Great Games, Tiny Screen: The Game Boy's Finest Hours

The Game Boy had no business hosting great games. Even in 1989 it was modest hardware: no colour, a screen that smeared during fast motion, and sound from a single tinny speaker. Rival handhelds were flashier and more powerful. Nintendo made a different bet, that a game people wanted to keep playing mattered more than raw horsepower, and a decade of brilliant, strange and stubborn cartridges proved the bet right.

Proof that fun never needed horsepower.

Great Games, Tiny Screen is a tour through some of the finest, oddest and most ambitious games the handheld ever ran, all of them in the museum's collection. Here is the full series, grouped by the kind of magic each game pulled off.

The puzzle boom

The Game Boy and the puzzle game grew up together. It all started with Tetris, the Soviet puzzle that came bundled with the console and sold it to the world. Nintendo chased that success with Dr. Mario and its falling pills, while Mario Picross smuggled a superb logic puzzle into the West that few there quite knew what to do with. Further back still, the mahjong launch title Yakuman quietly became the first game to use the link cable, and Mario & Yoshi gave the friendly dinosaur one of his earliest starring roles.

Mario, Pokemon and Nintendo's own

The handheld was also a stage for Nintendo's biggest names. Super Mario Land gave the plumber a wonderfully weird pocket adventure, and its sequel introduced the greedy anti-hero of Wario Land. The block-breaker Alleyway put Mario at the controls on day one, while Donkey Kong grew from an arcade port into one of the finest games on the system. Game & Watch Gallery looked lovingly back at Nintendo's LCD past, and then Pokemon arrived at the very end of the machine's life and gave it a triumphant second act.

Ports that should not have fit

Finally there are the conversions that seemed to belong on bigger machines and were talked onto the handheld anyway. Space Invaders hid an entire Super Nintendo game inside a Game Boy cartridge. Lemmings crammed a mouse-driven strategy game onto four buttons and a two-inch screen. And Dragon's Lair, born as a lavish laserdisc cartoon, was rebuilt from scratch to survive on a battery. Not all of them succeeded, but every one is a monument to developers who refused to accept a machine's limits.

One little machine, a whole library

Taken together, these games make the case better than any spec sheet could. A console with four shades of grey hosted Soviet puzzles and pocket monsters, mahjong and nonograms, arcade legends and Hollywood cartoons, and it kept players hooked for a full decade. Great hardware helps, but it was never the point. Great imagination was.

Every game above lives in the Game Boy Museum collection, and each has its own chapter in the Great Games, Tiny Screen series. Pick one and start reading.