History of Game Boy Advance

Predecessor of Game Boy Advance

In June 1996, a note was published on page 18 of issue 83 of the ELECTRONIC GAMING MONTHLY magazine.

This note mentioned that the British company ARM (Advanced RISC Machines) had signed a contract with Nintendo to create an energy-efficient chip for "Project Atlantis" — a top-secret color portable gaming system from Nintendo.

You can view other magazine clippings about Project Atlantis in the article: "Project Atlantis. Magazine Clippings".

It was claimed that this new ARM710 chip had cosmic characteristics and would run on two batteries for up to 30 hours, and considering that competitors (for example, Sega NOMAD) worked for 2 hours, this was supposed to be an unprecedented breakthrough.

Project Atlantis was supposed to have a 3 by 2-inch LCD screen, 4 control buttons, and a port for connecting an external controller.

And here's an interesting point. I haven't seen much information, but from what I've seen, many agree that a console cannot be developed for 7 years, and considering that after this console, the Game Boy Color was released, it is the predecessor of this model. Let's delve a little deeper and try to figure out who is whose predecessor and successor.

So, Game Boy Color is the fourth console released. (Before it were GB, GBP, and GBL). It was released on October 21, 1998, in Japan. Its main processor was the 8-bit Zilog Z80. That is, a completely different architecture compared to "Project Atlantis." But if you look at the very first Game Boy, you can see that it was built on the Sharp LR35902 DMC-CPU chip (a greatly simplified version of the same ZILOG Z80).

So it turns out that Game Boy Color was indeed the successor to the old classic Game Boy, not "Project Atlantis."

Moreover, our thoughts are confirmed by Howard Lincoln (former chairman of Nintendo of America), who on April 28, 2000, in an interview with GameSpot, said that "Project Atlantis" has nothing to do with Game Boy Color.

Let's fast forward to 2009, at the GDC (Game Developers Conference) exhibition, Masato Kuwahara (head of Nintendo DSi development) gave a speech. In his speech, he talked about what, in his opinion, influenced the development of the Nintendo DS. And at one point, he talked about a canceled project.

Look! This was the secret "Project Atlantis." As you can see from the picture above, this console is called the predecessor of Game Boy Advance. And it was canceled, but it was canceled because the graphics chip did not work well with the ARM processor and was too large. Pay attention to the size of the console; it's a monster from the world of portable consoles. For comparison, on the right is a Nintendo DSi!

The system was supposed to be released during the Olympic Games in Atlanta, which is why it was named "Project Atlantis."

Now let's go back to 2001, when Game Boy Advance was released. So whose successor is it?

To answer this question, I suggest you look inside the Game Boy Advance. There we will see two processors:

A 32-bit arm7tdmi running at 16.78 MHz and the same processor that was in the Game Boy Color — Z80 at 8 MHz.

But the Zilog Z80 was only included for compatibility with old games from Game Boy Color and Game Boy, while the main processor was for new games.

So it becomes clear that Game Boy Advance is the direct successor to that same "Project Atlantis."

Development of Game Boy Advance

The development of this console began at the end of 1998, right after the release of Game Boy Color. The starting point for creating Game Boy Advance was determining the screen resolution. Even from the time of porting games to Game Boy and Game Boy Color, Kenichi Sugawa realized that you can't just port a game. It's not even about technical requirements. Just considering the aspect ratio (it was square) and the screen size, when simply porting a game from one console to another, enemies would appear too unexpectedly and too close to the character.

Therefore, Nintendo developers planned to increase the screen size. And such an increase would have a good impact on the perception of the new console. There was also another problem: Game Boy, for more than 10 years of release, was always in a vertical form factor. This even became a kind of identity for the console. The vertical silhouette was the face of the console; it was immediately clear that it was a Game Boy. Kenichi Sugawa drew many sketches of a vertical Game Boy Advance, but this affected its size; as the screen grew, so did the console itself, which the developers categorically did not like.

In the end, the developers settled on a horizontal form factor; only this way could they make a compact enough console.

The first prototype turned out to be just a Game Boy lying on its side. And here again problems arose. In the vertical form factor, the batteries were located at the bottom of the console, and there was a good balance, but in the horizontal form factor, there was not enough space for the cartridge and batteries, and they had to be shifted to the right.

Because of this, the balance of the console changed significantly, shifting to the right.

But then Nintendo engineers managed to halve the cartridge. And then everything fell into place. The batteries returned to the middle, and the cartridge no longer stuck out of the console.

After the screen size was determined, Nintendo engineers took on the Game Boy Advance processor, and it was developed for more than a year! This was because programmers always wanted more: new features, new capabilities, which led to constant changes in the processor. During the development of the processor, one very major change and a bunch of minor ones were made. And changing the processor is not just adding a few extra lines of code; you then need to make a finished model, which took up to a couple of months.

Game developers also influenced the number of buttons on the console. They asked for additional buttons, so the L and R buttons appeared.

Overall, the development of the console was moving in the right direction. But there was one problem that just wouldn't go away. Due to the change to a horizontal form factor, Game Boy Advance lost its identity and became very similar to competitors' consoles, such as the NEO GEO Pocket.

And then Nintendo decided to hire an external designer to help Kenichi Sugino. In the end, the choice fell on Gwenael Nicolas and his Tokyo studio Curiosity Inc. Nicolas added rounded lines to the console and changed the screen overlay, adding roundness there as well.

And that's how the iconic design of Game Boy Advance was born.

In addition to the console's design, Nintendo was also interested in the issue of backward compatibility, which, according to the developers, was extremely difficult to implement. The developers faced several questions:

1. How to make sure that the new cartridge cannot be inserted into the old console, but the old cartridge can be inserted into the new console?

2. How will the console itself determine that a new cartridge has been inserted?

Nintendo engineers came up with an interesting way to implement backward compatibility for Game Boy Advance, which you can read about in this article: The main feature that distinguishes a fake Game Boy Advance SP from an original one.

You can read about other interesting facts related to the development of Game Boy Advance in two interviews:

Interview with Satoru Okada for NOM magazine.

Interview with Game Boy Advance developers.

Appearance of Game Boy Advance

The first information about Game Boy Advance appeared in 1999. In September 1999, all major publications reported on Nintendo's announcement. The console was supposed to be released in August 2000 for Japan and at the end of 2000 for America and Europe.

For example, information from Nintendo Power magazine (issue 125):

Pay attention to one interesting fact in this note: it states that the number of colors is 65000 in graphics mode. But the released Game Boy Advance had only 32000 colors. The reason for this can be read in the interview with Satoru Okada for NOM magazine. We have translated it for you.

Game Boy Advance was first presented at the Space World 2000 exhibition, which took place from August 24 to 26, 2000, in Tokyo.

There, a prototype of GBA with an interesting color scheme was presented.

An old recording from the Space World 2000 exhibition has been preserved on the internet (this was 2000, and the video quality is very poor). You can see how epic it was:

Interestingly, the day before the Space World 2000 exhibition, the Japanese magazine Weekly Famitsu took advantage of a leak and published an article about Game Boy Advance, showing the first screenshots of the console:

From a historical point of view, showing a photo of the console a day before its release doesn't change anything fundamentally.

But what is definitely interesting is the approach of IGN journalists.

They went "somewhere in the South China Sea" to take photos with Game Boy Advance game developers.

Considering that without games, Game Boy Advance makes no sense, it is obvious that this console will be released simultaneously with the games. But then the question arises: What do game developers use to create and test their games?

And IGN journalists kindly gave us the answer:

There was no Game Boy Advance as such. It was a printed circuit board with all the necessary elements that would later be compactly placed in Game Boy Advance.

Interestingly, this board immediately had an LCD screen and buttons underneath. But since playing on this was impossible, an SNES controller was connected to it.

It is immediately clear that the button layout was not planned to be like the SNES controller, even though the buttons are close together, they were already labeled as L and R, not X and Y.

Also, let's take a closer look at the LCD screen. The game Yoshi is visible on it.

Let's return to Game Boy Advance. If you remember, Nintendo indicated that the release date was the end of 2000. But in August 2000, they only presented Game Boy Advance at the Space World 2000 exhibition.

What caused the delays? Definitely not problems. Nintendo became hostages of the good sales of their consoles.

Game Boy Color sold so well in 2000 that Nintendo faced the question: Should they release Game Boy Advance right now, which would undoubtedly lead to a drop in demand for Game Boy Color, or should they wait a while?

David Gosen, who became European head of sales and marketing for Nintendo in 2000, believed that the success of Game Boy Color could delay the release of the next-generation console.

"The release date for Game Boy Advance was set for the end of this year. But since Game Boy Color is doing well, we don't know yet. This is a big problem for us," said Gosen.

As we can see now, Nintendo decided not to release Game Boy Advance immediately and postponed the release of the console to March 2001.

And on March 21, 2001, the console was released. It immediately received rave reviews from all gaming magazines and was well received by the public. And overall, it was an excellent console, if not for its drawbacks.

Cons of the Console

1. Lack of a built-in battery:

I don't think this is a major drawback, but it's still a drawback, because you can't say that batteries weren't common at the time. The mobile phone boom had already started, and they had built-in rechargeable batteries.

In an interview with the Game Boy Advance developers, they answered this question: they couldn't use developments related to mobile phones because there were no factory capacities. That is, they knew there was a new interesting component, but it was only produced in quantities of 100,000 units per year. With Game Boy Advance being released in quantities of more than three million per year, they would have hit a production bottleneck with that component.

2. Lack of backlight:

This is a major and significant drawback. The main problem here is not that they didn't steal the idea from someone, but that the Game Boy Light (released in 1998) already had a backlight.

Update. According to the developers, this would have unjustifiably increased the cost of the console.

Looking from the perspective of 2020 and discussing the drawbacks of the console may seem strange, but I suggest you evaluate a note from the magazine "Strana Igr" from 2003. Here's what they wrote:

Epilogue

Game Boy Advance is a very successful console. It sold over 81 million units (including Game Boy Advance SP).

They were released in a huge number of colors, and some models are now extremely rare.

The entire Game Boy Advance console family is still relevant today, selling like hotcakes on online platforms. What's most interesting is that all the fakes released don't even come close to the original. Game Boy Advance doesn't lag and delivers exactly the experience you expect.