Yakuman: The Launch Game That Gave the Link Cable a Job

There is a small port on the side of every original Game Boy, the one you plugged a link cable into. It made the trading in Pokemon possible and turned Tetris into a duel. But it needed a first game to give it a reason to exist, and that game was not a household name. It was a mahjong title that never left Japan, released on the day the Game Boy went on sale. Its name is Yakuman, and it quietly invented connected handheld play.

The first Game Boy game that needed a friend.

A mahjong game on day one

When the Game Boy launched in Japan in April 1989, it did so with a small handful of games. Alongside it on the shelves sat Alleyway and Super Mario Land, the games most Western fans think of as the handheld's opening act. But there was another launch title that never crossed an ocean: Yakuman, a straight adaptation of mahjong, the tile game that is as much a part of Japanese life as cards are in the West.

Choosing mahjong as a launch game made perfect sense in Japan. It is a game nearly everyone knows, played by families and salarymen alike, and putting it in your pocket was an obvious pitch. The title itself is a mahjong term: a yakuman is one of the rarest and highest-scoring hands you can assemble, the sort of result players chase for years. Naming the game after it was a promise of ambition.

The first game to use the cable

Here is why Yakuman deserves a place in any history of the Game Boy. It is credited as the first game to support the link cable, letting two players connect their handhelds and face each other at the mahjong table. Every celebrated moment of connected play that came later, the Tetris head-to-head battles, the frantic Pokemon trades, all of it traces back to a mahjong game that showed the feature could work at all.

Game Boy Link Cable

It is easy to underrate how novel that was. A handheld had always been a solitary object, one screen, one player. Yakuman took the Game Boy's odd little side port and turned two separate machines into a shared table. The idea that your pocket console could be a social device, not just a private one, started here, in a game most of the world never got to play.

Simple, sharp and quietly important

As a game, Yakuman is exactly what it needs to be: a clean, competent rendering of mahjong on a monochrome screen, tiles drawn crisply enough to read at a glance. There are no gimmicks and no story. If you know mahjong it is instantly playable, and if you do not it is a decent, patient teacher. For a launch title built to sell hardware and show off a feature, that restraint is a strength.

Nintendo clearly kept a soft spot for it. The name resurfaced on later systems, and the little mahjong game that started it all remains a beloved deep cut among collectors. For most players outside Japan, though, it is a game they never held, which is exactly what makes an original cartridge such a satisfying thing to track down.

You can find Yakuman in the Game Boy Museum collection. This article is part of the Great Games, Tiny Screen series.