Dr. Mario

Dr. Mario is a puzzle game from Nintendo, first appearing in the early 1990s for the Game Boy. It puts you in the role of the good doctor, tasked with a rather peculiar medical mission: eradicating viruses.

Your objective in Dr. Mario is to clear a bottle filled with colored viruses. You do this by dropping two-colored vitamin capsules, which you can rotate and move as they fall. The goal is to align four or more segments of the same color – either the capsule's color or the virus's color – in a horizontal or vertical line. When a match is made, those segments and any viruses they are touching disappear.

The challenge in Dr. Mario comes from the increasing speed of the falling capsules and the strategic placement required to make matches. You need to think ahead to set up combinations and avoid letting the capsules stack up to the top of the bottle. Successfully clearing all the viruses on a level advances you to the next, which presents a faster pace and potentially more complex arrangements of viruses to deal with. Dr. Mario on Game Boy offers this core puzzle experience directly.

The game also features a competitive two-player mode, where clearing lines sends garbage capsules into your opponent's bottle, forcing them to clear more to survive. This adds another layer to the Dr. Mario formula, pushing players to think about offense as well as defense.