History

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The Game USA series has its origings in the late 1990s and lasted into the early 2000s. Over the course of its history, the label was continuously updated in accordance with Nintendo's current handheld.

Game USA Color

The series emerged under the "Game USA Color" label, owing to the Gameboy Color. The release of the first multicart is difficult to pinpoint to a specific date, but it was sometime after October 1998, as that is when the Gameboy Color was released. The design of the multicarts and the logo immitates the official design formula by Nintendo. The logo was set in the official fonts, with "GAME USA" using the "GAME BOY" font and the "Color" label simply being copied without alterations.

The quality of the multicarts varied greatly, from containing just a couple, simple games being repeated in the menu to inflate the game count, to real monsters with up to 100 mostly different games of higher than average quality. What made them stick out among the sea of pirate carts was the simple and consistent branding, especially in comparison to some of the ludicrous designs of some bootleg art.

The clean design and distribution in western countries established the series against the competition from other pirate companies.

Game USA Color Advance

With the release of the Gameboy Advance in March 2001 the series would change its label to "Game USA Color Advance", reflecting that the multicarts were also playable on Nintendo's new handheld. It is possible that the name change occured even before the release of the Gameboy Advance, sometime after the official announcement of the console in August 2000, since from then on the new logo was available to be copied.

There was a brief transitional period in which the same multicarts were released simultaneously under both labels, or simply rereleased under the new label while keeping the content the same. In terms of the overall design formula nothing changed. The series still stuck to Nintendo's general design philosophy, utilizing the layout of the official cartridges and fonts.

This label marks the most active part of the series, with most multicarts of the series belonging to this label. These multicarts would be released for a number of years going forward, likely into the lifespan of the Gameboy Advance.

Game USA Advance

The history starts to get fuzzy starting with the switch to the Gameboy Advance. There exists a series of multicarts in roughly the same style as the previous two labels, however, much of the content changed drastically. The label used was "Game USA Advance", dropping the "Color". The layout of the stickers is also a bit different, which may have been due to there no longer being a consistent style used by official cartridges.

The series would wind down under this label likely due to changes in the bootleg market and technological aspects. Multicarts had been commonplace throughout the 90s, being packed with a multitude of different games that were all more or less small yet timeless. The new versions of the Gameboy, the Gameboy Pocket and Color, helped boost the market as did the release of Pokémon at the turn of the millenium. This momentum was carried into the Gameboy Advance, though it didn't last. Gameboy Advance games were more complex and larger in size, while the cartridges shrunk in half. Multicarts simply could not contain the same amount of modern games as was the case during the Gameboy era, and as such weren't as attractive as before.

The market for multicarts broke away completely soon after the release of the Nintendo DS in 2004 as flash carts all but replaced them.

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