10 Best Game Boy Color Box Art

The driller's round, smiling face fills the American box inside a pink and white target, with the logo dripping down from the top like icing. That is the whole cover, and it does not need anything else. Japan's box, by contrast, shows him swinging his drill through the blocks.

Dragons of every colour coil around the title on a wall of coloured bricks. It looks like the menu of a Chinese restaurant you would happily eat at twice a week. Better still, the bricks are honest: this is a brick-breaker, and you play a green dragon who uses his own body as the paddle.

A blue-haired heroine gazes out of the American box while a red-haired swordsman leaps past a flying ship behind her. Japan, where the game is called Estpolis Denki: Yomigaeru Densetsu, got a brighter painting of the same pair charging into battle.

A kid with a monkey on their head climbs out of the jungle, framed by a ring of vines that spells out the title. Small critters crawl around the edge, and a hut waits at the bottom. As a result, it looks like the cover of an adventure novel for kids.

This one never left Japan, and English-speaking players only got to play it through a fan translation. The box looks like a pencil sketch with watercolour washed over it. Pale towers float at the top, and people lounge on a beach at the bottom, so the whole thing feels more like a travel journal than a game cover.

The American box is a proper fantasy painting: the hero raises his sword on a cliff top while his party waits below and a castle sits in the clouds. Japan's box, meanwhile, goes for a cartoon instead, with the hero and his friends riding a giant white bird. Two very different boxes, and neither one loses.

Kirikou is based on the French animated film Kirikou and the Sorceress, and its box treats the film with respect. A tiny Kirikou runs through the jungle, while the face of the evil witch Karaba, with glowing red eyes and a golden headdress, fills the frame behind him. All of it sits inside a ring of yellow and red patterns, like a painted plate.

Instead of a zombie, the European box shows a life ring on a white ship's wall, smeared with bloody handprints, under a tagline that tells you that you are out of your depth. The name on the ring is Starlight, which is the cruise ship the game takes place on. Grim and clever, nothing else on the system is this scary without showing a monster.

Solid Snake stands shoulder to shoulder with a red-haired soldier, both drawn in sharp ink and grey armour on a plain white box. It looks like concept art from the PlayStation game, which tells you this little cartridge is the real thing. Fittingly, the game was made because Konami's European division asked for a Game Boy Color version of Metal Gear Solid.

Shantae flicks her long purple ponytail across a hot red background, and the swirl of it frames the whole box. The game inside has the same 90s anime look, so the cover is an honest promise. Sadly, fewer people saw it on a shelf than it deserved: the first run sold out, and a second print run never came.