All Original Game Boy Launch Titles

When the Game Boy went on sale in Japan on 21 April 1989, you could buy exactly four games for it. Not four hundred, not forty. Four Game Boy launch titles for the first regional release of the handheld console. A platformer, a baseball game, a Breakout clone, and a mahjong title that never left the country. The initial run of 300,000 consoles sold out in two weeks anyway, which tells you most of what you need to know about how badly people wanted a screen they could play on a train.

The lineup changed shape as the system crossed borders. North America got the four – minus the mahjong, which stayed home – plus two more in July 1989, including the one game everyone now files mentally as the Game Boy launch title. That game was Tetris, and it was not, in fact, a Japanese day-one release at all. Europe waited until September 1990 and quietly dropped one of the sports games. Add it all up, strip out the duplicates, and the complete set of games you could buy on the first day in any region comes to six. Four of them feature Mario in some capacity, which was not a coincidence.

What follows is every one of those six launch titles, in the order they entered the world: the four Japanese originals first, then the two North American additions. Between them they include a chart-topping dance single, a Soviet computer with no graphics card, and the single most important cable in handheld gaming history – which, fittingly, debuted in the game almost nobody played.

Super Mario Land

At the end of three of Super Mario Land’s four kingdoms, Mario reaches Princess Daisy, and Princess Daisy turns into a monster and scuttles away. A Fly, a Gunion, and a Kumo take turns impersonating her, and only in the fourth kingdom is the real Daisy waiting. It is a strange way to treat the debut of a character who would go on to become a Nintendo regular, but Super Mario Land is a strange game by Mario standards.

The game was the work of Gunpei Yokoi’s Nintendo R&D1, built at Hiroshi Yamauchi’s request to move the new handheld – which makes it the first mainline Mario game not designed by Mario’s creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, who happened to be Yokoi’s protégé. It shows. Mario travels not through the Mushroom Kingdom but through Sarasaland, drawn in spare line art, chasing an alien named Tatanga who has kidnapped Daisy in order to marry her. Two of the twelve levels drop platforming entirely and put Mario in a submarine and then an airplane, shooting through forced-scrolling stages borrowed wholesale from Gradius.

The soundtrack, by Hirokazu Tanaka, was good enough that in 1992 a British dance act called Ambassadors of Funk sampled the overworld theme, released it as a single, and rode it to number eight on the UK charts. The game itself sold more than eighteen million copies – more than Super Mario Bros. 3. For a launch title assembled to sell hardware, it did rather well.

Baseball

There are exactly two teams in Baseball, the Bears and the Eagles, and you cannot change them, rename them, or add a third. The Bears always bat first. Mario captains the Bears and Luigi the Eagles, though if you pick either as your pitcher he looks identical to every other man on the roster – a lineup of interchangeable players named Paul, Randy, Sam, and Jimmy.

Baseball was a port of Nintendo’s 1983 Famicom game, reworked for the handheld by Intelligent Systems and carrying a visible debt to Namco’s Famista series. The Game Boy version made one small but real improvement: where the NES original handled fielding automatically, here you could control the fielders yourself. A toggle switched between a USA mode and a JPN mode, changing how ball speed was displayed, the order of the ball count, and the music – a tidy piece of localisation built straight into the cartridge.

It could be played head-to-head by linking two Game Boys with a cable, which in 1989 was a novel thing to do with a baseball game on a train. Mario’s presence as a captain was salesmanship rather than design. Nintendo spent the early Game Boy years dropping Mario into anything that might sell a little better with a familiar face attached, whether or not you could do a single thing with him once the game started.

Alleyway

The little figure piloting the paddle in Alleyway looks a great deal like Mario, and for a year nobody at Nintendo would confirm that it was. The original Japanese box showed an unidentified man in a spacesuit. The international release quietly redrew him as Mario, the manual said nothing about it, and official word that the pilot was the company mascot did not arrive until a Club Nintendo article previewing the European launch in 1990.

Underneath the mystery is a Breakout clone, and a faithful one. Gunpei Yokoi’s R&D1 – the same team that built the Game Boy itself – made thirty-two stages, twenty-four standard and eight bonus. The standard ones come in threes: a static wall of bricks, then the same wall sliding sideways, then the same wall creeping down toward your paddle. From the fourth stage onward the paddle shrinks the instant your ball touches the top of the screen, which is exactly as irritating as it sounds. The bonus stages are the charming part, with the bricks arranged into sprites lifted straight from Super Mario Bros. and the ball tearing through them instead of bouncing back.

Yokoi thought enough of the physics he had written that he reused much of Alleyway’s code years later for Kirby’s Block Ball. A Breakout clone fronted by an anonymous spaceman turned out to have a longer afterlife than anyone reviewing it in 1989 would have guessed.

Yakuman

Yakuman is the launch title almost nobody outside Japan has ever played, and also, in a roundabout way, the reason you could ever trade a Pokémon. It is a Japanese mahjong game, the fourth of the four Japanese day-one titles, and the only one of them never released in the West – its single trip abroad was to China in 1995.

Its importance has nothing to do with mahjong. The Game Link Cable – the side port that would later let two players duel in Tetris and, famously, trade and battle Pokémon across the schoolyard – made its debut here. The feature existed because of Satoru Okada, who had worked on a 1983 handheld called Computer Mah-jong Yakuman that connected two units with a cable a full six years before the Game Boy. Okada pushed for a link cable on the new system over the doubts of his own team, built the technology himself, and put it first into the game he knew best.

So the most forgotten game on this list is the direct ancestor of the Game Boy’s defining trick. A single player faced one of five computer opponents; two players could link up for a versus match. Yakuman went on to spawn a whole line of Nintendo mahjong games that ran quietly for decades. None of them ever mattered as much as the cable plugged into the side.

Tetris

The game most people picture when they think of the Game Boy launch was not, strictly speaking, at the Game Boy launch. Tetris reached Japan on 14 June 1989, nearly two months after the system, and became a launch title only by being the cartridge bundled inside every North American and European box. It is the pack-in everyone remembers and the day-one Japanese title it never was.

Alexey Pajitnov built the original in 1984 on a Soviet Elektronika 60, a machine with no graphics card, so he assembled the falling pieces out of keyboard characters. As a state employee he signed the rights over to the Soviet government and saw nothing for them for years. The knot of who really owned the handheld rights – pulled at by Mirrorsoft, Spectrum HoloByte, Atari, and Nintendo, and dramatic enough to become a 2023 film – came loose largely because Henk Rogers flew to Moscow uninvited and knocked on the right ministry door. Nintendo had meant to bundle Mario. Rogers talked Minoru Arakawa out of it: pack in Mario and little boys will play, he said, but pack in Tetris and everyone will.

He was right. The Game Boy version sold around thirty-five million copies, and its theme – the Russian folk tune Korobeiniki – grew so inseparable from the game that the Tetris Company now requires it in officially branded versions. Pajitnov himself did not earn a thing from any of it until the rights reverted to him in 1996.

Tennis

Mario sits in the high chair in Tennis, calling the lines. He is the umpire – the only role on offer – and he announces faults and out balls with a small animation and the bearing of a man who takes the work seriously. That is the entire extent of his involvement, and in 1989 it was treated as a selling point.

Tennis was a port of Nintendo’s 1984 NES game, added to the lineup when the Game Boy reached North America on 31 July 1989. It is a spare thing: four difficulty settings, one opponent who never changes, the same court every time, and a two-player mode over the link cable. When the Game Boy finally landed in Europe in September 1990, Tennis was quietly dropped from the launch – left out, as one gaming history could not resist pointing out, of the very part of the world that hosts Wimbledon.

Mario’s career in the sport did not end in the umpire’s chair. He picked up a racket himself in Mario’s Tennis on the Virtual Boy in 1995, and by the time Mario Tennis arrived on the Nintendo 64 in 2000 the series had pulled in Princess Daisy – the same Daisy who had made her debut, kidnapped and impersonated by monsters, in the launch game at the top of this list.