Alleyway (video game)

Development

Alleyway was a launch title for the Game Boy when it first came out in Japan, joining Baseball, Super Mario Land, and Yakuman. It took inspiration from earlier ball-and-paddle games like Breakout and Arkanoid. Because of legal fights between Nintendo and Tengen over the rights to Tetris, Alleyway actually hit shelves two months before Tetris did. Along with Super Mario Land, this game was one of the earliest to feature Mario on the Game Boy.

However, the original Japanese box and cartridge art showed a nameless character in a spacesuit steering the paddle. For the international release, the artwork was swapped to show Mario at the controls, but neither the manual nor the back of the box mentioned the Nintendo mascot being in the game. A preview in Nintendo Power only pointed out that the first bonus level had bricks arranged in Mario's shape, without naming him. It wasn't until 1990, when Club Nintendo previewed the European release, that the pilot was officially confirmed to be Mario.

The game was an early project from Nintendo's R&D1 team, which also worked on Tetris and Radar Mission. Years later, designer Gunpei Yokoi reused a lot of Alleyway's code, including its paddle behavior and adapted physics, for the Game Boy title Kirby's Block Ball, collaborating with Shigeru Miyamoto's team.

Release

Nintendo's own promotional materials for Alleyway gave it a third of a page in its articles, and its ads ran alongside those for the Game Boy system and other games. Much later, a two-page spread in the Super Game Boy Nintendo Strategy Guide, which came with the Super Game Boy add-on, offered tips and color codes. The game returned as a launch title for the Nintendo 3DS Virtual Console on June 6, 2011, first in Japan, then in North America a year afterward. It later appeared on the Nintendo Classics service in May 2024.

Reception

Alleyway sold well during its initial release, but it never received a Player's Choice reissue, and critical opinion has largely been divided. Mean Machines rated it 33%, faulting its repetitive nature and noting that this version offered little beyond the original Breakout. The staff said players would be bored after just a few screens and pointed out that, unlike Arkanoid, Alleyway lacked power-ups. Electronic Gaming Monthly's four reviewers also compared it unfavorably to Arkanoid, stating it brought no improvements to the Breakout formula.

In Famitsu, two reviewers wanted more gameplay variety, with one feeling this lack was especially clear after playing Arkanoid and Nazo no Kabe: Block-kuzushi. GamesRadar+ echoed that view in its review of the 3DS re-release; Nathan Meunier gave it 5/10, writing that Alleyway was never impressive and still looked weak next to similarly priced games. He added that the difficulty sometimes seemed to "hate" the player, though save states helped ease the frustration.

Retro Gamer's Darran Jones called it "pretty piss-poor" even in 1989, criticizing its bland levels and absence of power-ups found in Arkanoid, and noting that many similar clones had surpassed it. The lowest-scoring Famitsu reviewer questioned why such a basic block-breaker was made available to a modern gaming audience.