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Pick Up and Play, Part 2: Dr. Mario

Marcel Pflug

May 23, 2023

3 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

After Tetris turned falling blocks into a worldwide habit, Nintendo went looking for a second puzzle it could call its own. The answer, oddly enough, was to hand Mario a lab coat. Part two of Pick Up and Play is about that follow-up, a game of colours and pills that slots into a spare few minutes as easily as it fills an entire afternoon.

Game Boy Dr. Mario, the virus-clearing puzzle game — The plumber who holds the cure

Pills, pills, pills and a level you can finish on a bus

In Dr. Mario you drop capsules into a bottle of viruses, lining up four or more of a colour to wipe them out. Clear every virus in the bottle and the level is done. That structure is what makes it such a good companion for short sessions: unlike Tetris, which just runs until you lose, Dr. Mario gives you a tidy little goal you can actually reach. A low level takes a couple of minutes, so you can clear one, feel like you achieved something, and put the machine down with a clear conscience. Or you can nudge the speed up, keep climbing, and suddenly the bus has arrived and you have not noticed.

Like all the best quickies, it hides real depth under a friendly surface. Clearing several rows in one go, or setting up chain reactions where one clear triggers the next, is where the points and the bragging rights live. But you never need to understand any of that to enjoy your first bottle, which is exactly the balance this series is built around.

Part of why it lodges in the memory is the presentation. The three virus types even have names, Fever, Chill and Weird, and two of them lent their titles to the game's music: the bouncy 'Fever' and the cooler 'Chill', a pair of loops players still argue over decades later. You can set the speed to low, medium or high and choose a starting level, so the same cartridge stretches from a gentle warm-up to a white-knuckle scramble where capsules fall faster than you can place them. That single dial is what lets Dr. Mario be both a two-minute distraction and an hour-long obsession, depending on how brave you feel that day.

Nintendo's other puzzle pillar

Dr. Mario arrived in 1990, released on the Game Boy and the NES at once, and became Nintendo's deliberate attempt to build a second puzzle phenomenon after Tetris. Rather than copy the falling-block formula, it found its own identity in that medical, virus-clearing theme, and it worked: Dr. Mario grew into one of the most recognisable early competitive puzzle games on the system, a fixture that Nintendo has revived again and again across decades of hardware. It also leans hard into head-to-head play, and two players can face off over the link cable, each trying to bury the other in viruses.

That early success turned into staying power. Dr. Mario never really went away: Nintendo has brought the formula back again and again, from Dr. Mario 64 to download-only versions, a Dr. Luigi spin-off and a free-to-play mobile outing, and the good doctor even earned a place on the Super Smash Bros. roster as a fighter in his own right. Not bad for a character who began as a plumber in a borrowed lab coat, in a puzzle game built to chase Tetris. The Game Boy version is where that entire second career started.

There is a small collector's wrinkle worth mentioning too. The UK edition held here went through several British print variants, so with Dr. Mario the regional and print-run differences matter more than you might expect for such a familiar game, a reminder that even a mass-market puzzle hides details for the people who look closely.

What makes Dr. Mario such a natural fit for a pick-up-and-play shelf is that finish line the virus count hands you. Tetris runs until you fail; Dr. Mario lets you win. Clearing the last virus in a bottle delivers a tidy little hit of completion you can reach in a couple of minutes, which is exactly the feeling you want when a couple of minutes is all you have. And then the next bottle is right there, one level harder, quietly asking for just one more go.

For a game about clearing infections, it is remarkably good for the soul: a couple of minutes, a bottle cleared, and back to your day. To see this cartridge and the rest of the collection, come and explore the Game Boy Museum.