The Game Boy is likely one of the most-successful gaming techniques ever, having offered 118.69 million copies throughout all its variants (together with the Game Boy Shade). In Japan and the US, it was the primary platform for one of many most-popular video games of all time: Tetris. It launched the Pokemon franchise, which has since grown to large proportions. And all of this mixed to begin Nintendo’s handheld empire. However, the Game Boy appeared to have some drawbacks at first. It was small, if cumbersome. It was intentionally much less superior than its handheld rivals on the time. Its restricted shade palette and sound board meant it needed to lean on cautious, deliberate abstraction. In different phrases, to be legible, thrilling, and interesting, the Game Boy needed to get bizarre. It was an outsider. And on the surface, strangeness thrives.
Maybe one of the best instance of this weirdness is The Legend of Zelda: Hyperlink’s Awakening. The sport was initially an after-work venture to port A Hyperlink to the Previous to the Game Boy, as there was no intention to create an authentic Zelda title for the system. Ultimately, the venture flourished right into a full, distinctive sport of its personal. Director Takeshi Tezuka even described the game as a “parody” of Zelda games proper.
That assertion undersells the sport’s relentless strangeness. One of many sport’s specific inspirations was Twin Peaks, which broadcast in Japan in 1991. Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost even met with Nintendo to debate the tv present and bringing its sensibilities to video video games, one thing we solely discovered this year. Hyperlink’s Awakening borrows the thought of a small city with a surreal populace, although it cranks the absurdity up from . Hyperlink is much away from Hyrule, having crash-landed on the mysterious island of Koholint. The sport’s preliminary hours play as a comedy the place, in looking for a approach off the island, Hyperlink should assist the city’s inhabitants stay their lives. He walks their pets, retailers for them, and does the extra common Zelda actions of fixing puzzles, braving dungeons, and preventing bosses.
However as the sport continues, the darkness on its edges grows. The complete island is a dream. Upon waking the Whale Fish, whose gigantic egg sits within the island’s central volcano, Hyperlink will get up. The island, and everybody he has gotten to know on it, will vanish. It’s nonetheless one of many medium’s most profound and haunting meta-narratives. All video video games are miniature worlds that vanish when we’re not them, solely delivered to life by means of our interplay with them. Hyperlink’s Awakening dramatizes that dynamic, making it a poignant story of enveloping loss.
In lighter phrases, the sport additionally brings in homages to a wide range of different Nintendo video games. It options goombas, piranha crops, chain chomps, and a Kirby-like enemy, amongst others. That type of cross-band pollination is commonplace now, however on the time, it was considerably subversive– not merely an Easter egg, however a satiric dilution of the oh-so-important Zelda Model. To today, Nintendo stays fairly protecting of its IP–Mario hasn’t appeared in Fortnite, in any case. The justification for this strategy in Hyperlink’s Awakening, based on Tezuka, was, “It was for the Game Boy, so we thought, ‘Oh, it’s going to be fantastic.'”
That assertion is deliciously revealing. The Game Boy was a platform on which you possibly can get away with issues: the place the chance area was just a bit wider. Whereas extra ubiquitous than its companion consoles, the Tremendous Nintendo Leisure System and the Nintendo 64, it was additionally much less of Nintendo’s flagship. It was much less in a position to create pictures that might foreground advertising. To today, Hyperlink’s Awakening is an outlier spin-off of considered one of Nintendo’s core franchises. It stands other than each different sport within the storied collection.
Zelda was not the one Nintendo franchise to get this sort of light subversion on Game Boy. Tremendous Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Cash was the primary sport to function Mario’s evil twin, Wario. He began as a villain however grew to become an anti-hero by his subsequent look in Wario Land: Tremendous Mario Land 3. Wario would go on to be folded absolutely into the franchise’s language, however the off-the-wall antics of one thing like WarioWare nonetheless make him an outsider. Turning Mario right into a cackling, grasping anti-hero just isn’t blasphemous, however it’s at the least cheeky.
Nintendo is much from the one firm whose video games on the Game Boy received existential. Saga, or Last Fantasy Legend because it’s recognized within the US, follows 4 warriors as they climb a mystical tower. Every stage of the tower, very similar to the Darkish Tower in Stephen King’s collection of the identical identify, is host to a special world. Fittingly, Last Fantasy Legend has an epic scale and duties you with traversing a number of worlds, killing gods, and combating oppressive regimes. Nonetheless, additionally it is naked, with out party-member characters. You move by means of every world virtually as shortly as you arrive and there may be nary a touch of what is going to happen as soon as you allow.
This barebones strategy does resemble the unique Last Fantasy, however much more than that, Last Fantasy is a sport about stopping the tip of historical past: a tough level the place time ceases. Its world has a gone, filled with historic civilizations and long-lost applied sciences. In Saga, there’s a feeling of every world being in complete stasis till you arrive. They every have their very own plot that solely you possibly can interrupt. The closing reveal–that a strong god created the tower and its worlds for his personal amusement–is hardly out of step with the RPG mould, however Saga’s simplicity makes that really feel wholly horrifying and existential. Like Hyperlink’s Awakening, the world appears to be another person’s dream that can vanish upon waking. Saga’s tower might not have a historical past, however it does have a future. With god useless, the peoples of the tower could make their very own decisions, however their freedom solely begins after the credit roll.
A few of the limitations of the Game Boy are proven within the identify itself. Nintendo, like most each different console producer, was working with the idea that its viewers was boys and younger youngsters. It is onerous to say that wasn’t true, however regardless of the identify, these assumptions had been each bent and damaged, typically with Nintendo’s outright encouragement. Loads of mothers performed Tetris and loads of younger ladies performed Pokemon. There’s a traceable line from the Game Boy to Beyoncé’s pink DS marketing campaign, and later to the presentation of the Wii and Swap as household gadgets for everybody. The Game Boy’s simplicity was the entry level.
For the reason that Game Boy, the margins it represented have each expanded and shrunk. Small, bizarre video games are plentiful on platforms like Itch.io. A few of these initiatives are even Game Boy video games, meant to be performed with emulators. Hyperlink’s Awakening has its personal aesthetic lineage, seen in unbiased video games like Undertale and Anodyne. Nintendo has just one flagship handheld/console hybrid now, and that isn’t prone to change sooner or later. Its manufacturers have flattened considerably, with each Mario sports activities and celebration sport having the identical fundamental aesthetic, repeated advert infinitum. It’s onerous to think about Nintendo publishing an after-work venture now, and any such venture can be extra prone to grow to be an indie sport by itself phrases, somewhat than an outlier traditional inside a bigger franchise. It is onerous to say if that is good or dangerous, however the Game Boy nonetheless represents one thing distinctive, by no means to be precisely replicated.