Was the Game Boy Color a successor to the original Game Boy?

[Mr Puggsly]

Shadow1980 said:

Mr Puggsly said:

No, that extra power was used to make more advanced games and GBC only carts could use more storage space (a huge advantage).

If the extra power was just for more colors, there wouldn't have been so many GBC exclusives.

Yeah. I forgot it had a fair amount of games that didn't work on the older models, like 400+, a lot more than the DSi or New 3DS would get. Still, I'd argue that even all that exclusive content doesn't quite make it a true next-gen successor to the Game Boy. It's still fundamentally the same system, just upgraded. Even Nintendo lumps it together with the older models in their shipment data; in fact, we don't even know what portion of Game Boys sold were Colors outside of Japan (we only know the Japanese figures because of old Famitsu data). So, between the specs and Nintendo's own intent, it was at best a pseudo-successor. That makes it a rather odd duck amongst game systems, but there's nothing else that quite did the same thing. The closest I can think of was the Sega Mark III/Master System, which replaced the SG-1000 and had a bunch of games exclusive to itself, but was basically just an upgraded version of the SG-1000, though a lack of relevant data means there's no way of telling if Sega treated both as part of the same product family.

While GBC didn't get the same kind of push as a new platform, but it was totally a successor. It rendered the original GB useless for many major releases.

I mean c'mon, if you wanted to play the new Zelda and Pokemon but had to buy a new console to play them, then how is it not successor?