The best Game Boy games of all time

By Jon Bitner and Jacob O'Gara Updated July 23, 2024

The handheld market wouldn’t exist today if it weren’t for the Game Boy. This brick of a system may have chewed through your batteries like crazy, but it was worth it to play games on the level of the best NES games anywhere you wanted. Sure, its library lacked color like the best Game Boy Color games, but that didn’t stop it from completely dazzling us at the time.

Even all these years since the Game Boy was made obsolete, there are some games that originated on this system that still hold a place as one of the best games of all time. Whether you’ve got the original hardware to play it on, or are taking a break from the best Switch games and diving into the digital versions on Switch Online, these are the best Game Boy games you should revisit.

Wario made his initial appearance in , where he quickly gathered a good-sized fanbase. In fact, the character was so popular that centers around him. The Mario franchise generally provides you with the standard entourage of unoffending good-guy characters. However, in the case of , Super Mario provides a refreshing twist as you take on the character of the most notorious bad guy himself: Wario.  Villains are completely self-involved, so this game isn’t about valiant displays of selflessness like rescue missions or helping Mushroom Kingdom inhabitants. Your task is simply to amass as much money as you can. Then you use that money to attempt to build a castle that puts Mario’s to shame. You’ll get a kick out of the novelty of being the villain.