History and Development of the GBA - 1994 - 2001

in 1989 the original game boy was released and 12 long years later Nintendo finally released a proper follow-up to the Game Boy line in the form of the Game Boy Advance and then just a few years after the Game Boy Advance was released the DS came along and the rest is history so why did the GBA come out as late as it did were Nintendo planning to release it a lot sooner well basically yes Nintendo was actually planning to release a successor to the original game boy in 1996 but that fell through and we got the Game Boy Color a few years later instead so in this video I'm going to take you on a deep dive of the history of the Game Boy Advance let's get started thank you so the story of the gba's development actually begins in 1994. the game boy had already been out for five years at that point and it was about time for Nintendo to start coming up with plans for a true successor Nintendo were in talks with a British chip manufacturer called arm to supply some new chips for their next Generation handheld tentatively titled project Atlantis because they were planning to originally release the system in 1996 to coincide with the Atlanta Olympic Games rumors began circulating about the Atlantis in magazines around the time it did seem extremely ambitious probably too ambitious apparently it would have featured a 32-bit CPU and been capable of 3D Graphics role in the PlayStation and Saturn and have a 30 hour battery life that all sounds way too good to be true especially in 1994. after a while the rumors began to die down and Nintendo kept releasing new upgrades to their Game Boy lineup including the Game Boy Pocket the Game Boy Light which was a Japanese exclusive system that actually came with a backlight light as you can see my screen's a little bit damaged I need to get that replaced at some point and then of course like I mentioned in the intro the Game Boy Color too but the Game Boy Color wasn't really a generational leap like a lot of people would have hoped based on the rumors and if there was any doubt that project Atlantis was the Game Boy Color Howard Lincoln of Nintendo of America actually shot that rumor down in an interview that he did with Gamespot around the release of the Game Boy Color so yes Atlantis was its own 32-bit project completely separate to the Game Boy Color which I'll be covering in a future video apart from a few small mentions of the name Nintendo never really acknowledged the existence of the Atlantis that was until 2009 when the Prototype console was casually shown off in a GDC talk by masoto kurahawa the designer of the DSi Olympics although the Talk's only been uploaded in Japanese it didn't stop me watching the entire thing and there's also a load of other really interesting prototypes and development Hardware that he actually shown off in there which I would love to cover in the future and although it did look quite bulky in those early pictures honestly it's not much difference in size compared to the Game Gear or the links back in the day so for a comparison here's kind of how the Atlantis would have looked if it did come out back in 1996 as planned and just for fun I actually took a photo of my switch OLED and compared that with a DSi as well and it's really crazy to think that Nintendo now has a handheld that's actually bigger than the Atlantis would have been back then how times change I guess and the design of the Atlantis with its four face buttons kind of reminds me of something like the analog pocket which is actually a really nice and comfortable handheld so it is such a shame that it never got released because I still think it would have done really well but there was something even more interesting than that GDC talk which I found while I was researching for this video and it's actually something that cements those magazine rumors as fact the video in question was a 2019 interview with Dave Jagger who was responsible for the develop movement of the arm architecture in the 90s he actually stated in this video that he worked with Nintendo in 1994 on an upcoming project which would have been the project Atlantis and I presume he stayed around and worked with Nintendo on the actual Game Boy Advance as well a lot of people think that uh the the chip that this became was for Nokia it actually wasn't it was benintendo and back then games cartridges plugged in and they were basically a bit of plastic a tiny little bit of brass and a stack of memory so on a train from uh Nintendo to a ski weekend at Matsumoto in 1994 and literally on a napkin uh I started writing that's the 16-bit instruction set it was pretty much the same one that I used in my thesis and around the time when he was working with Nintendo in 1994 that's just after armored released the arm7 chipset which is what the magazine said the Atlantis was going to be running on so I was so happy to find this piece of information and everything suddenly clicked together and forms a really good picture of what the system could have been like he actually goes into loads of detail about how exactly all those chips worked and eventually the chips that were used in the GBA a bit later on too so I definitely recommend giving it a watch after if you're interested in some of the technical details the Atlantis is such a fascinating glimpse into what could have been and I honestly believe that releasing such a powerful handheld in the 90s would have completely changed the landscape of handheld consoles at the time maybe things like the Wonder Swan or the Neo Geo pocket would have been completely different systems or maybe been a lot more powerful maybe Sega would have carried on its handheld line and released a true successor to the Game Gear I love love to speculate about all these possibilities and apparently I'm not the only one I found this absolutely amazing website which is basically dedicated to things like this someone actually created an entire possible and future timeline if Nintendo had released the Atlantis it goes into so much detail it was just an absolutely fascinating read it's a ridiculous sight and people have spent so much time coming up with these things anyway back to reality now and we're moving forward a few years to 1996 and in the intervening years while Nintendo were experimenting with the new arm processor and the possibility of a 32-bit handheld the original game boy was still going strong and the Atlantis project was ultimately canceled in favor of extending the original game boy's life a little bit longer with upgrades like the pocket the light and the color alongside games like Pokemon which really helped it in its later years but by the late 90s the technology in the Game Boy and Game Boy Color was definitely looking a bit longer in the tooth and Nintendo finally had some true competition and with things like the Bandai Wonder Swan which were actually designed by the creator of the Game Boy which I'll be covering in a future video as well it wasn't actually until 1998 and the release of the Game Boy Color that Nintendo finally started working properly on the Game Boy Advance as we know it today it took them two years to develop and finish the Game Boy Advance internally and then another year to bring it to Market in 2001. there are a lot of similarities with the Game Boy Advance and the canceled Atlantis project which came before it they both feature an arm chip the Atlantis was going to feature the arm710 and The Game Boy Advance features the slightly upgraded version which is the arm7 DMI there was actually an Iwata ask style interview on Nintendo's Japanese website just before the launch of the GBA to give a glimpse into its development and I managed to track down the original site and translate it into English and here's some of the most interesting information that I found on there the first year of the development was focused on defining the CPU specs and the screen size interestingly either mentioned the fact that having a wide screen was going to help towards porting console games to the system but as we all know the GBA mostly ended up having ports of SNES games and the occasional PS1 Titan but none of those were in widescreen so the fact that they chose a widescreen for the handheld for the reason of having ports and then the fact that the ports didn't really fit very well onto the screen is a little bit of a strange reason to go for widescreen I honestly think it's because widescreen was becoming the norm in TVs at the time and they just thought it looked a bit more futuristic and maybe it was more of a sales pitch thing than an actual Improvement to the gameplay and like we all know now a few years later with the DS they actually went back to the old 4x3 style aspect ratio instead and it actually makes playing GBA games on the DS a little bit strange because you have big black bars at the top and the bottom the SNES ports because of this wide screen and the slightly reduced resolution compared to a TV were actually all scaled in a little bit if they wanted to retain the same size of the Sprites so it did kind of have comment the detriment to the gameplay but obviously the games that were built specifically for the Game Boy Advance take great advantage of that extra screen space another part of the interview talks about some of the design challenges with the system and it's really interesting to read that even back in the late 90s when they were designing the GBA they actually tried to go with the clamshell design like the SP ended up having but apparently it was just too thick and too bulky with the technology at the time so it's really cool that they did go back and revisit that and of course the gbasp today is known as one of the best designs for the Game Boy out of any Game Boy really it just looks so sleek and futuristic even today they also discussed the fact that the system was designed to be the next evolution of 2D pixel art Graphics rather than going down the 3D route which would have drained the battery considerably interestingly this final design for the original Game Boy Advance was actually designed externally by a company in Tokyo called curiosity I was having a look on their website and it seems like they're actually mostly focused on architecture projects but I did also find some really interesting products that they designed including this feature phone from 2009 which I think looks really sleek and like someone on Twitter pointed out to me it actually resembles the game boy micro quite a lot which is really cool to see let me know in the comments whether you actually like the design of the original Game Boy Advance and let me know what you think about the design of this phone too in 1999 Nintendo finally started sending out Dev kits to potential Developers for the GBA The Gaming website IGN actually got a Hands-On with one of these boards for an article they were writing about the system before its release the boards at the time were known as the GBA Target board TS2 standing for test system it's really interesting to see what the developers would have been working on at the time this TS2 board was actually built upon the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color dev kit which also used this same flat circuit design the board used a modified SNES controller to be able to control the game and had a gba LCD screen on the board itself so developing could actually see what it would look like running on the real system the YouTube channel hard for games did a fantastic video on this looking at it in extreme detail it's also one of my favorite channels too I absolutely love seeing all of the Prototype stuff that he manages to get it's so fascinating so definitely go and check that channel out after you've watched this video and then a little bit later on a much more professional looking dev kit made by intelligent systems at Nintendo was actually sent out to Publishers and developers this one had a gba cart slot and it had an optional GBA link where developers could actually play their games and debug it on the computer at the same time which must have been really useful there's another great Channel called behind the code which did a fantastic rundown of everything that this intelligent systems dev kit can do as well as these there are a few other interesting Dev devices that I found which I'll show on the screen briefly and I would love to try and get some of this stuff someday you can find out about most of this at the website called retroversing.com and I definitely recommend checking out if you into this sort of stuff like I am things must have been really exciting internally at Nintendo because in 2000 they were finally going to be ready to show off the Game Boy Advance so let's move forward to the year 2000 and see what the launch of the system was like so we're now in the year 2000 and Nintendo actually decided not to show anything of the Game Boy Advance or the GameCube for that matter at E3 that year because they were saving everything for their very own event in Japan called space World instead this was a very special event for Nintendo the event actually spans several days and it was open to the public as well as the press and thanks to this incredible video we can actually see exactly what it was like inside at the time I always imagined spaceworld to be kind of a dark show with nothing more than a main stage and maybe a few booths to play on some of the announced games but this actually looks like a much bigger and brighter event than I ever imagined it even had its own Nintendo merch store at the show too I would have just absolutely loved to go to something like this as a kid it must have been so exciting in terms of the Gameboy Advanced at the show though there were some very interesting differences between the GBA that was shown off then and the final product that came out a year later both in terms of the games on show and the hardware there was a bunch of unreleased color variants for the system at space world including this clear one here with blue buttons a silver one with blue buttons a clear purple one with orange buttons and technically a brown d-pad and shoulder buttons and orange A and B buttons but you can't quite tell in this video but again hard for games did a fantastic video where it actually shows the very subtle difference between them and there was also a silver version with orange buttons as well which actually looks like it has the same sort of brown d-pad and shoulder buttons as the purple one and as well as those ones at the show there was actually one other pre-release color that never saw the light of day and that was this very red version here which actually came with some development kits it's such a shame that we didn't get these brighter colors for the Game Boy Advance because the ones that did come out at launch were a lot more dull in comparison we did end up getting one and quite similar to the berry red one but it was a very rare system that you could only get from one specific store in Canada and it's actually thought that only around a thousand of these actually exist today a few months after space World in Japan Nintendo actually came to the UK to a show called ects to show off the same systems there too and the reception to it at both events was extremely positive it's so cool to see something so important to Nintendo's history actually being held at a place that I've actually been to for shows myself I really wish I could have gone there as a kid the first show that I ever went to personally was a show called gamestars live which was also in London just around the release of the DS which I'll be covering in my DS history video coming very soon so if you are enjoying this then let YouTube know by giving me a thumbs up and a subscribe and now let's get back on to some more Game Boy Advance history around this time too Nintendo also began sending out something called the wideboy64 to the press this was actually a device that allows you to capture gameplay play and screenshots from the Game Boy Advance to using things like commercials or in magazines for printing the screenshots out there was also an intelligent systems version as well which looks a lot like the dev kit from before but this one was strictly for capturing gameplay by the end of 2000 Hope was really building for the launch of the system the next year and I was so excited for the launch as well it was actually the first console I ever got on launch and I could not have been happier it launched here in the UK on June 22nd 2001 and here is a photo of me on launch day with my original Game Boy Advance I don't know why I was posing like that but I was so happy to get it the games that I got on launch were Rayman advance and pin OB wings of Adventure kind of strange choices for launch games and a bit later on I did also get Mario Advance and f-zero maximum velocity 2 and it quickly became my favorite handheld console and especially the fact that you could go back and play some original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games was just fantastic so the Game Boy Advance era was off to a fantastic start and in the next video in this series I'm going to be taking a look at all of the different variations of the Game Boy Advance that were released from 2001 all the way up until 2008 and if you love The GBA as much as I do then I think you will really enjoy this video up here where I covered my top 15 games for the system thank you so much for watching please subscribe if you enjoyed this and I'll see you very soon for the next episode goodbye

Channel: RetroBreak

Views: 21,370

Keywords: Game Boy Advance History, Game Boy Advance, GBA Development, RetroBreak, Retro Break, GBA History, gameboy advance, Game Boy History, Game Boy Development, Gameboy History, Game Boy, Project Atlantis, Nintendo history., Gameboy Micro, 2000s gaming, Retro gaming, Gaming History, Retro Gaming, Game design, Nintendo, Handheld gaming, Video game history, Game development, Game consoles, Portable gaming, Technology, Console wars, Game industry, GBA Atlantis, Gba games

Id: eaIGRNQC1T4

Length: 15min 49sec (949 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023