Friday, April 21, 1989 — the day the Game Boy launched in Japan. 35 years ago, the video game landscape would change forever as Nintendo opened a new frontier portable playing for the masses. The company’s Game & Watch line gives you a limited gaming experience on the go, but the Game Boy was a completely different beast.
The 8-bit machine with a 160×144 pixel LCD screen may have been modest in the specs department, but it only powerful enough to offer deep gaming experiences, with the best examples rivaling those on home consoles. More importantly, its limitations turned out to be advantages in the long run; that blurry monochrome screen drew significantly less power than its color-backlit equivalent, and therefore gave the notebook decent battery life—an important factor to consider when your handheld relies on AA batteries to function away from a wall outlet.
Gunpei Yokoi’s design philosophy – using proven, inexpensive components in new and interesting ways – continued through Nintendo’s handheld line
The primary work of Satoru Okada and Gunpei Yokoi, the console was designed for a specific price point and purpose; be practical portable device. Competing companies got carried away with technical possibilities and modern handheld consoles far the superior specs fell flat as the Game Boy marched on. Gunpei Yokoi’s design philosophy – using proven, inexpensive components in new and interesting ways – continued through Nintendo’s handheld line and carried over to home consoles with the Wii. The Switch itself and new experiments such as Labo VRshow that this approach continues to keep the Kyoto company in poor shape.
Of course, it’s the software that makes or breaks any console, and the humble Game Boy would never have lasted this long without its catalog of amazing games. Obviously, it had the archetypal killer app in Tetris, and many still insist it’s the best version of the Alexey Pajitnov puzzle. The the story of his convoluted path to the console is worth exploring – an exciting combination of fraud, deception and blind luck that shaped Nintendo and the video game industry in general.
Any video game company would be more than happy to have a game with him half the appeal of Tetris in its books, but after seven years—when you’d expect the console to be winding down—the Game Boy got the biggest second wind in video game history with the Japanese release of Pokémon Red & Green in 1996. A smaller, lighter revision of the hardware, the Game Boy Pocket, also arrived that year, and the console’s true successor – the Game Boy Color – would launch worldwide two years later alongside the Western release of Pokémon. While this marked a transition from the OG hardware, the Game Boy line continued to enjoy nearly 100% backwards compatibility until the Micro variant of the Game Boy Advance in 2005.
While Tetris and Pokémon were system sellers, there is huge a library of games released for the system
While Tetris and Pokémon were system sellers, there is huge a library of games released for the system. The following list shows the best titles. You’ll definitely find a lot of ‘lands’ here — someone at Nintendo HQ decided that a tiny handheld just couldn’t contain massive ‘worlds’, so Super Mario Land ushered in an era of ‘Land’ games like Kirby, Donkey Kong and Wario.
As with our list of the 50 best Switch games and other Nintendo console Top 50 lists, the order here depends on the user rating of the game on this page. Logged in users can interact and rate titles directly on these pages by hovering over the rating or alternatively from each game’s page. To be clear, the games listed here are for original Game Boy only — no backwards compatible ‘black cart’ Game Boy Color games (unless they happened to get a separate release for the original). If it says ‘Game Boy Color’ on the box, you won’t find it below!
Don’t see your favorite on the list? Use the handy search bar below to find Game Boy games and enter your own ratings. Already rated your collection? Let’s dive into…
Note. In order for games to become eligible, they need a total of at least 30 user ratings.
