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RIP, Game Boy Advance
Written by Philip Jones on Monday, May 14, 2007
Game Boy Advance, we hardly knew ya...
[NOTE: We've already eulogized the GBA once, but with this piece we've focused on the hardware itself]
Back in 2004 when Nintendo unveiled a certain popular dual screened handheld, you might recall that something was uttered along the lines of "Hey! This isn't a replacement for the Game Boy Advance, it's supplemental to it!" We nodded, but we all knew it was the start of the Game Boy Advance's long march to the gallows.
The Game Boy Advance is now busy getting itself comfortable in its coffin. A look at the forthcoming release schedule isn't a pretty sight. There are a couple of movie tie-ins and a quiz show, with very little on the horizon. There have been some excellent releases in the last year in Japan, with Mother 3 and Rhythm Tengoku being notably awesome. It's a shame we'll never see them over here but we've only ourselves to blame for taking up the DS so voraciously.
So with the Game Boy Advance flatlining, it's time to take a peep at the history of the little guy. Having a six year lifespan is definitely something that can't be grumbled about, with those six years seeing some of the best in original handheld titles ever, especially in the RPG genre. The machine in essence, was serving as a continuation of the SNES and its excellent library.
So where does our journey begin? Cast your minds back to the mid 90's ( if that's an option ) and there's a slim chance you'll remember Project Atlantis, the mysterious codename given to the project to create a replacement for the aging Original Game Boy. It was originally rumored to have very high specifications and that it would be a portable equivalent in graphical power to the Playstation or N64, the console kings of the time.
Thing is, that's just not Nintendo's style. They take affordable technologies and craft them into tidy, easy to mass-produce game machines, with particular attention to battery consumption. The power hunger of the Original Game Boy's old rivals, the Lynx and Game Gear, pretty much tethered them to mains power for most of the time, with batteries barely giving more than a few hours play. Nintendo's machines have a history of going for weeks of play without changing or charging the batteries. Thus, any thoughts Nintendo might have had about cramming a super powered processor into a successor to the Game Boy was convincingly thwarted by power consumption.
So, what to do? As we well know, the Game Boy Color spurted out from between Nintendo's loins -- a strangely colorized "Son of Game Boy", with essentially the same graphical grunt, only in a distinctly 8-bit color style. The Game Boy Color did see some excellent games but many weren't really that different from older Game Boy games, they just happened to be in color.
Launching in 1998, the Game Boy Color has the shortest lifespan of any of the "Boys", unless you happen to count the novel yet commercially DAMNED Virtual Boy (Look it up kids, it's a red screened Game Boy that doesn't fit in your pockets, but does fit... to your FACE!), it seems pretty clear that the Game Boy Color was designed as a stopgap machine, to quell any potential competition that was brewing over at SNK and Bandai at the time.
After slaying the enemy beasts (Neo Geo Pocket & Wonderswan), it was safe for Nintendo to bide their time until the chips they desired were cheap enough to create a viable replacement for the aging 8-bit technology.
posted 3 weeks ago