I didn’t realise that the flickering screen was linked to the status change and I honestly thought the handheld was simply struggling to keep its lights on. One thing that makes me chuckle to this day, however, is that I used to think the console’s batteries were running out whenever my Pokémon got poisoned in battle. To this day, it’s still the only Pokémon game that I’ve managed to 100% complete, and it’s honestly not even close. I was in love with the franchise at this point, and I remember my friends and I would link up during our lunch breaks at school and trade Pokémon.

Naturally, then, I carried my Game Boy Color everywhere and sunk absurd amounts of hours into Pokémon. For one, the Game Boy Color was the first piece of hardware that I could wholly call my own up until that point, anything I’d played either belonged to my older brother or had been passed down when he upgraded to the next big thing. Those early days were some of the best of my gaming life. Pokémon Blue had launched just a few months earlier in the UK and I was already totally enamoured with the TV series at this point, so my excitement was through the roof. I distinctly remember getting my Game Boy Color on Christmas Day back in 1999. Ollie Reynolds, staff writer Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Life In honour of the occasion, here, a handful of us on Team Nintendo Life look back fondly on a console that, for so many gamers, opened a door to a whole world of portable Nintendo goodness. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if you consider the GBC its own system or not - it's part of a lineage of portable perfection and lovely little thing. Guide 50 Best Game Boy Color (GBC) Games Of All Time

(There’s a poll at the bottom of the page, so let us know where you fall on this generational divide!)

Is the GBC its own console or part of the OG Game Boy 'family'? Nintendo lumps its exclusive colour titles together with the monochrome library in the Nintendo Switch Online app, but it had plenty of its own exclusives. It wasn't backlit, so there was still room for improvement, but in addition to the colour on the screen, a range of snazzy case colours (which matched the five colours of the COLOR in the system’s logo) reinforced the idea that the GBC was, in fact, the idealised, final expression of the 8-bit system that launched nine years prior. Image: Zion Grassl / Nintendo Lifeīackwards compatible with the entire Game Boy library, the Game Boy Color refined the DMG and the smaller Game Boy Pocket with its sharp little colour screen and contoured body that felt even more comfortable in your hands and your pockets.

It's now 25 years since Game Boy Color launched, and for many of us in the West, it was on this system that we first caught and traded Pocket Monsters with pals back in 1998.

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