Mario Picross: The Puzzle Nintendo Couldn't Sell to the West

Every so often a game comes along that its maker adores, promotes relentlessly, and simply cannot convince people to buy. Mario Picross is one of those games. Nintendo believed in it, put Mario's face on the box, and pushed it across the West in 1995. Players politely declined. Three decades on, it is quietly regarded as one of the finest puzzle games on the Game Boy, which makes its commercial flop one of the handheld's great injustices.

Mario the archaeologist, chiselling pictures out of numbers.

Numbers that hide a picture

Picross is short for picture crossword, and the puzzle is also known as a nonogram. You are given a blank grid with numbers running along the top and down the side. Those numbers tell you how many cells in each row and column are filled, and in what runs. Chip away the right squares and a picture slowly emerges: a fish, a boot, a little umbrella. Guess wrong and you are penalised with lost time. It is logic, not luck, and once it clicks it is fiercely moreish.

GBuddy's GB Treasure Hunt

Nintendo dressed this austere logic puzzle in the friendliest costume it had. Mario appears as a kind of archaeologist, chiselling and hammering the picture out of the grid, cheering when you solve one and wincing when you make a mistake. The Game Boy's tiny screen was actually well suited to the format, since a monochrome grid needs no colour to be read. All you need is the discipline to trust the numbers.

A hard sell in the West

The Japanese edition of Mario Picross landed in 1995, and the PAL release followed for Europe. Nintendo genuinely got behind it, giving it prominent coverage in its own magazines and marketing. The problem was not quality, it was familiarity. In Japan, nonogram puzzles were already a known pastime in newspapers and magazines. In Britain, Germany or the United States, most shoppers had no idea what a picross even was, and a puzzle you cannot explain in one line of box copy is a puzzle that stays on the shelf.

The best Game Boy game a lot of people never heard of.

So it undersold. Not disastrously, but enough to make Nintendo cautious about the West's appetite for the genre. That single commercial decision would shape everything that followed for the series outside Japan.

The sequels that stayed home

Because the first game had struggled abroad, its successors never left Japan. Mario Picross 2 arrived on the Game Boy for Japanese players only, expanding the formula with larger, tougher puzzles and even handing some duties to Wario. Western fans who had fallen for the first game had no official way to buy the follow-up, and importing a Japanese cartridge was the only route. For a puzzle that needs no translation to play, that was a particular shame.

The sequels stayed in Japan. Now you know why importers exist.

Vindicated in the end

The story has a happy ending. The picross idea refused to die, and Nintendo kept returning to it, eventually building a long-running series on later handhelds that found the audience the Game Boy original never quite reached. Today the genre has fans worldwide, and Sudoku has made grid logic mainstream in exactly the way that might have saved Mario Picross had it arrived a decade later.

That is why the cartridge is such a rewarding thing to revisit. It was a great game that showed up a little too early for its own market, and the passage of time has done nothing but prove it right. You can find both the Western and Japanese versions in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.