Game Boy Advance

Lore & Background

Development of the Game Boy Advance began under the codename Advanced Game Boy (AGB), utilizing the 32-bit processing power from an earlier shelved prototype called Project Atlantis. Details emerged at the Space World 1999 trade show in late August, and Nintendo officially announced the system on September 1, 1999, initially targeting a Japanese release in August 2000 and North American and European launches by the end of that year. The final design, revealed on August 24, 2000, featured a landscape form factor with buttons on the sides of the device, a departure from the portrait layout of previous Game Boy models; this design was the work of French designer Gwénaël Nicolas and his Tokyo-based studio, Curiosity Inc.

The GBA's hardware uses a custom system on a chip (SoC) manufactured by Sharp Corporation, integrating the ARM7TDMI processor for GBA games and the Sharp SM83 processor for backward compatibility with Game Boy and Game Boy Color titles. The display is a 2.9-inch TFT color LCD with a 3:2 aspect ratio. The system supports up to 128 sprites per frame, multiple background rendering modes including affine transformation and bitmap modes for 3D geometry, and sound via two PCM sample channels combined with a four-channel programmable sound generator inherited from the original Game Boy. The console includes a D-pad, six action buttons (A, B, L, R, SELECT, START), and a link port for connecting to other Game Boy devices or the GameCube home console.

Reader's Guide

The Game Boy Advance established itself as the dominant handheld of its generation, massively outselling its competitors—the Nokia N-Gage and Bandai's WonderSwan—with 81.51 million units sold worldwide by June 2010. Its successor, the Nintendo DS, launched on November 21, 2004, and was backward compatible with GBA games. Despite the DS's release, the GBA remained Nintendo's predominant handheld console in terms of market presence and global installed base through 2008. It was only in late October 2008 that Nintendo announced the DS had officially surpassed the GBA worldwide in sales, though in the United States this milestone was not reached until late 2009. The original GBA model was followed in 2003 by the Game Boy Advance SP, a redesigned clamshell model with a frontlit screen; a backlit revision of the SP appeared in 2005, and a miniaturized redesign called the Game Boy Micro was released in September 2005. All Game Boy Advance models were discontinued in the Americas in 2008 and globally by the end of 2010, ending a production run of over nine years.

Did You Know?

• The Game Boy Advance was released in mainland China in 2004 under the name iQue Game Boy Advance.
• The GBA's landscape design was created by French designer Gwénaël Nicolas and his Tokyo-based studio, Curiosity Inc.
• The system's SoC contains two processors: the ARM7TDMI for GBA games and the Sharp SM83 for backward compatibility with Game Boy and Game Boy Color games.
• Nintendo spent about $75 million marketing the system in North America.