucky plumber and, a little later, a world full of pocket monsters. But from its very first summer it was quietly a sports machine too. Some of the earliest cartridges Nintendo made for the handheld were not adventures at all but games of tennis, baseball and golf, plain monochrome sports you could pull out of a pocket and play in a few minutes. And in every one of them, if you looked closely, a very familiar face was hiding. This is a tour of the sports games in the collection, and the cameos tucked inside them.
Nintendo's first handheld sports team
Three cartridges sit at the heart of this story, and all three are from the machine's opening years. Tennis and Baseball both date to 1989, right at the North American launch, and Golf followed in 1990. They are not showpieces of graphics or story; their charm is historical. This was Nintendo proving that its new handheld could be more than a home for puzzles and platformers, that it could carry the same everyday sports that had done so well on the living-room consoles, now shrunk down to fit in a coat pocket.
Game Boy Tennis Game Boy Baseball Game Boy Golf
There was another idea baked into them from the start: playing against a friend. Tennis in particular was an early showcase for the Game Boy's link cable, letting two players wire their consoles together for a proper match. That social, head-to-head streak runs through the whole sports line and, as we will see, eventually grew into something you could play four at a time.
Spot the plumber
Here is the fun part, the reason these plain-looking cartridges are more interesting than they first appear. Nintendo had a habit in these years of slipping Mario into its sports games as a friendly, familiar face, and all three games here are in on the joke, each in a different way.
In Tennis, look at the official presiding over your match: the chair umpire, calling the score from his raised seat at the side of the court, is Mario himself. It is a tiny detail, easy to miss, and completely charming once you notice that the most famous character in video games has been reduced to keeping score of your rallies. In Golf the cameo goes further: the lone golfer you control, the little figure lining up each shot, is Mario, a direct descendant of the golf game Nintendo first built around him on the Famicom back in 1984. The Western box even puts him front and centre, so here the plumber is not hiding at all; he is the star athlete.
Baseball completes the set, and it hides the best cameo of all. The Western box art shows Mario in mid-pitch, ball in hand, and the nod carries into the game itself: in the US mode one team, the Bears, fields Mario on the mound, while the rival Eagles answer with Luigi as one of their pitchers. So across these three early sports games Mario plays every position Nintendo could give him, referee in one, star athlete in another, and pitcher in the third, with his brother called up for the away side. It is worth noting that these appearances are a feature of the Western releases; they were Nintendo's way of putting a recognisable, welcoming face on otherwise plain sports games for players outside Japan. All of it happened years before Mario would ever headline sports games under his own name; on the Game Boy he simply turns up as a guest, a wink to anyone who recognised the man in red.
Four players, one adapter
The competitive streak in these games reached its peak when Nintendo built accessories to let more than two people play at once, and the collection holds the sporting side of that story in three boxes. The rare Top Ranking Tennis bundle packed the tennis game together with the Four Player Adapter, promising a fierce competition for one, two, three or four players right on the box. Racing counts as a sport too, and the same adapter turns up again with the motorsport titles: the sealed F1 Race bundle paired the adapter with F1 Race, the very game the adapter was first sold alongside.
Top Ranking Tennis (4 Player Adapter)
Grandest of all is the American Racing Set, a whole clamshell that gathered F1 Race and Super R.C. Pro-Am together with the Four Player Adapter and a Hip Pouch carrying case. Between them these three boxes turn the Game Boy's quiet sports catalogue into something loud and communal: not a solitary round of golf, but four friends hunched over four grey bricks, racing and rallying against each other through a single cable. It is the same competitive idea that Tennis introduced in 1989, simply multiplied.
The sports games are among the humblest cartridges the Game Boy ever produced, and among the most quietly historic: launch-era software, early proof of link-cable play, and a hiding place for one of gaming's most famous characters before he ever went pro. To see them, and the bundles that made them a four-player affair, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.
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