Thread by @gamespite

The @storybundle Spring Fired-Up games book collection (including the Game Boy Works books, by me!) ends tonight: storybundle.com/games

So, I'm going to post interesting things I've learned about Game Boy while creating these books throughout the day.

There were LOTS of old PC/arcade game conversions to Game Boy, but so far as I can tell the absolute oldest source material to hit the system was 1969's Lunar Lander.

That said, Pack-In Soft's port took, uh, liberties.

Many B&W Game Boy titles ended up being remade for Game Boy Color. The most obscure of these has GOT to be Epoch's weirdo puzzle-platformer Cyraid, which was repackaged a decade later as a tie-in with Japanese kids' morning show Oha Suta:

Speaking of licensing, you'd have to look long and hard to find a game with a more tortured license history than the first Crazy Castle. It started on Disk System as Roger Rabbit, came out in Japan as Mickey Mouse, and ended up in the U.S. as Bugs Bunny:

Regional name changes are also why the world's first-ever portable role-playing game was a chapter of the Final Fantasy series, except not:

Game Boy saw a fair few sequels to beloved NES games, and of all these Balloon Kid is the one that most deserves better visibility. It's a comprehensive reworking of Balloon Fight's Balloon Trip mode, and it's great:

Most unexpected trend on Game Boy: Games that (1) involve matching mahjong tiles and (2) are named for bits of Chinese geography. So far, I've come across three: Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Shisenshou (aka Szechuan).

I need to head out to meet a friend I haven't seen in a few years, so here are a few quick entries.

Most important game on Game Boy? HEIANKYO ALIEN, OBVIOUSLY:

First Western-developed Game Boy release? So far as I can tell, Wizards & Warriors X: Fortress of Fear.

The X is supposed to be a 10, I'm told. We're still waiting for Wizards & Warriors 4-9.

Outside of Knack for PS4, how many games are directed by the man responsible for its console's design? Not a lot! But Solar Striker, directed by GB hardware designer Satoru Okada, is one of those rare few:

Props to Konami (and Ultra, I guess) for creating the only Game Boy release to share a name with a kingdom in Game of Thrones. It's... Quarth!

Game Boy Works's brush with video game history: After I covered medieval Japanese first-person dungeon crawler Ayakashi no Shiro and lamented its lack of a fan-translation, @summvs11 accepted the challenge and gave us Doman's Revenge. That's awesome. gbatemp.net/threads/gamebo…

There are a LOT of awful racing games on Game Boy, but I found a surprisingly enjoyable one in Tonkin House's Roadster. Give it a try sometime:

Game Boy's link cable was one of its key features, and F-1 Race shipped with an adapter to bump the number of linked players from 2 to 4. Only a handful of games used it, and it wasn't a patch on Lynx's ability to connect *16* players right out of the box.

Last one for now: The first GB title whose packaging I wasn't able to photograph was the ultra-rare Fish Dude. But I made up for this failure by riffing on The Big Lebowski, for whatever that's worth:

One final observation: The biggest difference in aftermarket value for a sequel to a Game Boy release? Athena's Virtual Bowling for VB, the follow-up to World Bowling for GB. The latter goes for about $10 boxed these days. The former, $2000 or more!

Anyway, you can learn these and MANY more Game Boy factoids by grabbing the current StoryBundle before it ends in about three hours. storybundle.com/games