1996 marks the second Golden Age of the Game Boy for a few reasons. The Game Boy Pocket, a smaller and lighter model which required less batteries, was released in July for Japan and Setember for North America, and helped brethe new life into the aging hardware.
However, the chief catalyst of the Game Boy's revival was the release of Pokemon Red and Pokemon Green in Japan on February 27. The significance of Pokemon when discussing the second half of the Game Boy's life can not be understated. The original Pokemon was split into two games, each with unique creatures to capture, which helped convince players to play alongside friends. The two-player component, which included both competitive battling and mutually beneficial trading, gave the Link Cable more use than ever before, as well as giving handheld games a new social component.
The effects of Pokemon were dramatic. Sales of the Game Boy hardware and software increased by approximately 80% and 63% from 1995 to 1996, despite few other major releases. Nintendo mantained public interest in the games with the slightly updated Blue version, promotional events that distributed the elusive Mew, and an anime that first aired in April 1997.
The Japanese obsession with Pokemon only grew stronger in 1997, with the games selling over 6 million copies in 1997 alone, becoming the best-selling retail video game in Japanese history. Sales of the Game Boy reached an all-time high, with over 4.5 million sold that year, and a total of over 5 million games besides Pokemon were also sold in Japan that year. Nintendo released new Kirby, Wario, and Game & Watch titles, and other outside developers brought games such as Harvest Moon and Tamagotchi.
In light of its success, the long delay between Pokemon's release in Japan and elsewhere in the world is curious. This was due to a number of factors. First, localizing the many names of creatures and places to meet the needs of Western audiences took a period of time. More crucially, the source code of the games was highly fragile. Much of the games had to be completely reprogramed in order to accomodate the English language. The Western versions of Red and Blue would resemble Japan's Green and Red remade with assets from the original Blue. The games' ultimate release was timed to coordinate with related media such as a dubbed version of the anime in late 1998.
Back in Japan, 1998 saw the Game Boy's continued resurgence, again thanks in large part to Pokemon. A new Special Pikachu Edition of the game, more commonly referred to as Yellow, differed from the original games by drawing inspiration from the anime series. It was released in September, and was the year's best-selling game with over 2.4 million copies sold.
