The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Three Game Boy Games at the Extremes

Sergio Leone's classic western gave us a perfect shorthand for the full range of quality: the good, the bad and the ugly. Any large game library contains all three, and the Game Boy, with a catalogue of well over a thousand titles, is no exception. Its shelves run from genuine masterpieces to cynical cash-ins to games so notorious that collectors now hunt them down precisely because they are bad.

So rather than yet another list of the usual beloved classics, here are three games from the collection chosen to sit at each extreme of that range. Consider it a short, honest tour of the heights and the depths of the grey brick's library, and a small argument for why all three ends of the spectrum are worth caring about.

The Good: Donkey Kong

The 1994 Donkey Kong, often called DK '94, is widely regarded as one of the finest games ever made for the system. It opens by faithfully recreating the original 1981 arcade game, four familiar screens and all, and just as you think you know exactly what you are getting, it pulls a delightful trick: the game expands into around a hundred inventive puzzle-platforming levels that ask you to think as much as jump, introducing new moves and mechanics at a generous pace. It was also one of the first titles built to take advantage of the Super Game Boy, adding colour and a decorative border when played through that adapter. Smart, generous and endlessly clever, it is the Game Boy operating at the very top of its game, and a standing reminder that tight hardware constraints often produce the most disciplined and inventive design.

The Good - Donkey Kong (1994)

The Bad: Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly

At the other end sits a very familiar type of release: the licensed cash-in. Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly arrived to ride the enormous global popularity of The Simpsons, and like a great many licensed games of its era it is remembered as competent at best and forgettable at worst. It is not broken, and it is not offensive; it is simply unremarkable, the kind of middle-of-the-road platformer that filled shop shelves whenever a hot television brand needed a game bolted to its name. That is exactly why it belongs here. Every large library has a vast grey middle of games that nobody hated and nobody quite remembers, churned out to catch a trend, and this is a perfectly honest representative of it. Pretending a collection is all masterpieces would be a kind of lie; the ordinary games are the truth of what filled the shelves.

The Bad: Bart Simpson - Escape from Camp Deadly (1991)

The Ugly: Dragon's Lair

Then there is the game collectors love to hate. Dragon's Lair shares its name with one of the most beautiful arcade games ever made, a lavish, hand-animated laserdisc spectacle that dazzled players in the early 1980s and looked like nothing else in the arcade. Squeezed onto the tiny green screen of the Game Boy, it became something else entirely: punishingly difficult, unfair in its design and a world away from the arcade original in everything but the title. Its fearsome reputation has, with a nice irony, made it genuinely sought-after, the ugly duckling that collectors want on the shelf precisely because of its legend. A game can earn its place in history by being notorious just as surely as by being great.

The Ugly:- Dragon's Lair - The Legend (1991)

Three Kinds of Value

It is worth noticing that these three games are collectible for three completely different reasons, and that is part of the point. The good game is wanted because it is genuinely excellent and everyone agrees on it. The bad game is wanted because it is representative, an honest specimen of the ordinary releases that made up most of the shelf. And the ugly game is wanted because it is infamous, its poor reputation transformed over time into a badge of curiosity. A thoughtful collection needs all three kinds of value, because a shelf that only chases greatness ends up telling a flattering but incomplete story.

Why the Extremes Are Worth Collecting

A great collection is not only a shrine to the classics. The forgettable and the infamous matter just as much, because together the three tell the whole truth about a platform: what it aspired to at its best, what it settled for in the vast middle, and what went gloriously wrong at the edges. Lining up the good, the bad and the ugly side by side is one of the quiet pleasures of collecting, and a healthy corrective to nostalgia, which has a stubborn habit of remembering only the highlight reel.

It is also, frankly, more interesting. The masterpieces are celebrated everywhere; the honest account of a console is the one that also makes room for the also-rans and the disasters. Set these three cartridges next to each other and you have a more complete portrait of the Game Boy than any list of ten favourites could give you, because you can see the full range the machine was capable of, for better and for worse.

All three games, boxed and catalogued, can be found in the collection.