The Game Boy Advance puts 16-bit console power in a pocket

What happened

The horizontal shape was a break from a decade of upright handhelds, putting the screen in the middle and shoulder buttons on the back edge. What mattered more was the leap in capability. Sprite scaling, rotation and layered backgrounds, the sort of effects that had sold 16-bit consoles in the early 1990s, now ran on batteries in a coat pocket. Ports of older console games arrived quickly, and for many younger players they were a first encounter with a catalogue their older siblings had grown up on.

Backward compatibility carried the entire Game Boy and Game Boy Color library forward, which meant the system had hundreds of existing titles from the day it shipped. Nintendo had used the same trick before and would use it again. The original model's screen was unlit and hard to read in anything but bright light, a complaint the company answered with a front-lit clamshell revision and later a backlit one. The redesign, with its folding hinge, pointed toward the handheld Nintendo would release next.

Sales were strong across all three major markets, and the machine gave Nintendo something valuable during a period when its home consoles were losing ground: a portable business nobody else could touch. Role-playing games, strategy titles and licensed tie-ins filled the shelves. It also became the platform where several Japanese studios did their most inventive work of the decade, because small teams and modest budgets still made sense there while console production costs climbed.

The world at the time

The Game Boy line had run for twelve years on essentially the same monochrome architecture, extended by a color model in 1998 and kept alive commercially by Pokemon. Competitors had repeatedly tried better screens and lost on battery life and price. Nintendo's problem was upgrading without abandoning the enormous audience it had already built.

What it changed

Its success reinforced the strategy Nintendo would follow for the rest of the decade, and the clamshell revision led directly into the dual-screen system that followed. Meanwhile the demonstrated appetite for capable portable hardware helped convince Sony that the handheld market was worth entering, which it did four years later.