Nintendo Blurred the Lines Between Handhelds and Consoles Decades Before the Switch

The SNES let handheld gamers experience their portable faves in a whole new way

When the Super Nintendo officially launched in North America on Aug. 23, 1991, Nintendo immediately set to work proving the hardware could offer ambitious experiences the original NES simply could not. Games took advantage of new capabilities, including many more colors on-screen, as well as Mode 7 visuals that allowed them to spin and rotate backgrounds to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth.

For a long time after its release, the Super Nintendo played host to some of the most visually stimulating games of its era. Then came the Super FX chip and the prerendered visuals of Donkey Kong Country and its sequels. But there was still room for experiences that didn’t rely on cutting-edge visuals and new franchises, or indeed, anything new at all.

Introduced in mid-1994, the Super Game Boy was an oversized cartridge with a slot that turned the Super Nintendo into another device to play your library of Game Boy and supported Game Boy Color games (clear cartridges exclusive to the newer handheld simply displayed error screens). It accomplished this feat not through emulation, but by including a CPU like the ones inside an actual Game Boy. The approach wasn’t quite perfect, as the clock speed differed slightly, but it came reasonably close.

To understand the system’s appeal at the time, remember that the original Game Boy required four AA batteries to operate. The situation wasn’t nearly as bad as it was if we tried to enjoy a proper session on Sega’s color Game Gear, but the cost of batteries added up for those of us buying them with a meager allowance… especially if we were trying to catch every last critter in Pokémon. An optional accessory sold for around $30 and let us plug into a wall for nearly endless fun, but then we were tethered to a power outlet. And we were still stuck with the hardware’s tiny screen and its unpleasant green tint.

The Super Game Boy solved both of those problems at once. Now we could enjoy our favorite games like Super Mario Land and Tetris on (relatively) enormous television screens instead of squinting at the original Game Boy. We also got to enjoy custom borders, and sometimes reworked color palettes and presets.

Exact features varied from one game to another. Newer titles released after the Super Game Boy tended to provide the most options. For instance, sometimes it was possible to remap the controls to an alternate configuration. Using the Super NES Mouse, players could occasionally design their own borders to appear around the gameplay area (because television screens had a different aspect ratio than the Game Boy Unit).

Certain games included more substantial improvements. Some of them, including Donkey Kong and Killer Instinct, featured improved sound when played through the Super Game Boy. A handful of games offered multiplayer modes using two controllers, or even as many as four controllers (when a Super Multitap adapter was in use).

Not every cartridge benefited from the new hardware. The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX for the Game Boy Color featured a bonus dungeon when played on the handheld device. When played on a regular Game Boy or on the Super Game Boy, the dungeon was unavailable. On the other end of the spectrum, Space Invaders automatically loaded a SNES version of the game when you inserted the Game Boy version, allowing a person to play with various enhancements that help explain why we consider it one of the 30 greatest Game Boy games of all time.

The Super Game Boy would not be the last time Nintendo allowed us to play its portable games on our television screens. The company released the Game Boy Player in 2003 for use with the GameCube, which also adds Game Boy Advance support. Ahead of the launch of the Switch in 2017, skeptics had wondered whether there was an audience for a hybrid console amid the growing popularity of mobile gaming. Thanks to its previous experiments with devices like the Super Game Boy, Nintendo already knew better.