Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance: Fun for the entire future!
by Luc Maloney and Ryder Rose
Nintendo as a company dominated the gaming industry in the 80s with the Nintendo Entertainment System. By the 90s, the company expanded into handheld gaming technology with the Game Boy series. Although the first Game Boy was certainly revolutionary at the time of its release, this article will be focusing on a later generation of Game Boy: the Nintendo Game Boy Advance series. In this article, we will use a variety of Nintendo’s other portable gaming products to profile the Game Boy Advance (and its slightly-improved successor, the Game Boy Advance SP) as a significant historical piece of ubiquitous computing technology, as well as analyze its impact on later generations of Nintendo’s portable gaming technology.
The original Nintendo Game Boy was, well, a game changer for the gaming community. It was a handheld, replaceable battery-powered mobile gaming device with a black & white display and large cartridges that would allow a user to play a variety of games. Because it was a self-enclosed gaming system that could run on battery power, users suddenly had the ability to play video games on-the-move like never before. Although portable gaming devices, such as Nintendo’s earlier Game & Watch line, did exist prior to the Game Boy’s release, those devices were significantly more limited in the variety of gaming experiences that they could produce. The first Game Boy, of course, was a large success and prompted Nintendo to continue releasing new and improved versions of their handheld devices.
Although the original Game Boy was a major milestone in Nintendo’s early development of portable devices, it was not without its issues. The game cartridges were large enough that it was inconvenient to carry more than a few games at a time, the display had no color, and the battery life was not always predictable due to its reliance on replaceable batteries. The problems with the original Game Boy were all solved, in one way or another, with Nintendo’s release of the Game Boy Advance products. Said products, the Advance and Advance SP, also implemented a variety of improved functionality and features.
The original Advance, released in 2001, had a colored display and the game cartridges were roughly half the size of the previous models’ cartridges. Due to the advent of a new game cartridge format, Nintendo included backwards compatibility with the older generation of cartridges. Additionally, the Advance was designed to be compatible with a separate wireless adapter that allowed limited multiplayer between individual devices in a 10-foot area. These changes made the games on the Advance more engaging for users and made it much more convenient to travel with an increased number of games. Unfortunately, even with the marked improvement on the original Game Boy’s design, there were still several major issues with the first Game Boy Advance. Most notably, it required an external flashlight adapter to shine on the screen if it was being used in the dark. Beyond that, it was slightly too large to fit comfortably in a normal pocket.
Several years later, the Game Boy Advance SP was released in Japan in 2003, which improved greatly on the original Game Boy Advance model. The successor to the Gameboy Advance would now fold up, becoming small enough to fit in a pocket. It was also the first portable Nintendo console to include a rechargeable battery, LED backlit screen, and minimized the size of game cartridges. As will be discussed below, the changes implemented in the Game Boy Advance SP’s design had reverberating effects on Nintendo’s development and design of future models of portable game consoles.
When the Nintendo DS was introduced, it kept the flippable design that the Game Boy Advance SP used. The Nintendo DS also included a wider body, so it could fit a second screen on the bottom half of the console which had more of a Game Boy Advance look to it, which reversed the decision to have a pocket sized gaming console. Although this design change seems counterintuitive to the development of portable console ubiquity, the size change did not have a major effect on consumers. In fact, the expansion of the total display area vastly increased the DS’s popularity while also serving to demonstrate the idea that Nintendo’s products were on the cutting edge of technology. The DS family also incorporated continued support for wireless gaming, eliminating the need for an adapter through the use of an internal wireless module. It is clear that the DS family was heavily influenced by the innovations of the Game Boy Advance Series.
Most recently, Nintendo ended the DS line to focus on their current line of portable gaming consoles: Nintendo Switch. In a similar design trend to the transition from the Game Boy Advance SP to the DS, the Switch sacrificed the portability of the DS in favor of increased screen area and overall functionality. The Switch is less portable due to the size of its large central screen, but the functionality increase is significant in that it is able to run a vast array of high-requirement games and can also be connected to a dock for TV or monitor projection. While this seems to suggest that the Game Boy Advance series had a minimal influence on the current generation of Nintendo’s handheld gaming devices, the opposite is true in some respects.
Although the Advance series may not have been influential in all respects, the inclusion of a backlit LED screen, rechargeable battery functionality, and wireless interactions between separate devices were all innovations that were introduced to Nintendo’s handheld products with the advent of the Game Boy Advance series. Without these basic functions, modern portable gaming as we know it would not be possible. The Switch did follow at least one design trend similar to the Advance series in that it reduced the size of its game cartridges significantly. Furthermore, even the aesthetic design of the Switch is suspiciously similar to the design of the original Game Boy Advance, with a central screen and controls on either side. Who’s to say if it’s an homage to an influential older device, such as one of the products from the Advance series?
The Nintendo Game Boy Advance series serves as an important milestone in Nintendo’s development of their handheld gaming products. It represents, in our opinion, a transitional marker between the past and present models of handheld gaming devices. The improvements made on previous generations of the Game Boy series were significant, focused efforts of engineering that pioneered many of the basic functions that we take for granted in the modern age of mobile gaming. While not all improvements yielded lasting influences on modern iterations of portable gaming devices, such as the Advance SP’s decreased screen size, it is without doubt that the Advance series had a major lasting impact on modern gaming.
