was bundled with Nintendo systems in North America, Japan, and Europe, and sold over 40 million copies, according to the 1999 Guinness Book of World Records. Its success as a pack-in led many companies to see platform games as vital to their success, and contributed greatly to popularizing the genre during the 8-bit console generation. Sega attempted to emulate this success with their Alex Kidd series, which started in 1986 on the Master System with Alex Kidd in Miracle World. It had horizontal and vertical scrolling levels, the ability to punch enemies and obstacles, and shops for the player to buy power-ups and vehicles. Another Sega platformer series that began that same year is Wonder Boy. The original Wonder Boy in 1986 was inspired more by Pac-Land than Super Mario Bros., with skateboarding segments that gave the game a greater sense of speed than other platform games at the time, while its sequel, Wonder Boy in Monster Land added action-adventure and role-playing elements. Wonder Boy in turn inspired games such as Adventure Island, Dynastic Hero, Popful Mail, and Shantae. Scrolling platform games went portable in the late 1980s with games such as Super Mario Land, and the genre continued to maintain its popularity, with many games released for the handheld Game Boy and Game Gear systems. One of the first platform games to scroll in all four directions freely and follow the on-screen character's movement is in a vector game called Major Havoc, which comprises a number of mini-games, including a simple platformer. One of the first raster-based platform games to scroll fluidly in all directions in this manner is 1984's Legend of Kage. In 1985, Enix released an open world platform-adventure game, Brain Breaker. The following year saw the release of a more successful open-world platform-adventure, Nintendo's Metroid, which was critically acclaimed for having a balance between open-ended and guided exploration. Another platform-adventure released that year, Pony Canyon's Super Pitfall, was critically panned for its vagueness and weak game design. That same year Jaleco released Esper Boukentai, a sequel to Psychic 5 that scrolled in all directions and allowed the player character to make huge multistory jumps to navigate the vertically oriented levels. Telenet Japan also released its own take on the platform-action game, Valis, which contained anime-style cut scenes. In 1987, Capcom's Mega Man introduced non-linear level progression where the player is able to choose the order in