Nintendo's new 3DS-focused Direct was today

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah I'm thinking of the "duel mode" games. I consider them basically no different than "Super Gameboy" mode games a few years before that, in that they're playing it safe. Very few Gameboy duel mode games really made full use of that duel mode either. Even Pokemon Yellow ended up using the coloring scheme of Red/Blue (that is, Super Gameboy coloring).

Well, Pokemon Yellow is probably one of the most minimal uses of GBC coloring around; most games use more colors than that. Still, it is true that since a dual mode title has to work on both systems, it can't get the most out of the GBC -- you can't design your game with the twice-as-fast CPU in mind, for example, or the added RAM either. The GBC is not exactly a powerful system, but the backwards compatible games are even more limited than color-only games because of that. For some examples, if you compare Wario Land 2 to Wario Land 3, you can see the (visual) improvement in the second one, which goes color-only. The Zelda Oracles games also show this versus Link's Awakening; LA is the better game, sure, and the Oracles games run in the LA engine, but there are added graphical elements you won't see in LA DX. Etc.

Basically what I mean is that a lot of developers didn't go all-in on GBC support, opting instead to hedge their bets to make sure everyone with the older model wasn't left out.

If you look at game releases, the first year of the GBC saw mostly dual-mode games, but after that developers started switching over to color-only for the most part. So a lot of dual-mode games released in late '98 and then in '99, but after that you see more color-only titles releasing. Nintendo itself went mostly GBC-only after '99 for example. The very short life-cycle of the system obscures this, since there was such a short turnaround between the GBC and GBA, but it did happen. Even so, though, there were at least some backwards compatible games releasing in both the US and Japan into 2001; the last backwards compatible US release is Dragon Warrior Monsters 2. Japan's last backwards-compatible title is later than that. But they were definitely the exception by that point.

All things considered it wasn't a bad way to go. Most gamers saw the GBC as just a remodeled Gameboy anyway, and not worth shelling out full price when their Gameboy worked just fine. The Gameboy Advance was a different story, clearly being a major update over the previous model.

You think? I thought that the GBC was quite popular and successful, and after its release the original GB or GB Pocket quickly got less and less common, at least among people who still actually played handheld games... people my sister or younger cousins who loved Pokemon in '98-'99 but never did get a GBC (or GB Pocket either) were out there of course, but looking at game releases, the GBC has a surprisingly large library considering its relatively short life. The original GB lasted much longer, but it had some very weak years through the mid '90s, while thanks to Pokemon that was not an issue with the GBC...

But still, yes, the GBA obviously was a much bigger update, and I'm sure plenty of people did just wait for a GBA instead of getting the GBC. But at least in the US the GBC did sell well; from the numbers I've seen I think it did best in the US, actually.

Come to think of it, when the 3DS came along it ALMOST got treated the same way as the Gameboy Color by the public. Many thought it was just a DS with a 3D screen, not worth shelling out money for.

Good point, that was a problem for quite some time for sure.

It took a while before it became clear that the 3DS was a substantial power upgrade over the DS. Nintendo mistakenly didn't make that clear in the initial advertising for the product. Fortunately that course was corrected in time, but to this day many people still think the Wii U is just a Wii with a tablet. Nintendo needs to make it clear when a new generation comes along that it is more powerful than the last. It may seem obvious, but many won't even realize it's a new generation until they are told it is. Hopefully they'll make that clear when the advertising for the NX comes along. If they ONLY advertise it as a "portable you can hook up to your TV", history could very well repeat.

Yeah, we'll see. Since the NX will surely again be dated hardware they can't sell it as "the best new tech", but they do need to do a much better job of making it clear that it is a real new platform. If the rumors that it won't have backwards compatibility are true that could go a long way towards that, so long as people see it as a noticeable upgrade from previous Nintendo systems anyway...

(Oh, and I REALLY hope that the rumor that the NX will be region-free is true. I won't expect it to be true until it is proven, but it'd be awesome.)