9 Best Game Boy Sports Games

Nintendo World Cup is a Kunio-kun game in a soccer kit. The player-controlled U.S.A. team plays against Japan, led by Kunio himself, and the Game Boy port is based on the NES game. In Japan it came out as Nekketsu High School Soccer Club: World Cup, while North America and Europe kept the Nintendo World Cup name. Each team has only six players: a goalkeeper, two defenders, a midfielder and two forwards. You control one of them and give the others orders to pass or shoot, then hope they listen.

The Game Boy version lets friends join in over a link cable or the Four Player Adapter. Players who grew up with it still put it on their lists of favourite Game Boy games. Not bad for a soccer match where the whole team fits on a screen the size of a cracker.

NBA Jam hit arcades in April 1993. Its gameplay is based on Midway's earlier Arch Rivals, built around two-on-two basketball, with digitized players and huge dunks. It was a critical and commercial success, and critics cite it among the greatest video games of all time. Its catchphrases even became part of basketball culture in the years that followed. Acclaim bought the rights to bring it home, and the Game Boy got its own port by Beam Software in 1994, with more up-to-date rosters than the arcade.

Squeezing a game built on big digitized players onto a Game Boy screen sounds like a bad idea, and it worked anyway. Players still name it among the games they grew up with on the handheld. Tournament Edition later got a Game Boy port too, made by Torus Games.

Bases Loaded is Jaleco's baseball series, developed with TOSE. It started on the NES, in 1987 in Japan and 1988 in North America, and the Game Boy port followed in July 1990. In Japan it belongs to Jaleco's Moero!! sports line, which also gave the West Hoops for basketball and Racket Attack for tennis. The whole idea is the duel between pitcher and batter. On the NES, reviewers liked the graphics and animation but found the view from behind the pitcher made the ball far too hard to follow.

Players call the Game Boy version fun, and some still go back to it decades later. The series kept going long after this cartridge: three more NES games, two arcade sequels and finally Bases Loaded '96: Double Header for PlayStation and Saturn.

WWF Superstars was the first WWF game on the Game Boy. You pick from five wrestlers, including Hulk Hogan, Macho Man Randy Savage and The Ultimate Warrior, then beat the other four to be named WWF World Heavyweight Champion. Everyone shares the same moves apart from their strikes, and the moveset is long: piledrivers, suplexes, clotheslines and elbow drops off the turnbuckle. You can throw your opponent out of the ring once per match, and it does serious damage. After every match, Vince McMahon comments on the action.

Nintendo Power gave it 2.9 out of 5 in its April 1991 issue. That is the kind of score that makes a wrestler grab the microphone. Players remember it more kindly: it was a go-to game for plenty of kids, and some love its sequel just as much.

Top Rank Tennis is the second tennis game on this list, and the more modern one. A single button does all the work, from powerful drives to underhand shots, top spins and slices included. You set your player's shot power and foot speed, and the game saves them as you go. Beat ranked opponents and you climb the ladder. Lose and you drop. The cast has personality, from Ace Riley the showman to the Quarter Brothers and their weak serves. A gravelly umpire calls the game in digitized speech over a techno soundtrack.

Doubles works with a computer partner or a four-player link-up, as long as everyone brings their own cartridge. Players who own it rate it very highly. One review at the time warned that you need a very fast reaction time if you want to win.

Baseball is Nintendo's own, and it reached North America on August 1, 1989, in the Game Boy's very first days. It goes back to the 1983 Famicom game, which Shigeru Miyamoto personally wanted to exist and designed himself. That original had no licensed team names, just teams whose initials matched real leagues, and the only difference between them was the colour of their uniforms. It was a big deal at the time: the 1985 test launch of the NES leaned heavily on it, because everyone knew the sport.

The Game Boy version is plain and quick, and that is most of its charm. Players tend to name it in the same breath as Tennis, as part of the set of early Nintendo sports cartridges they still want to own.

Blades of Steel started as an arcade and NES hockey game, and the Game Boy got its own version in 1991. You choose Exhibition or Tournament, and the team that beats everyone else is awarded the Cup. The famous part is the fighting. Throw punches during the lead-up and a voice yells "fight", the fight screen appears, and the first player hit five times goes to the penalty box. The winner is not punished at all, which is either a bug or the most accurate hockey rule ever put in a game.

Players who grew up with a Game Boy still put it among their favourites. Both sequels, NHL Blades of Steel '99 and NHL Blades of Steel 2000, later got Game Boy Color versions made by Climax Studios.

Tennis was one of the five launch titles for the Game Boy in North America. Nintendo ported it from its 1984 NES game, which Shigeru Miyamoto designed, and whose arcade version was the sixth top-performing arcade game of 1984 in the United States. On the Game Boy you play the computer at one of four levels, or a friend over the link cable. Button A gives a low hit and B a high one, and you get the usual forehands, backhands, lobs and volleys at the net.

It looks like the most basic launch game ever made. Players who stick with it find out it is a lot deeper than it looks, and some are still learning new tricks decades later. Nintendo brought it back once more on the e-Reader in 2002.

Golf came out in Japan on November 28, 1989, and in North America in February 1990. It is the handheld version of Nintendo's 1984 Famicom Golf, which Satoru Iwata programmed on his own as one of his first projects for Nintendo. That game became the best-selling sports game on the NES and Famicom. Iwata later became Nintendo's CEO, and after his death Golf was hidden in early Nintendo Switch firmware as a tribute to him. If you need to spot the cartridge, one player describes it perfectly: "the one with a not-quite-Mario on the cover art."

There is no story, and nothing much happens apart from golf. Players keep coming back to how simple it is, and how well it fits a few spare minutes. More players named it than any other sports game on the Game Boy.