Game Boy Color
The is an 8-bit handheld game console developed by Nintendo. It was released in Japan on October 21, 1998, and in international markets the following month. Compared with the original Game Boy, the Game Boy Color features a color TFT screen instead of monochrome, a CPU running at up to twice the speed, and four times as much memory. It is backward compatible with games developed for its predecessor. The Game Boy Color was released during the fifth generation of video game consoles and competed with the WonderSwan and Neo Geo Pocket, and Genesis Nomad.
The handheld is slightly thicker, taller and has a smaller screen than its immediate predecessor, the Game Boy Pocket, but is significantly smaller than the original Game Boy. As with its predecessors, the Game Boy Color has a custom 8-bit processor made by Sharp. The American English spelling of the system's name, Game Boy Color, remains consistent throughout the world.
The Game Boy Color received positive reviews upon release, and was praised for its backwards compatibility with games from its predecessor. It had a relatively brief lifespan, being succeeded by the Game Boy Advance after less than three years on the market. The Game Boy and the Game Boy Color combined have sold 118.69 million units worldwide, making them the fourth best-selling system of all time. Its best-selling games are Pokémon Gold and Silver, which shipped 23 million units worldwide.
History
The original Game Boy was first introduced in 1989. The device was a monochrome handheld, and one of its competitors, the Atari Lynx, featured a color screen. While the Lynx's color display was visually impressive, it was criticized for its bulky size and poor battery life. The Game Boy, in contrast, offered superior portability and longevity, propelling it to immense popularity. Publicly, Nintendo pledged to develop a color Game Boy, but only when technology limitations could be addressed.Internally, a team led by Satoru Okada, who played a key role in the original Game Boy's design, was experimenting with color displays. Their early-1990s prototype, codenamed "Project Atlantis," featured a color screen and a powerful 32-bit processor from Sharp. However, the team was not satisfied with the outcome and shelved further development.
Despite the lack of color, consumer interest in the Game Boy remained strong. In 1996, Nintendo released the slimmer Game Boy Pocket, and the launch of the Pokémon series that same year further boosted sales. However, developers were losing interest in creating new games for the aging platform.
Additional market pressure for Nintendo came in October 1997 when news broke about Bandai's new handheld, the WonderSwan. The project was led by Gunpei Yokoi, the engineer who led the development of the Game & Watch series and the original Game Boy. Yokoi had left Nintendo in 1996 following the commercial failure of his final project at the company, the Virtual Boy. His departure caused a stir, with investors dumping Nintendo stock, forcing a temporary halt on trading at the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Yokoi was killed in a roadside accident in 1997 before the WonderSwan's release.
Faced with mounting pressure, Okada revisited Project Atlantis. Prioritizing quickly bringing a device to market over processing power, he dropped the 32-bit chip in favor of a faster version of the existing Game Boy's 8-bit processor that would allow for a sooner launch and maintain compatibility with the existing library of Game Boy games.
The Game Boy Color was announced in March 1998 and released in Japan that October. It received an international rollout throughout November, reaching North America on the 18th, Europe on the 23rd, and Australasia on the 27th. Launching at a price of, the Game Boy Color ultimately outsold the WonderSwan, which went on sale in March 1999.
The Game Boy Color had a relatively short lifespan, being on the market for only two and a half years before being succeeded by the Game Boy Advance in 2001. The successor finally brought the 32-bit processing power envisioned in Project Atlantis. Despite the new system, the Game Boy Color remained in production, serving as a budget-friendly alternative. The last units were reportedly sold by March 2003.
Hardware
The Game Boy Color uses a custom system-on-a-chip that integrates the CPU and other major components into a single package, designated the CPU CGB by Nintendo and manufactured by the Sharp Corporation. While the CPU CGB was a new design for the Game Boy Color, the technology was largely an evolution of the ten-year-old DMG-CPU SoC used in the original Game Boy.Within the CPU CGB, the main processor is the same Sharp SM83 that powered the original Game Boy. Derived from two other 8-bit processors: the Intel 8080 and the Zilog Z80, the SM83 features the seven 8-bit registers of the 8080—lacking the alternate registers of the Z80—but uses the Z80's programming syntax and additional bit manipulation instructions, along with new instructions optimized for operations specific to the hardware design.
While in the original Game Boy, the SM83 operated at a clock rate of 4.194304 megahertz , games can command the processor in the Game Boy Color to operate in "dual-speed mode," doubling its frequency to 8.388608 MHz. This allowed developers to achieve twice the processing power when creating games exclusively for the Game Boy Color, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing games.
The CPU CGB incorporates the Picture Processing Unit, a basic GPU that renders visuals using 16 kilobytes of Video RAM, twice as much as that of the original Game Boy. Games developed specifically for the Game Boy Color could fully utilize this additional memory, enabling enhanced effects and displaying up to 56 colors simultaneously from a palette of 32,768 colors. Programmers subsequently developed the "high color mode" technique, which involved rapidly switching color palettes to display over 2,000 colors at once. This feature was used in games such as The Fish Files, The New Addams Family and Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. When a Game Pak compatible with the original Game Boy is inserted, the additional video RAM is disabled.
The screen is a 2.3-inch thin-film transistor color liquid-crystal display, measuring wide by high. The screen aspect ratio and resolution remain identical to the original Game Boy at 160 pixels wide by 144 pixels high in a 10:9 format. Like the original Game Boy and Game Boy Pocket before it and the Game Boy Advance after it, the screen is passively reflective, with a surface behind it that reflects ambient light back through the liquid crystal elements toward the viewer. Because there is no backlight, the device can be hard to use in dark environments.
Additionally, the SoC contains a 2 KB "bootstrap" ROM which is used to start up the device, 127 B of high RAM that can be accessed faster, and the Audio Processing Unit, a programmable sound generator with four channels: a pulse wave generation channel with frequency and volume variation, a second pulse wave generation channel with only volume variation, a wave channel that can reproduce a waveform, and a white noise channel with volume variation. The motherboard of the Game Boy Color contains a 32 KB "work" RAM chip, four times more than the original Game Boy.
The Game Boy Color features a D-pad, four action buttons, and a sliding on–off switch on the right side of the device. Volume is adjusted by a potentiometer dial on the left side of the device. The left side also has a Game Link Cable port for connecting up to four Game Boy devices for multiplayer games or data transfer. The port used on the Game Boy Color is of a smaller design first introduced on the Game Boy Pocket and requires an adapter to link with the original Game Boy. The Game Boy Color also included a "high-speed" mode that allowed data to be transmitted up to 64 times faster over the Game Link Cable than on the original Game Boy. The Game Boy Color included an infrared communications port for wireless data transfer, but it was only supported by a small number of games and consequently was not included on the later Game Boy Advance line.
Technical specifications
Model colors
Nintendo had seen success selling colored variations of the Play It Loud! Game Boy and the Game Boy Pocket, so the company released the Color in several case variations.The logo for Game Boy Color spells out the word "COLOR" in the five original colors in which the unit was manufactured: Berry, Grape, Kiwi, Dandelion, and Teal. Another color released at the same time was "Atomic Purple", made of a translucent purple plastic. Other colors were sold as limited editions or in specific countries.
Games
The Game Boy Color launched with an extensive game library, thanks to its ability to play original Game Boy titles. At launch, it featured three exclusive games: Pocket Bomberman, Tetris DX and Wario Land II. Over time, the system amassed more than 900 titles, in addition to the original Game Boy's catalog of over 1,000 games. In a promotional list of 296 Game Boy Color games, 100 were compatible with the original Game Boy.Nintendo prohibited simple "colorized" re-releases of monochrome Game Boy titles, requiring developers to implement meaningful gameplay enhancements. These additions included new levels, characters, items, or mechanics that leveraged the system's color capabilities. To ensure these enhancements were significant, Nintendo mandated that they be easily recognizable to players familiar with the monochrome version. Many of these enhanced versions, often called "Deluxe" or "DX", became some of the Game Boy Color's most popular titles, including Tetris DX and The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX.
The Game Boy Color's improved display and enhanced processing power also enabled more faithful ports of NES games, in contrast to the heavily modified versions created for the original Game Boy due to its monochrome display limitations. One of the most notable examples is Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, which showcased the Game Boy Color's ability to deliver an authentic port of the NES classic.
Tetris for the original Game Boy is the best-selling game compatible with Game Boy Color, Pokémon Gold and Silver are the best-selling games developed primarily for it, and Pokémon Crystal was the best-selling Game Boy Color exclusive title.
The last Game Boy Color game ever released is the Japanese exclusive Doraemon no Study Boy: Kanji Yomikaki Master, on July 18, 2003. The last game released in North America is Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on November 15, 2002, while Europe's was Hamtaro: Ham-Hams Unite! released on January 10, 2003.
Beyond the platform's official titles, as of 2025, an active online community continues to create new titles for the Game Boy and Game Boy Color through tools like GB Studio, a free and user-friendly game-building engine that simplifies the process compared to manual coding. GB Studio has been used by professional game studios like Krool Toys, who created the promotional title Grimace's Birthday for McDonald's in 2023.