Game Boy Advance Retrospective: The Handheld That Kept 2D Alive

The Game Boy Advance looked backward on purpose, and it worked. While the home consoles were dabbling in 3D and polygons, Nintendo's 2001 handheld embraced 2D and sprites, with hardware comparable to the Super Nintendo. So it became the place where nearly every major system and series that came before it got a port, from Super Mario Bros. 3 to Super Mario World.

The 32-bit chip inside it came out of Project Atlantis, the color prototype Nintendo had shelved years earlier. The original model had one famous flaw, though: a dark screen. That is why the clamshell Game Boy Advance SP arrived in early 2003 with a front-light you could switch on and off. The fix for a dark screen was, in fact, a light.

Key facts

Released

March 21, 2001 in Japan, June 11, 2001 in North America, June 22, 2001 in EuropeSource

Launch price

US$99.99Source

Units sold

81.51 million, the SP and Micro includedSource

Best-selling game

Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, 16 million copiesSource

Shape designed by

Gwénaël Nicolas and his studio Curiosity Inc.Source

Power

Two AA batteriesSource

Screen

2.9-inch color screen, 240 by 160 pixelsSource

Discontinued

2008 in the Americas, by the end of 2010 everywhere elseSource

How the shelved 32-bit Game Boy finally shipped, sideways

Still under pressure from rival handhelds, Nintendo started on a successor to the Game Boy Color, codenamed Advanced Game Boy, that would use the 32-bit power of Project Atlantis. It was announced on September 1, 1999. However, the change everyone could see was the shape: French designer Gwénaël Nicolas and his Tokyo studio Curiosity Inc. turned the Game Boy on its side and put the buttons beside the screen instead of below it. By March 2001 the price was set at $99.99, and Nintendo went on to spend about $75 million marketing the system in North America.

The library leaned into what the hardware did best. It played Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges too, while its own library was full of SNES-like role-playing games and ports from older 8-bit and 16-bit systems. As a result the handheld became a living time capsule for players who grew up with those games, a current system still getting new releases in the styles of the past.

Meanwhile the hardware kept changing around the games. The SP's front-light came in 2003, and a brighter backlit SP followed on September 19, 2005. That same month the much smaller Game Boy Micro arrived, back in the original's sideways shape. Even the Nintendo DS, launched on November 21, 2004 and able to play GBA games, needed almost four years to catch its own predecessor: Nintendo only announced that the DS had passed the GBA in worldwide sales in late October 2008.

The best Game Boy Advance games

Ranked by how often players recommend them, with picks other players backed counting extra. Golden Sun takes #1, and Metroid Fusion sits third.

Every Game Boy Advance list

Handhelds for Game Boy Advance games

Almost every emulation handheld runs GBA games well, so the real difference is how much of the screen the picture fills. The ones below fill the most of it with even pixels.