Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins is a platformer developed and published by Nintendo for the Game Boy in 1992. A sequel to the 1989 launch title, it is a dramatic step up in scope and polish, trading the original's small, quirky stages for a large, connected hub world, Mario Land, dotted with themed zones the player can tackle in a flexible order while hunting the six golden coins needed to reclaim Mario's castle. The castle has been seized by Wario, who makes his series debut here as the greedy antagonist, setting up the character who would soon headline his own games. Bigger, more generous, and more varied than its predecessor, with larger sprites and a confident sense of design, it plays much more like a full console Mario adventure shrunk onto the handheld than the offbeat experiment that came before. It was well received as one of the strongest platformers on the system. This is the Game Boy Mario for the long rainy summer afternoon when the pool was closed, a substantial, secret-filled adventure you could sink a whole day into, and a high-water mark for the handheld platformer at its most assured. It also planted the seed for Wario's own series, which would spin out of his debut here the very next year.