Super Mario Land

Super Mario Land is a platformer developed and published by Nintendo as a launch title for the Game Boy in 1989. Built not by the usual Mario team but by Nintendo's R&D1 division under Gunpei Yokoi, the Game Boy's own creators, it is a distinctive, slightly offbeat take on the series. It sends Mario to Sarasaland, a setting he had never visited, to rescue Princess Daisy from an alien invader, across worlds themed around ancient Egypt and Easter Island rather than the usual Mushroom Kingdom. Its most surprising touches are two auto-scrolling shooter stages in which Mario pilots a submarine and a plane, firing on enemies in a style borrowed from an entirely different genre. Smaller in scope and quirkier in tone than its console counterparts, it was nonetheless a strong launch companion and a major early seller for the handheld, proving that the whole Mario experience could be shrunk down and carried in a pocket. For players who owned a Game Boy on day one in the summer of 1989, it was often the first game they played on it, a strange and charming little adventure that traveled with them wherever the machine went. Its offbeat setting and shoot-em-up detours have kept it a fondly remembered oddity in the series ever since.