Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 041: A Failed Game Boy Pilot

Episode Date: June 27, 2016

It's not really a Micro episode, but that's OK — it's not really Retronauts, either. Jeremy digs up a pilot episode for a Game Boy-centered podcast (costarring Game Boy superfan Bryan Ochalla) that ultimately never saw the light of day. In this standalone episode, we discuss the system's launch and day-one releases: Baseball, Alleyway, Yakuman, and of course Super Mario Land. Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts, my original plan was to talk about classic gaming at E3, 2016, but it turned out there wasn't anything at E3, 2016, that was really relevant. So instead, I dusted this pilot episode for a Game Boy World podcast that I never actually launched or followed through on as a substitute. So this week in Retronauts, it's Game Boy. It's the inaugural episode, and we'll be talking about Game Boy. Yes, it's the first Game Boy World podcast. And with me here on the line we have Brian O'Challa, also known as the Gay Gamer.

Ryan, you want to introduce yourself a bit, talk about your interest, why I've summoned you here, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, well, I have been interested in the Game Boy since I was a kid, since it came out in the mid-80s. Although I will admit, even though I owned a Game Boy in a bunch of games as a kid, you know, like four or five years later, I sold all of it to probably to help buy another system. I actually have no idea why I sold them, but I do remember selling them. And then a couple of years ago, I was reintroduced to it through a post on the Scroll magazine blog about Nubo and IREM made game for the Game Boy. And it kind of prompted me to start looking into other Japanese Game Boy games that I might have missed in all of the years that I hadn't owned a Game Boy.

And ever since then, things have gotten a little crazy. Yeah, your blog is a really great resource for people who are interested in reading about obscure Game Boy games, especially import games. You seem to bring in a lot of games from Japan and even go for Japanese versions of games that have been released in the U.S., which I assume is because of the packaging. Yeah, and there are other reasons, too, especially some of them are only Japan releases. So that has a lot to do with it. But yeah, the packaging, I'm a big box art fan for all systems. And a lot of times, especially retro games, the packaging is better in Japan in my mind. So that's where I go.

Well, and it's also hard to come by packaging for Game Boy games. As I've discovered, as I've been doing Game Boy World, it was a system that was really targeted toward kids. And kids tend not to be very responsible when it comes to how they treat their games. I mean, it's these little cartridges that you take on the go with you. So why would you keep the boxes? They're big and cumbersome and flimsy. So most people threw out their boxes. And getting a hold of boxes for some of these games is just like, I want to tear out my hairs.

I've been looking for boxal two for months and it's just not popped up. I know eventually, you know, eventually I'll find these games and hopefully whoever offers them won't be trying to sell them for ridiculous amounts. But it took me months to find Soccer Mania because who's ever heard of Soccer Mania? like yeah it's it's an obscure game and uh so you know when a copy did finally pop up i was just like this is more that i want to pay for it but i need to photograph it so whatever yeah and you know it's funny it's when i remember as a kid owning all sorts of systems and i kind of want to kill myself for doing this now but i remember just i kind of got rid of the boxes after we bought the game i kept the manual i kept the box like especially with game boy games they had the

little plastic carrying case, but I just got rid of all the boxes, which I can't believe now. I would never do that now, but that's probably what's happened to a lot of people, so you're right. There are not that many boxes in existence, which is sad. I was actually really good about keeping boxes because the NES and Super NES boxes fit perfectly into shoe boxes. So I could just have this collection. I didn't own a Game Boy at the time. But, you know, then I was still stupid because I just sold off those games. I probably traded them to Funco for like 10% of what they were actually worth. So, yeah.

Oh, well, regrets of childhood, what can you do? But that's what makes curating the past so interesting because everyone did that. And so there's a lot of information out there, just a lot of resources and materials that are really obscure. Like a lot of the stuff that I'm scanning and photographing, it's not online anywhere. Yeah. And same with you. I've seen you post scans and photos of game packaging, and, you know, if you do a search for those things, you'll find, like, a 100 by 100 pixel thumbnail from Rakuten or something.

Like, you know, some Japanese shop somewhere, but it's just, like, a thing in their database and their inventory, so, so, I don't know, like, I realize Game Boy is not a high priority for most people, but that's kind of why I'm doing Game Boy World, because precisely because it is such a sort of marginalized system that no one's really taken the time to properly curate and chronicle. Whereas pretty much every other platform on the face of the planet,

you can find information out there. But despite the fact that it was the best-selling console of the 20th century and it's got Nintendo's fanaticism surrounding it, it's just not that, I don't know, people just don't really care about Game Boy that much. So I want to give it some love. And the fact that you, you're also kind of in the same,

you have that same sort of affection for the system, I think makes you a perfect choice to, you know, come in and chat about Game Boy and its history and what made it so great. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah, so thanks for coming aboard. I guess, first of all, just for the sake of completeness, since this is the first episode,

I should explain briefly what Game Boy is. It's a chrono-gaming project that I'm handling kind of in my spare time because that's how everyone does Chrono Gaming projects. Man, if I can make a living off of this, let me know. But I'm pretty sure it's doomed to be a side project for the rest of my life. But, yeah, basically going through the Game Boy Library

in the order in which games were released in any region. So if it was released first in America, then I'll look at the game at the time of its U.S. release, but if it was released first in Japan, then we'll look at when it came out in Japanese or, you know, in Japan. Just to kind of get a sense of how the platform evolved. Because, you know, there are a lot of games that were localized years after the fact. In fact, I just recorded an episode on NFA, no, Soccermania that I just mentioned.

And that was released in the U.S. like two years after the Japanese release. So just to kind of make things consistent and easy, that's how I'm doing it. So primarily it's a video project, but I'm also writing sort of revamped scripts into articles that I collect into books, and the books contain whenever possible full photography of packaging and manuals and stuff, just to sort of, you know, have a single resource, like a definitive resource for Game Boy. And I say definitive, but it's not because even though I'm, you know, trying to fact find, I can only get so much information on these obscure games without credits from Japanese developers that have been gone for the past 20 years. Like, it's hard to find

information on a lot of these things. I don't know the directors on most Game Boy games. It just wasn't, that information wasn't available. So I'm kind of making the best of it. And, you know, I'm talking about the qualities of the games and it's subjective. It's my opinion. I'm sure there are games that I'm writing about and saying, this was not very good. I know for a fact that there are games I'm saying this is not very good where people have come in and said, no, actually you're wrong. This game is something that I love and you're stupid and horrible. So, you know, I don't think Solar Stryker is very good, but apparently a lot of people do. So like I said, it's only definitive to a point, but it is a sort of single,

hopefully all-encompassing resource. I wanted to be as comprehensive as possible. And so that is my, the bizarre burden that I've elected for myself. And then, yeah, the chronicling you're doing is much less systematic and much more just like what catches your interest, right? Yeah, I mean, to be honest, my blog, probably like a lot of blogs, is all over the place. I pretty much started it to simply write about games and systems that interest me and not, you know, games and systems that everybody else likes. So with all of my Game Boy posts, it's pretty much just games that have caught my attention that I'm obsessed with, that I like the packaging.

You know, last year and this year, I tried to kind of focus things on a, I called it last year, the year of the Game Boy. And then since I didn't actually write about everything I bought last year, I've continued it as another year of the Game Boy. But, you know, I wrote about the Game Boy before that. So it's kind of all over the place. And, you know, kind of like you, as I acquire things, I write about them. But definitely not in any kind of order.

Or I'm definitely not trying to acquire all of the Game Boy games that have been published. You know, I can only imagine how interesting. that has been for you so far. Yeah, spoiler alert, they're not all worth getting, but it seems like some of the most obscure and worthwhile, or at least worthwhile, games are also the most expensive and hard to find. Like, I don't really want sumo fighters, and the fact that the last boxed copy that sold on eBay went for $900 does not fill my heart with joy.

That's one of those that's probably going to be something of a gap in the library. And there's a lot of games that are easy to get the cartridges. Like you can find any bare cart you want. It's no problem. And usually pretty cheaply. But as soon as you factor in the box, even the manuals aren't that hard to find, but the boxes, yeah.

So I'm doing what I can. But yeah, the gay boy world obviously was inspired by stuff like Cron Tendo, but it's also kind of the culmination of just my own attempts to sort of systematize the writing I was doing. I feel like, you know, when I just write about whatever,

I tend to write about the stuff that I like. and after doing that for 10 years professionally and even longer just on my own you know it gets kind of repetitive like I always have something new to say about something I love but I don't know if someone really wants to see me write about Super Metroid again so this is a way to sort of

have a system in place where I have to stretch and I have to write about things that I don't know spend time with games that I would never have touched otherwise like I don't really want to play soccer mania and it's not very good but I've done it and I've recorded video for it so it exists and so you know there's a bit of discipline to it and it does mean that when I get to something good I can really just revel in it and say ah yeah this is what it was all about like the the space invaders episode that I recently put together was much to my surprise a lot of fun because you know space invaders big deal you know that

games ancient. But what Taito did with the later Game Boy release that Nintendo published in America, where they basically stuck a super NES cartridge or super NES ROM inside the Game Boy cartridge that can only be accessed through a Super Game Boy, that's crazy. Like that never happened on the platform any other time. So finding little nuggets like this is just great. So, so yeah, that's kind of the methodology there. Anyway, so I was thinking, this Game Boy World podcast segment could basically be treated like Game Boy World, where we start at the beginning and just kind of go through and talk about all these games. I don't know if you've played all the Game Boy launch lineup titles. Yes. Oh, definitely. Even Yakoman?

Through emulation, yes. Well, I mean, it's the same thing. Yeah. I don't think you're not getting the authentic Yakuman experience if you're playing on an emulator. It's okay. yeah so basically just begin from the beginning and i suppose the beginning would be with the game boy hardware itself i've written a lot about the game boy hardware and about its main designer gumpet yokoi and just kind of the the strengths and weaknesses of the system relative to its competition like the atari links the sega game gear so i kind of feel like that's a like my opinions are known. So if you don't mind, why don't you give us the lead-in to Game Boy? And maybe you'll have a different way of approaching it than I normally would. Um, okay. Well, so I guess the only way

I can lead into it is just something I've been thinking about lately in terms of how people in general kind of view the Game Boy today compared to how they did when it came out. And I pretty vividly remember, you know, the late 90s, 89 when it came out in the United States. And to me, you know, like today it's kind of looked back on as this brick antiquated system, P-green screen. But I have really vivid memories of just thinking about it in awe as a kid as it was a portable NES, even though, you know, it wasn't technically, but that's how I thought about it. Um, possibly because even though, you know game and watch existed stuff like that i didn't consider those real game systems and i considered the game boy a real game system so um i think that's one of the things that brought me

back to it is just at its base it is kind of the one of the first mainstream portable game systems um that had actual cartridges that went into it as opposed to you know coming loaded with games. I guess that's maybe not the lead in you were expecting, but I don't know. I think it's interesting to change the perspective and not just think of it as this antiquated piece of hardware. But at the time, it had a lot going for it. Even games like baseball and alleyway, which are kind of derided now at the time, it was exciting that you could play baseball on the go wherever you were or tennis or Tetris. So I don't know. I don't. No, no. Is that what you're looking for?

Sure, that's an interesting perspective. I don't know that I necessarily share it, but it's an interesting way to approach it. And yeah, I mean, at the time there was like a lot of, wow, I can't believe it. This game system is going to be portable and I'll be able to play Castlevania anywhere. And of course, you know, there were the Tiger handheld games at the time and Game Boy's own predecessor, the Game and Watch system or the series. But this was something different. This was more like real video games as opposed to the sort of simplistic creations with the pre-printed LCD screens. You know, Game and Watch and the Tiger handhelds almost felt like they felt more in line in spirit with old electromechanical games that you'd seen in arcade than necessarily a video game as you think of a video game.

And, you know, I had little handheld LED electronics back in the early 80s. So, you know, the idea of playing a portable game on the go wasn't that new, but with this kind of quality it was. Although, you know, you say it seems antiquated now, but even back then to people in the know, it still felt antiquated because it was a step behind Atari's Game Gear, Atari's Links, which, had, you know, begun development three years before Game Boy launched. And there was a quote that someone dug up recently from Gumpay Yokoy who said that it was a challenge convincing the rest of Nintendo to go forward with his plan to release a monochrome game system. Like, to everyone in Nintendo, it seemed like a terrible idea.

And he had to really work hard to convince people like, no, this is what it should be. is what we should be doing. I realize it seems counterintuitive to kind of take this backward step and not produce something that's on the level of links, but this is the right choice. And definitely history bore that out. I mean, the Game Boy just completely stomped links, and it wasn't just due to marketing. It was due to the realities of portable gaming. Like, you want something that's going to have good battery life, and the links did not. So it was worth the compromise of color to come up with something. that was, you know, was going to be more portable and more practical and cheaper on battery

expenses too. But it took, you know, a bit of vision to see that. And at the time, you know, I still remember reading magazines where, I guess, Electronic Gaming Monthly or video games and computer entertainment, where there was kind of this like chuckling behind their hands about Game Boy compared to links, and especially once Game Gear came out. Yeah. So there definitely was a sense of like yeah this is this is kind of underpowered and puny but you know that's sort of at the professional level at the kids level the consumer level of nine-year-olds 10-year-olds who cares it's mario and you can play it in you know in car right well in final fantasy and castlvania and metro you know i think at least from what i remember i liked the game gear in

the lynx as a kid but they didn't have the same games so why did it matter if they were in color? I don't know. The Nintendo connection really counted for a lot because Nintendo did have sort of this suite of franchises, not just first party, but also third party, that were just associated with Nintendo with NES. And so even though Game Boy was much less powerful than the NES in terms of game processing power and resolution and color, Game Boy still did feel like a portable NES because in the first year, you did have Mario, like you said, Tetris. You had all those Nintendo sports games. You had

Fist of the North Star. You had Final Fantasy. You had Castlevania. You had Batman, Wizards and Warriors. So it was like all these games that you associated with NES, and they were right there at the beginning of Game Boys. So they did a really good job, and their partners did a good job of of creating the impression that oh hey yes it's nes on the go and uh that that counts for a lot it really made a big difference so um you actually owned a game boy back at the at the time of its real life i guess you would say yeah like did you did you get that early or later um it's funny i've been thinking about this too lately i owned it sometime within the first six months of its release. I was never, uh, my parents were never the sort that I got a system,

you know, on launch day or anything. Um, but I definitely had one probably by that Christmas or, you know, whatever the nearest holiday was. Um, and I definitely owned, I think I owned all of the launch games except for baseball at some point. Um, so yeah, I definitely was into it early on, uh, had friends who had game boys. We played them together, that kind of thing. so it was a it was a social thing for you or was it just like i love video games and i want portable video games um i i think for me it was mostly we played together at the same time not with like a link cable um i guess kind of both but not necessarily you know how it was later with Pokemon and linking up and everything but well that that's still social gaming like when

you're hanging out with a friend and you're both kind of doing the same thing, even if you're not doing it together, there's still like this bond that you share. So I think that's, I think you can definitely call that social. Yeah. And I distinctly remember a neighbor friend who had a game boy in like baseball and tennis right at launch. And we would stand or, you know, we'd sit at each other's houses and someone would get to play, you know, you get to play a round of tennis. And then if you lose and then you hand off the game boy to the next person, they get to play until they lose. For some reason, reasons of that too. Yeah, myself, I never owned a Game Boy, and it wasn't for lack of interest. It was just

I only had so much money in my gaming budget, and I was pretty deep into the NES. And then when the Super NES came out, that was around the time I got my first job, like a year later. So, you know, my money for my job either went to save it for the future, because I knew I would be going to college, or buying Super NES games. So as much as the, you know, the, you know, the Game Boy interested me. I just never, like, I just didn't have room for it in my budget. I would have had to give up on some NES game or Super NES game that I wanted. And I just couldn't bring myself to do that. So I did end up getting a Super Game Boy sometime after it came out and caught up with like Metroid and Zelda and some other essentials. But I didn't really get

that much use out of the Super Game Boy because I got it right before I took sort of like a one hiatus from gaming and so I kind of I kind of missed out by the time I got back and became interested again you know super NES was pretty mature and I had a bunch of great games like Final Fantasy 6 and Krono trigger to play and the soup the the the in 64 was just around the corner so Super Game Boy never seemed that much of a priority so I'm kind of I'm kind of approaching Game Boy world in some ways as like a almost I wouldn't say with regret, but more like here is this sort of vacancy, this void in my gaming history that I wanted to fill but couldn't at the time. So circumstances just never allowed

it. Here's a chance for me to actually see what I missed out on and then take that to the like an extreme, a ridiculous extreme. But yeah, like the closest I really came to Game Boy at the time. My brother had a friend whose father bought him and his friend both Game Boys. So whenever they, when they hung out together, they could play video games. My brother wasn't really into video games. So he had this Game Boy that he barely ever used. But brothers being brothers, he didn't want me to play it either. I think partly because he played it some and found it really frustrating. And then he lent it to me on a car trip. And in the space of less than an hour, I played Super Mario Land for the first time and beat it.

And he was really peeved about that, that I finished the game before him. So it was basically just kind of like in its original box, locked away, like, I just knew I wasn't allowed to touch it. So I didn't get to play it much. My grandparents eventually got a Game Boy, but by that point, that was years later, and it was mostly for my younger cousins. So it was always kind of like this glancing blow, me and the Game Boy, never destined to line up together. So I'm rectifying that, I guess. And what prompted you to come back to it for Game Boy World? Portable gaming really is something that I fell in love with at the very end of the 90s.

You know, the PlayStation era really put the kibosh on 2D classic gaming. Everything became 3D. I think N64 had like three games that would be counted as 2D games. and PlayStation had more Saturn obviously had a lot but they were all stranded in Japan and PlayStation like I said had a bunch but most of them

weren't very good the system just wasn't geared for it so portable gaming became sort of this refuge where the games that I'd grown up playing and still loved could find a place of expression of course most Game Boy, Game Boy Color games were really terrible

you know you had a lot of 2D platformers but they were mostly crap they were like you know the 2D platformer version of tour rock or perfect dark no one no one wants to play that that's awful um but you know it kind of kept me going and then the neo geo pocket came out and that was revelatory i was like wow this is pretty much you know Sega genesis quality visuals um really great thoughtful gameplay uh it lived a very short life but that was the point in which i was like you know I really, like, I really see value in portable gaming. I started traveling a lot and didn't always want to be, you know,

sitting in front of a television because I sit in front of a computer screen all the time for work. So, so, yeah, portable gaming kind of became a big thing for me when it became sort of an alternative way to play as opposed to, you know, before NeoGeo Pocket, it was really just sort of like the sort of second best approach to gaming. Whereas once it hit that point where it was, you know, like console, classic console quality, it's not feeling like a compromise and more like just this is a different method of playing games. So from the game, you know, Neo Geo Pocket Game Boy Advance, I was pretty much fully invested. So, you know, I kind of gradually shed my sort of dismissal of the Game Boy.

I mean, you could go back and read articles I wrote when I first started working at OneUp.com 10, 12 years ago, where I'm like, yeah, most Game Boy games haven't held up, it's stupid, to sort of, you know, spending more time coming to appreciate what was happening on the system and just its place in video game history. So, you know, as I became kind of like the guy in the mainstream press who wrote about DS games all the time, the Game Boy just started to seem more important to me. So I put together with some friends, a book, kind of just like a loose chronicle of the Game Boy's history for its 20th anniversary in 2009. And then just never really felt like that did the system justice. So it was always sort of on my mind to tackle the Game Boy. And once I found Cron Tindo, like the idea of, oh, doing that for Game Boy seemed pretty intuitive for me. but it took me three or four years

to finally get around to actually committing to it because I wanted to make sure that I had the means to do it and the time. I don't really have the time, but I'm at least willing to try to make the commitment and the methodology. I just wanted to make sure that I was doing it right. And I feel like everything kind of lined up for me

a year ago last year for the 25th anniversary and I finally just pulled the trigger and said, yeah, it's time to do this. So anyway, that's my long, boring story about Game Boy. So I wasn't there at the time. I was kind of an outside observer, but this is my chance to stop being the lonely face outside looking in the window and actually just take part in it. So, you know, a lot of what I read about Game Boy is not coming from a place of nostalgia. It's coming more from a place of like, you know, I'm approaching this in 2015 and it's not necessarily great.

But I also understand the context of the time. I remember what gaming was like in 1989, 1990, and I've read a lot of history and know what was happening on platforms that I wasn't even aware of. So I feel like I have the necessary context to, if not necessarily, appreciate the games, because some of them are hard to appreciate,

then at least respect where they came in. And then, you know, when something really genuinely terrible comes along, I feel like I have enough, enough awareness of history and everything to be able to say yeah this game actually is garbage yeah although then there's the flip side too

I mean I think one thing I've found in just collecting the games that are good or that I like is that despite the fact that maybe the crap you know hugely outweighs the great games there are a few you know inarguably great games for

the system that hold up despite the fact that they were made for it. And I think those are the ones that are the most interesting to me, just how someone was able to produce such greatness on, you know, such limited technology. There's that. And there's also just the little surprises. The games aren't necessarily like, oh, this is the greatest thing ever, but, oh, hey, this is good. This is fun. This is interesting. You know, Atlas's Quirk is one of those games. Like, I had no idea what it was. It was this tomato on the cover with sunglasses and a moose. Hawk. So not really promising, but then it turns out that it's actually a really good sort of puzzly Sokoban kind of game, much better than Boxel, the actual conversion of Sokobon to

Nintendo. Yeah. So yeah, it's been things like that. The Sword of Hope was really interesting. It was like this weird midpoint between Icom simulations or, you know, graphical adventures and RPGs. Kind of reminds me of Riviera the Promised Land, which stinged devices. developed, you know, 20 years later. So just finding things like that has been really enjoyable. The downside has been that I've come across a lot of puzzle action games. That would be really notable on any other system, but on Game Boy, where that's like 50% of the content. I'm just like, okay, yeah, here's another puzzle action game, and it sure is puzzly and actiony.

Gosh. So, so there is a tendency for the sort of repetition to cause, you know, worthwhile in entertaining, well-made games to become sort of lost, which is unfortunate. Yeah, so the Game Boy launched in April, 1989 in Japan, and then came out in America. August or September of 1989, it's not really clear. I'm pretty sure it's August, but there's no specific date that I've been able to find looking through all kinds of new sources, just August. And then made it to Europe sometime in 1990, and I don't even. even know when in 1990. I've pretty much factored Europe out of the Game Boy World discussion. There'll be some Europe exclusive games, but like the European market was so fragmented

and just incoherent at the time that it's really hard to track down any definitive history. And that wasn't Nintendo's main focus anyway. So really focusing on Japan and the U.S. primarily Japan, despite my U.S. location and history, just because that's where most of the games were being developed. That does change later in the Game Boy's life. You start to see a lot of American developed games, Western developed games, but at the beginning, it was all Japan all the time. Yeah, so actually, I think the first Western developed game

didn't come along until the beginning of 1990, which was Wizards and Warriors. And I don't even know if that was actually developed internally at rare. There's no credits for it, no information anywhere online. So for all I know, that was sourced out to Tose or something, which will explain why it's kind of crappy. But, yeah, just, again, hard to find all these specifics. But when the Game Boy launched in Japan, it came with four games.

It came with alleyway, baseball, Super Mario Land, and Yakuman. And why don't we actually talk about Yakuman first, since it was the one that didn't come to the U.S.? Do you have any experience with Yakoman? I do, but it's a weird thing because at various times, in my life I have attempted to learn how to play mahjong and between those times I always forget and then I have to relearn so as someone who does not have the greatest understanding of it it doesn't hold a lot of value and interest but I guess you know at its basic level it is portable mahjong and black and white or the game boy and I know I know you've pointed out how it's notable just for

kind of bringing in the adult crowd, and I think for that reason alone, it's interesting, but probably the game that's held up the least out of the four, in my opinion, I would guess. Yeah, Mahjong games and Japanese consoles are kind of a tradition. Basically, when you launch a console in Japan, you publish a Mahjong game for it. And I don't know exactly what it is, but it's kind of like, I don't even know if there's an equivalent to the West. I guess, now there's like Texas Holden or something, but I can't think of anything in the past where you see, or even now where you see a video game adaptation of some sort of non-sports pastime that's just going to be at the launch of every system. But yeah, this was this was

Game Boy's obligatory console launch Mahjong game. And to me the most interesting thing about Yakuman is that it shows right at the beginning, Nintendo building the game, by drawing on their previous history. So, you know, Game Boy was developed by Gunpeyokoi, who had developed the Game and Watch system or series. And most people think of Game and Watch as just like the little handholds with the screens, you know, Octopus or Ball or Mario Cement Factory or whatever. And, you know, there were those, the really kind of low-end, inexpensive systems.

But there were a few premium game and watch systems. and one of them was called Yakuman, and it was this sort of unusually shaped game and watch. It was much more expensive than most, and the screen was specifically set up for playing Mahjong. So, you know, it had to have this extremely wide resolution to show all the tiles that you had in your hand and give them adequate detail.

So, yeah, kind of interesting, just that at the very beginning, Nintendo was like, hey, remember that Yakuman game we made before, the Mahjong game? Let's try to turn that into something for Game Boy. And you can sort of see its origins because aside from the title screen, Yakuman uses no gray scale whatsoever. It's just black and white. So it's clearly, like they were clearly looking to the Game and Watch for inspiration.

All the other launch titles have, you know, a full, they make full use of the four shades of gray available for Game Boy, but Yakoman's just two-tone. So that's kind of a little interesting factoid. But at the same time, like, I have trouble being excited about it because I don't even understand Japanese Mahjong. I watched some tutorial videos and it was just like, I don't know, but, you know, I can't really, I can't really say whether or not it was done well. But, To the game's benefit, to its credit, it did have, it did make use right away of the link cable. The idea was that you could link up with someone else, and instead of just playing

mahjong against the computer, play against another person, which I'm sure was much more entertaining. Yeah, that's actually something that kind of became a Game Boy standard is that there's, at least for competitive games, there's the single player mode, which isn't that fun, and then you have a link cable mode, which is much more entertaining. but it presumes that you know someone who has a Game Boy and also the game you want, which you can't always count on. But, you know, it's good optimism. And at least the option is there for breaking away from the mundanity of playing against the CPU.

So obviously, that one never came to the U.S. It's very Japanese in every sense. And, yeah, like you mentioned, I do feel it does represent a play for the game. older audience, which is something Game Boy was, I don't know if that was the intention at the beginning. I mean, they did call it Game Boy. But at least in the U.S., the system was pretty heavily marketed toward adults. There were a lot of commercials that didn't show kids playing.

They showed like businessmen playing. So the idea was, yeah, you're going to be taking all these boring business trips, so why not do something fun? And obviously, those people probably weren't meant to be playing Super Mario. land, but more sort of neutral, non-character, non-cartoony type games, such as baseball. You said baseball was the one launch game we've never owned, right? Yep. Is that because you don't like baseball as a game, or is it because you don't like baseball for Game Boy?

To be honest, baseball has never been my sport, so it's just not something that interested me. and you know I think I can count on less than one hand how many baseball games I've owned in my life probably RBI baseball for the NES and I think that's probably about it so wasn't really my kind of thing but like I said I've played it in fact I played it this weekend just to follow up with it it's you know kind of like Yakima it's very bare bones presentation of baseball I think you've written about that too just not a whole lot of power you know you don't have a whole lot of control over what's going on and it's very straightforward and how it's showcased um i don't know how how about you what i what yeah it is very similar you mentioned rbi baseball and it's very

similar to that and that it is a sort of rudimentary take on baseball i mean it's pretty clearly patterned after Nintendo's NES baseball, but it's a step down from that, which is a shame because NES baseball, I think, I'm pretty sure that came out in Japan in 1983. So you're looking at a baseball game that is not as good as a six-year-old console game. So that's a problem right there. You know, at launch, though, it was pretty much what there was. Yeah, you have two different teams with like four potential pitchers and that's about it. You take turns hitting and pitching and you try to field the game. The CPU is much better at all of this than you are.

And, you know, it's one of those games where the CPU gets to be better than you naturally because the game doesn't do a good job of giving you the information you need. Like when someone hits the ball into the outfield, the camera is very slow to follow and track the ball. So you don't really know where your fielders are and what you're trying to do. It's kind of the Game Boy's resolution limitations coming into play. That's something that happens a lot with adaptations of NES games. There's sort of this essential compromise that designers had to make.

They had to say, well, do we want to get people detailed graphics, where things are very big on the screen, but because of the lower resolution, you see less of their surroundings, or do we want to show them the same, like, screen proportions that you would get on NES, with a sprite taking up the same percentage of the screen as it would on NES,

but this means everything is going to be tiny and almost indistinguishable. So you see this kind of back and forth, and people make different decisions, you know, different studios make different decisions for different games. Unfortunately, I think baseball airs more on the same, side of big graphics. They're not amazing. They're very kind of primitive, but they're still

sort of cartoonish and detailed in a way. And it means you see less of the screen than you do on NES. Like if you compare a baseball screen on Game Boy to baseball, Nintendo's baseball on NES, you're just like, oh, yeah, this is like half the view. So it becomes naturally sort of difficult that way. Again, this is a game where you can link up with someone. And play head to head and all of a sudden it becomes like oh yeah now we're both equally disadvantaged so if it's not fun then it's at least equitable yeah and that's also kind of a theme through a lot of a lot of sports games i've noticed they're they're definitely my least favorite part of game boy world although i haven't gotten to to horse racing games yet that could that could take

the prize we'll see but sports games have so far been pretty bad except golf which is not a team sport so maybe it's just the team sport concept not working on game boy although i well i mean i know we'll get to that eventually but i've i liked a few of the tennis games on game boy but then again i like tennis as a sport so that's probably influencing my my opinion of the matter no i think that's fair um i don't think nintendo's first tennis game was that good but But I'm willing to believe that there were some good tennis games eventually and good sports games in general. Yeah. I know, like I keep bringing up Soccermania just because I just played it and it's garbage.

But, you know, Nintendo released Nintendo Cup Soccer, which was actually a Kunio Koon game, one of the mini Kunio Koon sports games, downtown Niketsu Soccer or whatever, I don't know. So I imagine that's probably going to be pretty good. technos, a millionaire, a million, whatever, they tended to make pretty good sports games. But it's a ways before I get to that. So instead, I'm still reeling from Soccer Mania. So those were kind of the two-week games of the launch.

I say that about Yakuman, not really having the knowledge, the cultural knowledge and knowledge of the game necessary to make a full judgment, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. But the next two games, I think, were a lot stronger. Alliway and Super Mario Land. We could talk about Alliway first. That was also an adaptation of a previous Nintendo game, though not a handheld game. It was one of their first televisioning.

Actually, it might have been their first television game, Block Kuzushi, or Blockbreaker, which was part of yeah just their early line of pre-famicom standalone home console games I can't even really call them console because there was no there were no cartridges to interchange

it was just a game system that played one game but pretty much is just a straight breakout clone well it's an interesting one I mean I've always liked it I've kind of had a soft spot for it But even at the, like I'm sure you've said, at the time, it was, it paled in comparison to games like Arkanoid that offered more, that were colorful, that had, you know, power-ups and in various different styles of play. And so, I mean, I'm sure even at the time it was looked upon as, again, kind of archaic, but I think for what it does, it, it does it acceptably.

you know, and it has the kind of obligatory, here's a Mario Sprite as a board, and here's a blooper or, you know, different Nintendo characters thrown in there for good measure. I think Mario's actually in the little paddle. So I don't know. I remember as a kid, I really liked it. I've always kind of liked those block-breaking games. So I think, you know, in terms of when it was released, and even now, I mean, it's acceptably good fun.

It's nothing amazing. I thought it did what it was supposed to do at the time, I guess, which maybe isn't, you know, it's kind of faint praise, but. No, I think that's fair. I mean, it was a little hard to play the game and get much out of it. If you had already played Argonaut, which was, I think, 1986 in the arcades and had already come to NES with its own special controller and everything. So, you know, by comparison, Allieway is very simple.

there are no power-ups. It's basically you hit the ball, and once you, I believe you hit the back of the screen, the very top, your paddle shrinks. And of course, the ball gets a little faster as it travels along. So it gets harder as you play, but it doesn't really feel organic. It's basically just like, oh, you did this one thing, so now the game is harder. And, you know, it's, it was also kind of tough to play on the NES or the Game Boy screen. because of the lag and the sort of dimness of it. The ball gets moving pretty quickly toward the end, and your paddle's very tiny,

and you don't have an analog controller like the Arconoid controller. It's just the digital D-pad. So a little tough to play. It's easier on better hardware, like a Game Boy Pocket or Super Game Boy, or if you get it on virtual console, If you get it on virtual console, you can do save states and see the end. But to me, that's kind of missing the point. Like, why would you play an arcade-style game like this and just cheat your way to the end?

Yeah. I can understand if it were, you know, more like a platformer or something, but this is really just a rudimentary basic concept of video games. It's like one step above pawn. So I don't know that you really need to cheat necessarily. And, you know, if you practice, you can make it to the end. I think there's like 20 levels. So it's not like, you know, some daunting, hardcore challenge. It's a pretty short game.

Yeah. But the custom boards where, you know, you have the bonuses with the Nintendo sprites, like you mentioned. And then some of the tricks they start to play later where different layers of the blocks rotate a different directions, a different direction. and different speeds. That can add a little challenge. It keeps it from being just Atari's breakout, which is good because breakout was like 15 years old at this point.

So it would have been really kind of embarrassing if they couldn't at least, you know, one-up at over breakout. But, you know, it's not an amazing game, but it's still a fun few minutes of diversion. It was pretty much, you know, a perfect game if you were sitting in a car or something and needed to kill 15 minutes of time,

just plug that in and play and then you're like, okay, that's good. I'm not bored of other things as much as I am this now. Yeah. So good diversion. And then finally, the crown jewel of Game Boy's launch, which was Super Mario Land. And I've written a lot about this one, so I'm going to turn the floor over to you, Brian, and let you tell the world why Super Mario Land is amazing.

Is it amazing, actually? well I mean it's definitely interesting um you know especially coming from where Nintendo was and where its systems were at the time and where the Super Mario series was at the time um it was kind of an interesting release in that it in some ways was either depending on how you look at it a step back or a return to its roots with the kind of a more straightforward um presentation of Super Mario aesthetics and gameplay, you know, coming from, I think, you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, was it released between two and three or after three? I can't remember. Are you talking about in America or Japan?

Oh, well, okay, my perspective is from America. Yeah, see, that's what I think is interesting. I feel like the, there are two different ways to see Super Mario land, and it's kind of depending on how you were following Mario at the time. Because in Japan, you had Super Mario Brothers, you had Super Mario Brothers 2, the Lost Levels, then you had Super Mario Bros. 3 in 1988. So you had this very clear line of continuity for Mario games.

So Mario Land, which is kind of weird, it's not developed by Nintendo EAD, it was developed by R&D1, and it's different. It doesn't have input from the normal Mario team. So it's kind of this weird, alternate world where the physics are a little different, your powers are a little different.

Sometimes it's a shooter. You're traveling through lands with different themes, different monsters. It's just an oddball game. So coming from the Japanese perspective, it was like one, two, three, then Mario Land, it's like this weird, bizarre side venture. But in America, we had Super Mario Brothers.

Then we had Super Mario Brothers 2, which wasn't actually Mario. It was some other game in disguise as Mario and played pretty much nothing like the original Mario Brothers. And then you had Mario Land. Super Mario Brothers 3 wouldn't come out until 1990, like six months after the Game Boy's launch. So at that point, there was no set role, set definition for Mario.

Like Mario games could be whatever they wanted to be. On NES, you had Wrecking Crew, Mario Brothers, Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario 2. You know, it was like everything that starred Mario, and had Mario in the title was some weird, different kind of game. So to me, like, Mario Land was just another one of those. It was like, oh, well, here's Mario kind of playing in a game more like the original Mario brothers or Super Mario Brothers. In some ways, it felt almost like a return to his roots, like you mentioned.

Whereas, you know, that's just because we had seen all these, like, weird side ventures and weren't as far along as the Japanese gamers. but Mario 3 was really more of a return to Mario's roots, but we didn't know it yet unless we'd seen the wizard. Right. And I did not go see the wizard because, yeah. I didn't either. Who would spend money.

Come on. But yeah, the game is pretty unusual. I mentioned it was developed by Nintendo R&D1, and I think I have the names of the folks who worked on it here. Yeah. Satoru Okara Gumpai Yokoai, Hip Tanaka, Makoto Kano all these people worked on Mario games in the past

but they weren't Super Mario games they were Mario Brothers wrecking crew So they had They had a claim to working on Mario They had a stake in the series In the franchise It just wasn't the games that most people associate with Mario So

So, you know, Super Mario Land was kind of like their return to the franchise after five years, five years in which the series had developed radically from when they had last worked on it. So I kind of feel like what they came up with was sort of their own, like, old school take on Mario, if you will. They weren't really, they were kind of making a Super Mario Brothers game, but also just kind of doing it their own way. And looking at where the Mario Land series went after this, it's easy to see that this is the first step in an evolution of its own thing. Eventually it became Wario Land, which technically on the sort of macro level, yeah, it's Mario Brothers.

But once you get beyond that sort of, you know, you're running and jumping and hitting things, the two series could not be more different. And this was kind of the inflection point for that. it started with Mario but weird Mario and then became weirder the further they went so was this one you ordered

what you owned at the time this was not a pack-in game surprisingly like I think people would have expected Mario to be the pack-in game but Tetris was it was something you had to buy separately but I would guess I mean I definitely probably bought it along with the system and I'm guessing a lot of kids did

and I don't know I think it's an interesting thing to look like today it's not really a game that I go back to all that off. It's not something I bought for like my 3DS through the e-shop. I don't really long to replay it, but going back and playing it now, I mean, I can appreciate it. And I know at the time when it came out, it didn't bother me that, you know, the graphics are kind of like oddly minimalist. Everything's smaller and, you know, some of the power-ups are strange. I do remember as a kid, I really liked kind of the alien

Egyptian theme. And I've always loved the shoot-em-up stages. So it's funny. I know as a kid, I really loved it. And these days, I don't, it's not something I really think about, but I do think it's still enjoyable, unlike some of the other launch games. I think you can still have fun with it, even though I'm sure it feels a lot different to people who are used to kind of, you know, a Mario that's a little floatier when he jumps. And the difficulty, you certainly can dial lot of times in Super Mario Land compared to some of the more modern games. Yeah, it's difficult, but at the same time, it's not hard because the game's very generous with one-ups.

And I, you know, you can get pretty far into the game on your first try. Like I said, the first time I ever played it, I finished it. I actually am worse at it now than I was back then because I was like some kind of video game Rain Man, seriously. But even so, it's not that hard. and it's a very short game. It's like 12 levels. And several of those are shooters, which are very easy.

And every level has its own boss. It's not just Bowser at the end of every level, which is kind of novel. Like the Mario games don't tend to be very diverse with bosses. Even Mario 3, it was always, you know, one of the Kupa kids or that dude in the airship. What was his name? The guy with the helmet. I know, I don't remember. Yeah, that guy.

So, you know, there's already more diversity in this game than in a typical Mario game. In some senses, I mean, I'm not going to say that this game is more diverse than Mario 3 because that would be ridiculous. That game is like just a grab bag of crazy ideas. But, you know, there are a lot of fun ideas going on here. I do like, like you said, the themes, not just the Egyptian theme, but I also like the Chinese. theme where you have the kionchi jumping at you and there's like spiders in the the trees and everything it's just got you know like a very sort of chinese watercolor background with bamboo and everything it's just it's all very different for mario and it's a good look on him like just you know

breaking out of the usual mario games have become so systematic now which isn't to say they're not well made it's just like you're not going to be surprised by any world you encounter in Mario games at this point. Yeah. It's always like there's a desert level and there's a fire level and there's an ice level and there's a forest level and there's a water level. Yeah, okay, great. So Mario Land has, you know, a more adventurous outlook than contemporary Mario games do.

So that's also something kind of nice. Yep. And two, it's clearly out of the four launch games. I mean, it's one of the only ones that actually features more than a single screen. You know, I mean, you're, it's kind of like. what Super Mario Brothers did to the Famicom and the NES and that it showed that you can go beyond a single screen and kind of legitimized it to me as a game system because, hey, it's a Mario game. You can run from left to right and there are different worlds. I don't know. That's how

I always looked at it. No, I think that's a worthwhile point to make. You know, at the very beginning, you have to keep in mind that there was no such thing as a handheld game market at this point. There were Game and Watches, and the Atari Links was in development, but didn't actually launch until after Game Boy. So there was no indication that you could have real console game, video game experiences on a handheld. And I think, you know, the low power and just the unproven nature of the system at the beginning caused Nintendo to take a very conservative approach. And not just Nintendo, but like all the early games, you know, the first six months of the Game Boy's life, really until you get to Castlevania and Final Fantasy Legend, they're all

pretty simplistic and not really taking a lot of risks. They're all very sort of like, it is kind of like going back to those first few years of the Famicom's life where, you know, everything was on an in-rom cartridge and barely had any memory and couldn't do scrolling and so forth. So Mario Land, despite its kind of primitive graphics was an attempt to sort of take the, almost like the aesthetics of game and watch, like very simplistic, and translate those into something, you know, on the scale of what you'd expect from a Mario game on NES. And of course, the game ends up being like half as long as a real Mario game, if even that. But, you know, given the limitations of the format, I feel like it kind of, I feel like it lays its

case out pretty effectively like hey yeah you've got a real mario experience here it's smaller than you're used to and a little weird but it's still Mario and there's more like this coming and you know there were a lot of good console caliber games that came out on game boy so uh so it's kind of uh you know a good like a statement of intent yeah it's like you know babe ruth pointing to the stands before he hits his home run so anyway any uh any final thoughts on mario land or on the rest of the game boy launch lineup? Hmm. Like, do you think it was a strong lineup?

I mean, it's only four games, but was that enough? It's to say either, you know, from today's perspective or from the perspective when it came out, I honestly thought when it came out that, you know, especially if we're going to imagine it was four kids who could buy five, four or five games at the same time. time. I remember thinking it was plenty. Today, I don't know if I would feel the same way. It's not, you know, I wouldn't say it's the strongest lineup, but it's certainly diverse. It kind of offered something, you know, if someone wanted a puzzler, if someone wanted an action game, if someone wanted a sports game. So it threw at least a broad array out there, even if they're not all

top notch. Yeah, I think this is one case where the American market benefited from localization delays. Now everyone releases their systems pretty much simultaneously, so everyone gets pretty much the same thing all over the world. But, you know, in 1989, it was actually unusual for a game system to come out so closely in America on the heels of its Japanese release. It was like three, four months, which is just pretty much unheard of. I mean, Famicom was two years, more than two years, before the NES came out. Master System was the same way. By 1989, the PC engine, the Mega Drive were already out in Japan, but I don't think the TurboGraphics 16 and the Genesis,

the American counterparts of those systems, launched until after Game Boy. So, you know, there was like a year between localized releases, if not more. So, you know, we got the game system pretty quickly here, the Game Boy. And despite the local, the sort of short delay, we still benefited from that because by the time the system came out in the U.S., there were quite a few other games out in Japan that could make it here tennis. And most importantly, Tetris, it was a pretty big deal. So I feel like the American launch lineup was a little bit stronger. I mean, it came with Tetris as a pack-in, so that's kind of a win right there. Yeah.

But, yeah, I would say for the time, this was pretty much what you'd expect from me. a Japanese launch. The Famicom launched with three games. The Sega Mark 3 launched with just a few games. I think PC Engine launched with two games. I think Megadrive launched with three. I mean, big launch lineups just weren't a thing back then. Like, you didn't have Dreamcast level launch lineups.

And hell, in Japan, Dreamcast launched with three games. It had like two dozen here, but that's because of a localization delay. So, yeah, it's just, you know, kind of. a sign of the times, I think. And like you said, it was a good diverse lineup. It wasn't, you know, necessarily something for everyone, but it was pretty close. You had sports, you had arcade, you had action, and then you had, like, you know, for your grandparents, they could play Yakima on.

Yeah. So, you know, a pretty good first case. If we want to look at it as in terms of modern launch windows, yeah, it was great. There was a lot out by the end of 1989 for Game Boy. especially in Japan it was 25 games here in America I think we had six but you know we'll take what we can get yeah

anyway so yeah that's that's kind of a look back at Game Boy's launch I guess that's enough for this episode we've talked about an hour which is plenty to say about four Game Boy

games from 26 years ago so I think we'll call it quits here and at some point in the future. Who knows how long it'll take. We've been trying to record this for like a year now. We'll get back and, you know, talk about some of the early games that came out for Game Boy going beyond just the launch. But that does wrap it up for this episode. So thank you, Brian, for joining me. If you want to tell the world where they can find you online, that would be great.

Oh, yes. My blog is The Gay Gamer and pretty much the URL is The Gaygamer.com. I'm on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, wherever you want to go for social media. And thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah, well, I appreciate you taking the time. I do have to ask, though, are you the gay gamer? I feel like I know a lot of gamers who are gay. Well, but, you know, I started blogging in 2007, not that there weren't, you know,

self-proclaimed gay gamers back then. And I, you know, I definitely do not consider myself the gay gamer. But at the time... So it's a soft article there. Like it's a definitive article, but a gentle one. It was more that at the time, and I wish I knew, gaygamer.net, I don't know if it existed at the time. But at the time, the whole reason I started blogging was that I did not know of any other people like myself out there. So that's why I started my blog and named it that.

So, okay. Fair enough. Anyway, so yeah, thanks again, Brian, and thanks anyone who happened to download and listen to this. Thank you.