The Game Boy Color was Nintendo's second handheld console, releasing worldwide in 1998. Rather than a complete hardware leap over the original Game Boy, it instead offered a similar experience, but now with support for colored sprites. However, this small change in hardware did allow for full backwards compatibility with standard Game Boy titles.

It only took a few years before the Game Boy Color was replaced with a true successor, the Game Boy Advance, though it still saw a number of important releases like Pokémon Gold/Silver/Crystal and Wario Land 3.