The Super Nintendo is one of the greatest video game consoles ever made. I mean I know I'm a fan of it and a lot of you out there are as well. But what if I were to tell you that there was a video game released on the platform that wasn't released in one of those famous Super Nintendo cartridges? What if it was released on a Game Boy cartridge? The Super Game Boy was a cartridge released for the Super Nintendo that allowed you to play Game Boy games on your Super Nintendo. It was a really cool device a lot of people owned in the ‘90s but something that a lot of people really didn't know about was that Super Game Boy games were released that actually took full advantage of this specific hardware. They were able to use the Super Nintendo’s better color library and well a whole bunch of stuff that the Game Boy simply wasn't capable of doing. For instance Donkey Kong which was released on Game Boy used the full color palette of the Super Nintendo. Killer Instinct another game released on Game Boy allowed you to play with two players something you couldn't do with a single Game Boy. And Kirby's Dream Land 2 made use of an entire sound library that was specific to the Super Game Boy. Now all those games are cool but we're not here to talk about those ones. We're here to talk about Space Invaders.
Now for those of you that don't know Space Invaders was an arcade game released in the late ‘70s and it was really popular. It came out on a lot of different platforms, a lot of different hardware, but on the Super Nintendo it was released on a cartridge like any other. And it also had a specific version released just for Game Boy. Now this version has Super Game Boy features. Like a lot of these other games we just mentioned it has a colorful border, color scheme and a bunch of other neat features but one feature stands out. When you start up Space Invaders on a Super Game Boy you're given the option of two different modes the Super Game Boy mode and the arcade mode. When you select the arcade mode a loading screen appears that says that Space Invaders are now invading your Super Nintendo and then you're presented with a full 16-bit version of Space Invaders for the Super Nintendo. Space Invaders was released on the Super Nintendo using a full-size Super Nintendo cartridge but this version here is inside the Game Boy cartridge itself. The only real difference between this Game Boy version and the Super Nintendo original is that this one doesn't have a VS game mode so you can't play split-screen with your friends.
Unfortunately the gameplay in the 16-bit version is pretty much exactly like the original Game Boy and Super Game Boy versions of this game. It's just Space Invaders and they really didn't add a lot of extra features to make anything a lot more fun to play. I think that's one of the reasons why this game was kind of just forgotten about because it really didn't do anything additional beyond just being a good version of Space Invaders. But I've got to imagine that if this was successful and this game set a precedent for other Game Boy games to be released in this exact same way we might have seen an age where Game Boy games are released with full versions of Super Nintendo games inside the cartridges. Unfortunately this idea never took off and this game serves as an example for what possibly could have been. Regardless though I still find it really impressive that they managed to stick a 16-bit game inside this tiny little Game Boy cartridge and to think about the fact that 16-bit games wouldn't have been available on portable devices for years after the fact this little cartridge was way ahead of its time. I think people should be out there collecting these copies of Space Invaders and cherishing them. They're a really cool piece of Nintendo's history and something I don't think people should forget. Even though it wasn't a major success and most people don't even think about it nowadays this remains as the only example of this technology ever being used and because of that Space Invaders on the Game Boy has the distinction of being the smallest Super Nintendo game ever made
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