35 Years Ago, The Game Boy Made Mainstream Gaming Just A Little Stranger

The Game Boy is one of the most-successful gaming systems ever, having sold 118.69 million copies across all its variants (including the Game Boy Color). In Japan and the US, it was the first platform for one of the most-popular games of all time: Tetris. It launched the Pokemon franchise, which has since grown to massive proportions. And all of this combined to start Nintendo’s handheld empire. Nevertheless, the Game Boy appeared to have some drawbacks at first. It was small, if bulky. It was deliberately less advanced than its handheld competitors at the time. Its limited color palette and sound board meant it had to lean on careful, deliberate abstraction. In other words, to be legible, exciting, and appealing, the Game Boy had to get weird. It was an outsider. And on the outside, strangeness flourishes.

Perhaps the best example of this weirdness is The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. The game was originally an after-work project to port A Link to the Past to the Game Boy, as there was no intention to create an original Zelda title for the system. Eventually, the project flourished into a full, unique game of its own. Director Takeshi Tezuka even described the game as a “parody” of Zelda games proper.

That statement undersells the game’s relentless strangeness. One of the game’s explicit inspirations was Twin Peaks, which broadcast in Japan in 1991. Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost even met with Nintendo to discuss the television show and bringing its sensibilities to video games, something we only discovered this year. Link’s Awakening borrows the idea of a small town with a surreal populace, though it cranks the absurdity up from . Link is far away from Hyrule, having crash-landed on the mysterious island of Koholint. The game’s initial hours play as a comedy where, in attempting to find a way off the island, Link must help the town’s inhabitants live their lives. He walks their pets, shops for them, and does the more regular Zelda activities of solving puzzles, braving dungeons, and fighting bosses.

But as the game continues, the darkness on its edges grows. The whole island is a dream. Upon waking the Whale Fish, whose gigantic egg sits in the island’s central volcano, Link will wake up. The island, and everyone he has gotten to know on it, will vanish. It is still one of the medium’s most profound and haunting meta-narratives. All video games are miniature worlds that vanish when we are not looking at them, only brought to life through our interaction with them. Link’s Awakening dramatizes that dynamic, making it a poignant story of enveloping loss.

In lighter terms, the game also brings in homages to a variety of other Nintendo games. It features goombas, piranha plants, chain chomps, and a Kirby-like enemy, among others. That kind of cross-band pollination is commonplace now, but at the time, it was somewhat subversive– not merely an Easter egg, but a satiric dilution of the oh-so-important Zelda Brand. To this day, Nintendo remains quite protective of its IP–Mario hasn’t appeared in Fortnite, after all. The justification for this approach in Link’s Awakening, according to Tezuka, was, “It was for the Game Boy, so we thought, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine.'”

That statement is deliciously revealing. The Game Boy was a platform on which you could get away with things: where the possibility space was just a little wider. While more ubiquitous than its companion consoles, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Nintendo 64, it was also less of Nintendo’s flagship. It was less able to create images that would foreground marketing. To this day, Link’s Awakening is an outlier spin-off of one of Nintendo’s core franchises. It stands apart from every other game in the storied series.

Zelda was not the only Nintendo franchise to get this kind of gentle subversion on Game Boy. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins was the first game to feature Mario’s evil twin, Wario. He started as a villain but became an anti-hero by his next appearance in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. Wario would go on to be folded fully into the franchise’s language, but the off-the-wall antics of something like WarioWare still make him an outsider. Turning Mario into a cackling, greedy anti-hero is not blasphemous, but it is at least cheeky.

Nintendo is far from the only company whose games on the Game Boy got existential. Saga, or Final Fantasy Legend as it’s known in the US, follows four warriors as they climb a mystical tower. Each level of the tower, much like the Dark Tower in Stephen King’s series of the same name, is host to a different world. Fittingly, Final Fantasy Legend has an epic scale and tasks you with traversing multiple worlds, killing gods, and combating oppressive regimes. However, it is also bare, without party-member characters. You pass through each world almost as quickly as you arrive and there is nary a hint of what will occur once you leave.

This barebones approach does resemble the original Final Fantasy, but even more than that, Final Fantasy is a game about preventing the end of history: a hard point where time ceases. Its world has a long past, full of ancient civilizations and long-lost technologies. In Saga, there is a feeling of each world being in total stasis until you arrive. They each have their own plot that only you can interrupt. The final reveal–that a powerful god created the tower and its worlds for his own amusement–is hardly out of step with the RPG mold, but Saga’s simplicity makes that feel wholly frightening and existential. Like Link’s Awakening, the world seems to be someone else’s dream that will vanish upon waking. Saga’s tower may not have a history, but it does have a future. With god dead, the peoples of the tower can make their own choices, but their freedom only begins after the credits roll.

Some of the limitations of the Game Boy are shown in the name itself. Nintendo, like most every other console manufacturer, was running with the assumption that its audience was boys and young teenagers. It’s hard to say that wasn’t true, but despite the name, those assumptions were both bent and broken, sometimes with Nintendo’s outright encouragement. Plenty of moms played Tetris and plenty of young girls played Pokemon. There is a traceable line from the Game Boy to Beyoncé’s pink DS campaign, and later to the presentation of the Wii and Switch as family devices for everyone. The Game Boy’s simplicity was the entry point.

Since the Game Boy, the margins it represented have both expanded and shrunk. Small, weird games are plentiful on platforms like Itch.io. Some of these projects are even Game Boy games, meant to be played with emulators. Link’s Awakening has its own aesthetic lineage, seen in independent games like Undertale and Anodyne. Nintendo has only one flagship handheld/console hybrid now, and that is not likely to change in the future. Its brands have flattened somewhat, with every Mario sports and party game having the same basic aesthetic, repeated ad infinitum. It is hard to imagine Nintendo publishing an after-work project now, and any such project would be more likely to become an indie game on its own terms, rather than an outlier classic within a larger franchise. It’s hard to say if that’s good or bad, but the Game Boy still represents something unique, never to be exactly replicated.