10 Best Game Boy Box Art

Look closely at the American box, and you'll see Kirby is white. Japan's box, on the other hand, shows him pink, bouncing through a sky full of stars. Next to it, the American one looks like a marshmallow that has seen a ghost.

A mole in a pink scarf pops up in a sunny meadow full of cute critters. Don't let it fool you, though. Behind the cute box art, the game hits hard.

The American box is a grinning green gargoyle, friendly enough for a lunchbox. In Japan, however, the game was named after Red Arremer, and the box shows him as a black silhouette on blood red. That suits a game from the Ghosts n Goblins series much better.

Kid Dracula is Konami's comic spinoff of the Castlevania series, so both boxes lean all the way in. The American one is pop art in hot pink and yellow, while the Japanese one crowds the little vampire with cartoon monsters.

A soldier in chrome armour raises his gun out of a fiery haze. The painting is by Julie Bell. Oddly enough, though, the box carries the signature of her husband, Boris Vallejo.

Charizard breathes fire across the whole American box. As one player put it, "You pick Charmander because you want the cool dragon on the cover." Japan's box, by contrast, puts Charizard inside a round badge.

America got the logo on a plain brown box. Japan, meanwhile, got a full painting of Link leaping with his sword raised under a swirling sky. Same game, very different first date.

Samus stands on rocky alien ground in a suit with huge round shoulders. As it turns out, that redesigned suit, as seen on the cover, became the style later games kept.

This one started life somewhere else entirely. Turtles co-creator Kevin Eastman sketched it as the poster for the first live-action movie. However, it was shelved so the film would not look like the cartoon, and later it was reworked into this game's cover. Lucky game.

Dracula fills the whole sky in red, while the hero below swings his whip straight at him. In other words, it looks like a horror film poster, which is exactly what a Castlevania box should look like.