Great Game Stories: 12 Game Boy Tales, from Once Upon a Time to The End

Warning: contains princesses, pirates, Pokemon and at least one apocalypse.

Every Game Boy cartridge was a tiny grey box, but inside each one lived a whole story. Long before high-definition cutscenes and voice acting, developers told their tales with a handful of sprites, a few lines of text and a great deal of imagination, and somehow it worked. A child holding the console under a bedsheet did not see four shades of green. They saw kingdoms, castles, monsters and heroes. Great Game Stories is a series that gives those adventures back their storybook shape, retelling twelve of them exactly the way they always felt.

Each entry takes one game from the museum's collection and tells its story from once upon a time to the end. We keep the wonder, the villains and the strange dream logic of these little worlds. And because a fairy tale is nothing without its ending, every article closes with a clearly marked Spoiler Alert, so you can stop before the final page if you would rather reach it yourself with the cartridge in hand. Here are the twelve tales, grouped by the worlds they belong to.

Twelve Great Game Storylines

The Mushroom Kingdom on the move

Super Mario Land: the plumber's very first handheld outing sends him through four unfamiliar kingdoms to rescue a princess who is not the one you are thinking of.

Super Mario Land 2: Mario comes home to find his own castle stolen by a jealous newcomer, and must gather six golden coins just to get back through his front door.

Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3: that jealous newcomer gets his own adventure, raiding a pirate island for enough treasure to build a castle to rival Mario's.

Wario Land 2: Wario wakes up robbed and furious, in an adventure where he cannot actually die and every hidden door branches the tale toward another ending.

Kongs and kidnappings

Donkey Kong: what looks like the old arcade climb turns into a hundred-room chase, as Mario pursues a lovelorn ape across nine sprawling lands.

Donkey Kong Land: a grumpy old ape's boast becomes a wager, sending Donkey and Diddy Kong across a whole Game Boy world to win back their stolen banana hoard.

A pocket full of monsters

Pokemon Kanto: a child leaves a small town with a single creature and a promise, then sets out across the region that started a global obsession to catch them all.

Other worlds in your pocket

The Rescue of Princess Blobette: a boy and his shape-shifting blob climb a tower of traps on a faraway planet to free a captured princess, one jellybean at a time.

Star Wars: a galaxy far, far away squeezed into four shades of grey, retelling the tale of a farm boy, a smuggler and a very large space station.

Dragon's Lair: not the dragon-and-princess cartoon people remember from the arcades, but a punishing Game Boy platformer in which a knight gathers the pieces of a shattered star.

Bart Simpson's Escape from Camp Deadly: Bart and Lisa are shipped off to a summer camp with no way home, run by a villain who answers to Mr. Burns.

Deadeus: a modern homebrew tale in which a boy dreams that a god will end his village in three days, with eleven different ways for the story to close.

Pick a cartridge, open its story and read on to the end, or stop just before the Spoiler Alert and go play it the way its makers intended. Either way, there are more tales waiting on the shelves, so come and explore the rest of the collection at the Game Boy Museum.