#noobow

Noobow

IREM

Front and back covers of the Noobow instruction manual.

I’ve been obsessed with this IREM-made GameBoy game, which only released in Japan, since I first heard about it ages ago.

Noobow

The Game Boy's extensive library of games contains a whole host of renowned classics that have forever changed the medium (The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, Tetris, and Pokemon, for example), but for every fondly remembered gem, there's at least two or three games that have been forgotten by the vagaries of time. This is especially the case for games that were only ever released in Japan. Be it due to licensing/copyright issues (the first two Super Robot Wars games), being part of a really obscure-at-the-time genre (Konami's Cave Noire, a prototypical rougelike), being too Japanese (Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru, or "The Frog For Whom The Bell Tolls", the engine of which was re-used for Link's Awakening), some games were just deemed unmarketable for release anywhere beyond the Land of the Rising Sun. One such casualty was Noobow, a 1992 licensed game based on a Japanese chocolate mascot so obscure that not even the internet can supply any reliable information beyond a couple of short animated videos. It's actually quite an enormous shame, because Noobow is a pretty good game that just about anyone can get into and enjoy.