GameBoy Advance launched 12 years after GameBoy, ignoring GameBoy Color. |
The Gameboy case was an anomally. Very bizarre. That console was over by 1995-1996. What happened was 2 things:
1, Sega greatly abandoned the development for the Game Gear by 1995 and planned no revision of it (like Nintendo did with Game Boy Pocket). So GB was the only portable..., by 1995.
2, Pokémon appeared in Japan in 1996, and boosted the GB sells, so... Nintendo planned to launch the game in US and Europe by 1998 and 1999. By then, GB was old as fuck. Nintendo knew that, and first, planned a new 32bit portable around 1995, to succeed the GB around 1997-1998... but then cancelled it when it was already testing the new machine, and just decided to make a new revision of the 8bit GB... with color screen. Why? to make pure profit with the huge Pokémon-mania around the world what started in that moment. And it worked. GB pocket and GB Color sells were huge by then.
That unexpectedly expanded a LOT the life of that machine. But I can tell you, in 1996-1998, the original GB was clearly dying: Its better and most known games were the very old ones, from 1989 to 1993 (apart from DK Lands) and practically did not have new launches from Nintendo.
