Colour Reached the Shell Four Years Before the Screen

Colour Reached the Shell Four Years Before the Screen

Two Game Boy Color shells reach us more than any others: red, and the clear one you can see through. Both were among the six colours on sale when the machine launched in Japan on 21 October 1998, so there are simply more of them out there. What they need is almost always the same. The screen nearly always has to be replaced.

Then the battery compartment gets opened, and that is where we find out whether the machine has a future. The Game Boy Color had a reflective screen with no backlight, and two AA batteries ran it for about twenty hours, so plenty of these machines were put away with the batteries still inside. If the leak stayed on the terminals, it can be cleaned. If it reached the board, sometimes nothing can be done.

The colours that arrive most are not the colours that sell fastest. Limited editions move far faster than the plain ones. And selling a Game Boy by the colour of its shell is older than the colour screen. On 21 November 1994, Nintendo released the Game Boy Bros.: the Game Boy in six shells, red, yellow, green, white, black and a clear one, with the same black-and-white screen inside. Four years later, the screen caught up.

A plain red one can wait a long time for its buyer. Someone out there is looking for exactly that red.