The Game Boy is one of the most successful gaming systems of all time, with 118.69 million copies sold in all its variants, including the Game Boy Color. In Japan and the United States, it was the first platform for one of the most popular games of all time: Tetris. It launched the Pokemon franchise, which has grown ever since. All of this combined to create Nintendo’s handheld empire. However, the Game Boy initially seemed to have some shortcomings. It’s big, but small. It was intentionally less advanced than its handheld rivals at the time. Its limited palette and soundboard meant it had to rely on careful, considered abstraction. In other words, in order to be clear, exciting, and engaging, the Game Boy had to be weird. That’s an outsider. And outside, strange things keep emerging.
Perhaps the best example of this weirdness is The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. The game began as a side project to port Awakening to the Game Boy, as there was no intention of creating an original Legend of Zelda game for the system. Eventually, the project blossomed into a complete, unique game. Director Ken Tezuka even described the game as a “parody” of the Legend of Zelda game itself.
That understates the game’s relentless strangeness. One of the clear inspirations for the game is Twin Peaks, which aired in Japan in 1991. Games, which we just discovered this year. Link’s Awakening borrows the concept of a small town with a surreal population, even as it heightens the absurdity. Link traveled far away from Hyrule and crash-landed on the mysterious island of Koholint. The first few hours of the game are a comedy, with Link having to help the townspeople live their lives while trying to find a way off the island. He walks their pets, does their shopping for them, and does some more common Zelda activities like solving puzzles, braving dungeons, and fighting bosses.
But as the game goes on, the darkness around its edges grows. The whole island is a dream. After awakening the whale (whose giant egg is located in the volcano in the center of the island), Link will wake up. The island and everyone he knew on it would be gone. It remains one of the medium’s most profound and haunting metanarratives. All video games are miniature worlds that disappear when we are not looking at them and only come to life through interaction with them. Link’s Awakening dramatizes this dynamic, making it a poignant story of loss.
Simply put, the game also pays homage to various other Nintendo games. These include goombas, piranha plants, chain chewers, Kirby-like enemies, and more. This kind of cross-band pollination is commonplace now, but at the time, it was a bit subversive—not just an Easter egg, but an ironic watering down of such an important Zelda brand. To this day, Nintendo remains very protective of its IP—Mario hasn’t appeared in Fortress Heroes yet, after all. According to Tezuka, the rationale for this approach in Link’s Awakening was, “It was for the Game Boy, so we thought, ‘Oh, that’ll be fine.'”
This quote is very inspiring. The Game Boy was a platform you could get away with: the possibility space was a little wider. While it’s more ubiquitous than its companion consoles, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Nintendo 64, it’s also not as popular as Nintendo’s flagship console. It is less capable of creating images capable of prospect marketing. To this day, Link’s Awakening remains a spin-off of one of Nintendo’s core franchises. It’s unlike every other game in the Legends series.
Zelda isn’t the only Nintendo series to do this kind of mild subversion on the Game Boy. Super Mario Land 2:6 Gold is the first game to feature Mario’s evil twin, Wario. He started out as a villain, but after appearing in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, he became an anti-hero. The fact that wacky antics like Made in Leo still exist makes him an outsider. Turning Mario into a cackling, greedy antihero isn’t blasphemous, but it’s at least cheeky.
Nintendo isn’t the only company releasing games on the Game Boy. Saga (known as Final Fantasy Legend in the US) follows four warriors as they climb a mysterious tower. Each level of the tower, like the Dark Tower in Stephen King’s series of the same name, hosts a different world. Fittingly, Final Fantasy Legend is of epic proportions, with you tasked with traveling across multiple worlds, slaying gods, and fighting oppressive regimes. However, it is also bare and devoid of party membership features. You move through each world almost as quickly as you arrived, and there’s no hint of what happens after you leave.
This barebones approach does resemble the original Final Fantasy, but more importantly, Final Fantasy is a game about preventing the end of history: a hardpoint where time stops. Its world has a rich past, filled with ancient civilizations and long-lost technologies. In Saga, each world has a feeling of complete stillness until you arrive. Each of them has its own plot, which only you can interrupt. The final reveal – that a powerful god created the tower and its world for his own amusement – hardly differs from the RPG formula, but Legends’ simplicity makes it feel utterly terrifying and existential ism. Just like Link’s Awakening, the world seems to be someone else’s dream and will disappear when you wake up. Saga Tower may not have a history, but it does have a future. God is dead and the people in the tower can make their own choices, but their freedom only begins after the end credits roll.
Some of the limitations of the Game Boy are evident in the name itself. Like most other console manufacturers, Nintendo’s assumption was that its audience was boys and teenagers. It’s hard to argue that this isn’t true, but despite the name, these assumptions are twisted and shattered, sometimes with direct encouragement from Nintendo. A lot of moms play Tetris, a lot of young girls play Pokémon. There’s a traceable line from the Game Boy to Beyoncé’s pink DS campaign and later to the presentation of the Wii and Switch as home devices for everyone. The simplicity of the Game Boy is where it comes in.
Since the Game Boy launched, the profits it represents have both expanded and contracted. There are a lot of small, weird games on platforms like Itch.io. Some of these projects are even Game Boy games designed to be played using an emulator. Link’s Awakening has its own aesthetic lineage that can be seen in indie games like Undertale and Anodyne. Nintendo only has one flagship handheld/console hybrid right now, and that’s unlikely to change in the future. Its brand has been somewhat flattened, with every Mario Sports and Party game having the same basic aesthetic repeated ad infinitum. It’s hard to imagine Nintendo releasing an after-hours project right now, and any such project would be more likely to be a standalone game rather than an outlier classic in a larger series. It’s hard to say whether that’s good or bad, but the Game Boy still represented something unique that could never be fully replicated.
