Computational Complexity of Game Boy Games

We analyze the computational complexity of several popular video games released for the Nintendo Game Boy video game console. We analyze the complexity of generalized versions of four popular Game Boy games: Donkey Kong, Wario Land, Harvest Moon GB, and Mole Mania. We provide original proofs showing that these games are $\mathbf{\text{NP}}$-hard. Our proofs rely on Karp reductions from four of Karp’s original 21 $\mathbf{\text{NP}}$-complete problems: $\text{textsc}Sat$, $\text{textsc}3-Cnf-Sat$, $\text{textsc}HamiltonianCycle$, and $\text{textsc}Knapsack$. We also discuss proofs easily derived from known results demonstrating the $\mathbf{\text{NP}}$-hardness of Lock `n’ Chase and The Lion King.