The Game Boy is one of the most-successful gaming systems ever, having sold 118.69 million copies across all its variants (including the Game Boy Color). In Japan and the US, it was the first platform for one of the most-popular games of all time: Tetris. It launched the Pokemon franchise, which has since grown to massive proportions. And all of this combined to start Nintendo’s handheld empire. Nevertheless, the Game Boy appeared to have some drawbacks at first. It was small, if bulky. It was deliberately less advanced than its handheld competitors at the time. Its limited color palette and sound board meant it had to lean on careful, deliberate abstraction. In other words, to be legible, exciting, and appealing, the Game Boy had to get weird. It was an outsider. And on the outside, strangeness flourishes.

Perhaps the best example of this weirdness is The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. The game was originally an after-work project to port A Link to the Past to the Game Boy, as there was no intention to create an original Zelda title for the system. Eventually, the project flourished into a full, unique game of its own. Director Takeshi Tezuka even described the game as a “parody” of Zelda games proper.

That statement undersells the game’s relentless strangeness. One of the game’s explicit inspirations was Twin Peaks, which broadcast in Japan in 1991. Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost even met with Nintendo to discuss the television show and bringing its sensibilities to video games, something we only discovered this year. Link’s Awakening borrows the idea of a small town with a surreal populace, though it cranks the absurdity up from . Link is far away from Hyrule, having crash-landed on the mysterious island of Koholint. The game’s initial hours play as a comedy where, in attempting to find a way off the island, Link must help the town’s inhabitants live their lives. He walks their pets, shops for them, and does the more regular Zelda activities of solving puzzles, braving dungeons, and fighting bosses.

But as the game continues, the darkness on its edges grows. The whole island is a dream. Upon waking the Whale Fish, whose gigantic egg sits in the island’s central volcano, Link will wake up. The island, and everyone he has gotten to know on it, will vanish. It is still one of the medium’s most profound and haunting meta-narratives. All video games are miniature worlds that vanish when we are not looking at them, only brought to life through our interaction with them. Link’s Awakening dramatizes that dynamic, making it a poignant story of enveloping loss.

In lighter terms, the game also brings in homages to a variety of other Nintendo games. It features goombas, piranha plants, chain chomps, and a Kirby-like enemy, among others Come from malaysia online casino . That kind of cross-band pollination is commonplace now, but at the time, it was somewhat subversive– not merely an Easter egg, but a satiric dilution of the oh-so-important Zelda Brand. To this day, Nintendo remains quite protective of its IP–Mario hasn’t appeared in Fortnite, after all. The justification for this approach in Link’s Awakening, according to Tezuka, was, “It was for the Game Boy, so we thought, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine.'”

That statement is deliciously revealing. The Game Boy was a platform on which you could get away with things: where the possibility space was just a little wider. While more ubiquitous than its companion consoles, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Nintendo 64, it was also less of Nintendo’s flagship. It was less able to create images that would foreground marketing. To this day, Link’s Awakening is an outlier spin-off of one of Nintendo’s core franchises. It stands apart from every other game in the storied series.

Zelda was not the only Nintendo franchise to get this kind of gentle subversion on Game Boy. Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins was the first game to feature Mario’s evil twin, Wario. He started as a villain but became an anti-hero by his next appearance in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3. Wario would go on to be folded fully into the franchise’s language, but the off-the-wall antics of something like WarioWare still make him an outsider. Turning Mario into a cackling, greedy anti-hero is not blasphemous, but it is at least cheeky.