Though Pokemon breathed new life into the Game Boy, Nintendo was still pressured into making more developed hardware than the increasinglt obsoilescent handheld. Their response was the Game Boy Color. The most notable feature of the platform was the namesake colors, with a palette of over 32,000 colors compared to Game Boy's four. Otherwise, the hardware was largely unchanged. In that sense, it was similar to Nintendo's latter upgrades from the DS to the DSi and the 3DS to New 3DS. The Game Boy Color also featured full backwards compatibility with the standard Game Boy library.
The Game Boy Color was released on October 21, 1998 in Japan and the next month in America, Europe, and Australia. Despite being released over two years after Pokemon in Japan, the Game Boy Color was released only a few weeks later in America and nearly a year earlier in Europe. The platform's launch was overshadowed by Pokemon in the West, though Dragon Quest Monsters and the spinoff Pokemon Trading Card Game were very successful in Japan. In the West, the first major hit was Link's Awakening DX, an updated version of the 1993 Zelda game, which was released in December for North Americans and January 1999 in Europe.
The Game Boy Color gained momentum in 1999, with a number of games from Nintendo and outside developers. Pokemon Pinball was fairly successful, being one of the ten best-selling games of 1999 in Japan. One of the biggest releases of the year was Super Mario Bros Deluxe, a port of the NES original bundled with the Japan-only Lost Levels and a number of extras specific to this release. Mario Golf was released latter in the year, and third parties released Harvest Moon, Yu-Gi-Oh, and Dragon Quest titles.
However, the biggest Game Boy Color release in 1999, and in the platform's life cycle, was Pokemon Gold and Pokemon Silver, the second generation of the series. It would be another year until its American release, but in 1999 alone, it would sell over 5 million copies, despite only being released on November 21. 1999 would be a new record software year for the Game Boy in Japan, with an additional 7.5 million games sold on top of Pokemon Gold/Silver.
Support and success continued into 2000. Pokemon Crystal continued the series success in Japan, and would be released the next year in the West. Nintendo would release more spinoffs such as Mario Tennis, Kirby Tilt n Tumble, and Pokemon Puzzle Challenge and Trading Card Game 2, as well as the acclaimed Wario Land 3. Third party support was arguably stronger than ever, with Yu-Gi-Oh, Dragon Quest 3, Rayman, Blaster Master, and Metal Gear Solid being a few of the many games released.
However, by 20001, the Game Boy hardware was over a decade old. Nintendo had been planning a successor for years, and was ready to move on to more advance hardware. At Space World event in August, Nintendo unveiled the Game Boy Advance, a handheld system technically comparable to the SNES. The Game Boy Advance would soon come to replace the Game Boy Color after its Japanese launch in March 2001 and Western launch three months later.
Even as its days were numbered though, the Game Boy Color was still supported, both by Nintendo and third party developers. Nintendo worked with Capcom to create two new Legend of Zelda games, titled Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Enix released a second Dragon Quest Monsters game in 2001, which outsold any other handheld game in Japan that year. Licensed games like One Piece and Harry Potter continued to be successful. And although the market for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color had largely died by 2002, a few gems such as Shantae were still released.
When the Game Boy was introduced in 1989, the dominat consoles in the gaming industry were the NES, Master System, and TurboGrafx-16. Super Mario Bros 3 was considered the recent ground-breaking title of the day. By its discontinuation in 2003, there was a remake of the same game for the Game Boy Advance. The titular plumber himself had leapt into the third dimension back in 1996, halfway through the Game Boy's long life. This long legacy has been matched by few other gaming platforms.
