Game Boy Games

Nintendo released the Game Boy in Japan on 21 April 1989 and in North America that July. On paper it was already outdated: a Sharp processor at roughly 4.19 MHz, a 160x144 reflective LCD showing four shades of grey-green, and no backlight of any kind. Its rivals — the Atari Lynx and the Sega Game Gear — had colour screens and better hardware, and both lost. The Game Boy won on the things that actually matter for a handheld: it ran for around thirty hours on four AA batteries, it was almost indestructible, and it came bundled with Tetris in the West, a game that sold the concept of portable play to adults who had never bought a console.

A small screen with a deep library

The hardware forced designers to be economical, and the results were often better for it. Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2 rebuilt Mario at a smaller scale, and Wario Land spun a villain out of the series. The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening is still cited as one of the best entries in its series on any machine, and Metroid II carried a console franchise onto a handheld without watering it down. Kirby's Dream Land introduced a character who outlived the platform. Then in 1996 Pokémon arrived and revived a machine that was already seven years old — the link cable turned trading into the point of the game. The Game Boy Color of 1998 kept compatibility while adding a faster processor and 56 on-screen colours; combined sales of the two models reached roughly 119 million units.

Playing Game Boy games in your browser

Emulation here runs inside the page, with nothing installed on your machine. On this platform, though, almost the entire library is still commercially active — Nintendo continues to sell and re-release its handheld catalogue — so of the 476 Game Boy entries we hold, only a couple are playable directly, such as Cosmo Tank. The rest are reference profiles with release details and links to official stores, which is the honest way to handle a library that is still earning for its authors.