Evan Amos, Wikimedia
- Originally released in 1989, the Nintendo Game Boy is now 30 years old.
- The Game Boy helped create a market for portable video games; Nintendo has sold more than 100 million Game Boy and Game Boy Color consoles worldwide.
- The Game Boy has an impressive library built from more than a decade's worth of games and dozens of classic remakes.
- Nintendo continues to dominate the portable gaming market with innovative handheld consoles like the Switch and the 3DS.
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Nintendo recently celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Game Boy, the handheld console that helped Nintendo cement its legacy as a video game innovator.
The battery-operated Game Boy was a game changer when it was released in 1989. While the original Nintendo Entertainment System made Nintendo a household name by bring video games into homes across the world, the Game Boy made it possible to play games just about anywhere. Many of the early Game Boy games were adapted from popular arcade games, and through the years Nintendo steadily built the Game Boy's library by re-releasing scaled-down versions of dozens of successful games from the Nintendo Entertainment System.
As developers discovered the advantages of the Game Boy, they began creating exclusive games for the console. Portability let players spend more time with their games, which encouraged developers to create complex roleplaying games like "Pokémon" for Game Boy. Companies publishing blockbuster PlayStation games like "Metal Gear Solid" would also create portable spin-offs with an entirely new style of graphics and gameplay to capitalize on the massive audience of Game Boy owners.
"Pokemon: Yellow" & "Pokémon: Let's Go, Pikachu!"/Nintendo
"Pokémon: Let's Go! Pikachu" (right) is a remake of "Pokémon: Yellow," (left) showing just how far Nintendo's consoles have come since the Game Boy.
With a vast catalogue of classic games that were ported from other systems, and even more games designed with portability in mind, the Game Boy has one of the most impressive game libraries of any console. As an added bonus, nearly every game released on the Game Boy Color is backwards compatible, so the original Game Boy released in 1989 can play games that were released more than a decade later.
Below we've collected 30 of the most important games released on Game Boy and Game Boy Color, in honor of the console's 30th anniversary. We've included their original descriptions as provided by Nintendo, or their original box art, with a few exceptions.