When Game Boy launched in Japan, it arrived with four games (each sold separately, of course). Most of them made their way to the West – as did the overwhelming majority of game releases from Game Boy’s first year of existence, for that matter – with one notable exception: Yakuman.
Yakuman‘s failure to venture beyond Japanese shores doesn’t require much explanation, though. It’s just that it would have been financial suicide. Yakuman would have been lucky to achieve triple-digit sales figures in the U.S. After all, Americans aren’t exactly clamoring for Japanese-style mahjong games.
