While You're Waiting For The Nintendo Switch 2, Here's What It's Like To Play A Game Boy Color In 2025

With the announcement (and subsequent delay) of the Nintendo Switch 2, Nintendo's handheld consoles are back in the limelight. In 2025, finding someone toting around a Switch on a plane or on public transportation is a fairly common occurrence. You might see a Nintendo 3DS occasionally as well. Long before the Switch and even before the DS and 3DS came the Game Boy Color. 

A follow up to 1989's original Game Boy, the Game Boy Color was unleashed upon the gaming public in 1998 with what was then a state of the art color display, excellent battery life, and a deep library of around 800 games that, thanks to backwards compatibility, included franchises like Pokémon, Legend of Zelda, Mario, and just about everything else you can think of. If you spent any amount of time gaming nearly 30 years ago, there's a good chance you sank a lot of hours into saving Hyrule or catching every Pokémon on a Game Boy Color. 

Now, with the advent of backlit screens, smartphones, and devices like the Steam Deck that allow you to play whatever you want wherever you want, an original Game Boy Color might seem like more of a historical novelty than anything else. What's it like to play one in 2025?

On the surface, the Game Boy Color's specs are not what anyone would call impressive, at least 27 years after its release. The non-backlit LCD screen has a resolution of 160x140. For comparison, an iPhone 16 has a 2556x1179 display. To be fair to the Game Boy Color, it does boast a range of 32,768 colors, a vast improvement over the original Game Boy's monochromatic display. It's powered by an 8-bit processor and has a total of 32 kilobytes (yes, kilobytes) of RAM, giving it less computing power than your microwave. Power is derived from two AA batteries, which, by Nintendo's reckoning, gives you about 10 hours of playtime. It also has a headphone jack, which is nice.

Knowing this, I bought a "Berry" colored Game Boy Color at a retro game store about a month ago and I've been playing it pretty consistently since. In short, it's been a lot of fun exploring the nostalgia of my earlier gaming days. Just because a game like "Pokémon Gold" came out 25 years ago, that doesn't mean it isn't worth playing. In a more nuanced assessment, I would compare it to listening to vinyl records, or to a lesser extent, driving an older car. It's objectively worse in some ways compared to modernity, yet a lot better in some ways you might not immediately glean.

The Color's lack of a backlight might be its biggest headache — literally and figuratively. There are a variety of aftermarket lights and screen magnifiers available to mitigate this if you don't mind hunting through eBay or your local retro store. Better yet, if you have the soldering skills available, there is an entire world of backlit screens for sale online, and hundreds of tutorials available. I opted to just play the Game Boy in direct light. That limited the places and time of day I could play, but in the right lighting conditions, the screen could be downright sharp and colorful (at least as far as 25-year-old games are capable of producing).

Perhaps my favorite aspect of Game Boy Color gaming was the simplicity. You don't have to worry about a data connection, frame rate, compatibility issues, downloading updates, micro-transactions, or much else. You just pop the cartridge in and it works nearly instantly. I spent the majority of my time playing an original copy of "Pokémon Gold," and I didn't have a single issue. I played a few older original Game Boy titles as well, and each game performed just as well as it did when it was new in the 1990s. If you can figure out the lighting situation (or better yet, buy a Game Boy Advance SP, which has a backlit display), then it's about the most painless gaming experience you can have in 2025.

I'm not saying that "The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages" is a better cohesive portable gaming experience than, say, "Elden Ring" or "Grand Theft Auto V" on a Steam Deck, or "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate" on a Switch, but it absolutely shouldn't be relegated to the past along with the likes of Nu-Metal and JNCO jeans. If you're tired of how cluttered modern gaming can be, a Game Boy Color could be a tempting option. If you find one for the right price or dig yours out of the attic, it might be worth exploring, and a nostalgic way to fill the time while you wait for the Nintendo Switch 2 to launch. 

As game emulation and the retro games industry have demonstrated, old games are still worth playing. Nintendo made an excellent, high-quality, portable gaming console in 1998, and it's still playable several console generations later. That's not only a testament to Nintendo's ability to read the market at the time, but also indicative that sometimes, the simple and no-nonsense approach is a great way to go about things. In 2025, it's absolutely worth it to go buy a Game Boy Color, fire up a game, and play to your heart's content.