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The console you actually took outside. The Game Boy landed in America on July 31, 1989, and turned the backseat, the pool, and the campsite into a place to play. Top Loader ranks the handheld summer.
Every other list in this series has been about games that feel like summer on a television: beaches you look at, islands you visit, a couch you share. This one is different, because the Game Boy was different. It did not just feel like summer. It was summer, the actual object, the thing you took outside.
It went on sale in America on July 31, 1989, and for a certain kind of kid it changed what summer even was. It went in the backseat on the long drive. It went to the pool and sat on the towel. It lit up the tent after dark, four double-A batteries at a time. Summer break used to end at the edge of the living room. The Game Boy pushed it out to wherever you happened to be.
It did not just feel like summer. It was summer.
The actual object, the thing you took outside: the passenger seat, the beach bag, the tent after dark. This list is about the games that owned those portable summers.
The one. Not just the best Game Boy game but the reason the machine became what it became. It came bundled in the box, so for millions it was not a game they bought, it was the game they already had, and it never left the system. No story, no save to babysit, just falling blocks and the one piece of music your whole family could hum by August. The Korobeiniki theme is the actual sound of a 1990 road trip.
The summer vacation game, and it knows it. Link washes up shipwrecked on Koholint Island, a warm, strange, dreamlike place with a beach and a mountain and a mystery, and the whole adventure is about being stranded somewhere beautiful and slowly learning it is not what it seems. The first Zelda you could take with you, the first one you could play under a tree. An island you cannot leave, on a machine built to go anywhere.
The last great summer of the original Game Boy, and maybe the biggest. Pokemon turned a handheld into a social event: you caught them on your own, but you could not finish without the kid down the street and a Link Cable stretched between two Game Boys on somebody's porch. The summer of trading, of the Mew-under-the-truck rumor, of 151 creatures. Catching them all was a summer job.
The launch companion. If you had a Game Boy on day one, you probably had this: a strange, wonderful little thing built by the handheld's own creators under Gunpei Yokoi, set in a place called Sarasaland full of pyramids and Easter Island heads, with two stages where Mario pilots a plane and a submarine like they wandered in from a different game. The first proof the whole Mario world could fit in your pocket and travel with you.
The treasure hunt. Wario got his first starring role here, and it is a perfect summer premise: a greedy would-be pirate raiding an island for a pile of gold, and the whole game rewards you for poking into every corner and hauling out coins. Slower and more exploratory than a Mario game, which is exactly what you want on a long lazy afternoon when you are not in a hurry to be anywhere.
The pool game. Kirby's debut is short, soft, pastel, and easy, and I mean all of that as praise. Not every summer game needs to be a challenge. Some need to be the thing you play half-asleep on a lounge chair with the sun in your eyes, and this is the best version of that on the system: breezy, bright, over in an afternoon. It is the one you hand to the kid who does not really play games, so they get a summer too.
The glow-up. Everything the first Super Mario Land was not: big, polished, generous, with a whole hub world to wander and secrets to dig out. It is also where Wario walked in for the first time, as the villain who has taken over Mario's castle. This is the Game Boy Mario that plays like a proper console adventure, the one you sank a whole rainy summer day into when the pool was closed.
The deep one. It opens looking like a straight port of the 1981 arcade original, four screens and a barrel-throwing ape, and then it just keeps going, blooming into more than a hundred puzzle-platforming levels. It is enormous and clever, the kind of thing you could live inside for a whole trip. If summer means one long game you slowly work through, this is it. It even turned to color if you had a Super Game Boy.
The adventure for the long haul. Under a slightly confusing name, this is the very first Mana game, a real-time action RPG of a tropical fantasy quest, the handheld you bring for the twelve-hour car ride, the flight, the week at the lake with nothing to do. It has a world to get lost in and a story to follow at your own pace, which is the specific luxury of a summer with no schedule.
The night game. Every summer list needs its August, the moody one, and here it is. Metroid II sends Samus down into the caves of a single alien planet to hunt the Metroids one at a time, and it is claustrophobic and lonely in a way that is perfect for the dark. This is not the pool game. This is the one you played by flashlight in the tent, the screen the only light in the room. Summer nights are part of summer too.
To be straight about what I left off. Kirby’s Dream Land 2 is sunnier and deeper than the original and nearly took its slot. Mega Man: Dr. Wily’s Revenge was the one for the kid who wanted a real fight in his pocket. And the Game Boy Camera, a few years later, turned the thing into a toy that took grainy little photos of your whole summer, which might be the most summer accessory Nintendo ever made, even if it was not a game.
But the real honorable mention is the machine itself. No console I have ever owned went more places, ate more batteries, or survived more abuse in a backpack. It let summer come with you.
It let summer come with you.
The Game Boy showed up on July 31, 1989, and it did the one thing no living-room console could: it let summer come with you. Load one of these up, get outside, and find out whether the sun is still too bright to see the screen. It always was.
