A Game Boy Advance Story: Portable Perfecton
Console launches are very special events, and Nintendo console launches for many are particularly so. With the launch of the Nintendo Switch on the horizon, I’ve decided to tell my stories of Nintendo console launches past, and why those systems are special to me. This is my Game Boy Advance Story. (Originally published in 2017)
A Game Boy Advance Story
The Game Boy went for a very long time without a proper successor. Pocket was a nice redesign, and Color was a welcome half-step. But even with the games no longer exclusively in creamed spinach color, the Game Boy line was still only at best able to provide the NES experience on the go. By the year 2001, 8-bit simply wasn't cutting it anymore. It was time for Nintendo to give us a new system. For all its faults, the Game Boy Advance was that system, and I was waiting with bated breath.
With video games going more or less exclusively 3D in the home console space and developers having pretty much maxed out what they could reasonably pull off on Nintendo's ancient Game Boy hardware, the announcement of the Game Boy Advance was a true breath of fresh air. There was a certain amount of trepidation on my part when I read that it was going to be a 32-bit system because the last thing I wanted was something that just gave me handheld versions of the kinds of games seen in the early N64/PSX days. I understand that was a necessary growth period for the industry, but I did not want to go back. Fortunately, my fears were quashed when Nintendo dropped the first screenshots of their new portable in action. The GBA was going to basically be a supercharged Super NES, and I was pumped.
As someone who wasn't too fond of the 32/64-bit era, once we had finally moved on to systems like the PS2, Dreamcast, Xbox, and GameCube, I came to like 3D gaming a lot more. Developers were getting the hang of navigating a 3D space, and the graphics, even at their worst, were lightyears ahead of anything the previous generation had to offer. Still, 2D gaming was where my heart was, and seeing what the Game Boy Advance had to offer managed to get me more excited for portable gaming than I had been in a very long time.
The first real images I remember seeing of the GBA were on this poster we got in at my FuncoLand around the time of the announcement. It was a big foldout thing that was split in half between the GBA and the GameCube. It said "The real future of gaming" across the middle, and it had screens of these amazing GameCube tech demos like Metroid, Zelda, and Luigi's Mansion on one side, and on the other a bunch of Game Boy Advance games. I swear I have that poster around here somewhere, but I can't find it! UPDATE 2/16/22: I found it! This is it.
Anyway, seeing that Super Mario Advance looked like Super Mario Bros. 2 was pretty exciting. Seeing what Golden Sun looked like was really exciting. Seeing that the GBA Mario Kart was going to be more like the Super NES game was really, really exciting. And past the poster, when I got my hands on a magazine showing off the launch lineup and I saw Castlevania: Circle of the Moon, exciting as no longer an adequate word. I was getting what appeared to be a sequel to Symphony of the Night, and I was going to be able to play it anywhere. Sold.
What made this period of time all the more exciting was the fact that it wasn't alone. The GameCube was also coming right around the corner. I wasn't just getting new 2D games on GBA, but new 3D stuff that promised to bring Nintendo's franchises up to the quality I had been seeing on the PS2 and Dreamcast. What a time to be a Nintendo fan.
Finally, launch day came for the Game Boy Advance, and it was great. Unfortunately for the purposes of this narrative though, I don't have much of a story connected to it. I still worked at FuncoLand, I had my purple system preordered, and I bought it the day it came out. No muss, no fuss.
Of course what followed was a veritable cornucopia of incredible games that I sunk untold hours into. Remakes and originals alike graced my tiny non-backlit screen and just when I thought I had seen it all, someone would release something else crazy. Remember Boktai? The game that you played with the freaking sun? Or how about that NES Classics line that put a bunch of NES games in the palm of your hands with super collectible packaging? There was an Astro Boy game that was far better than it had a right to be, an incredibly addictive Super Dodge Ball game, a better than arcade-perfect port of Final Fight, the hits just refused to slow down. Then there was the Game Boy Advance SP, which might be one of the most perfect handheld devices ever released, especially for its time, the e-Reader which may have been dumb, but it brought me new Super Mario Bros. 3 levels, and the Game Boy Micro which was, well, pointless... But it sure was neat to have the option to play F-Zero on a screen the size of a postage stamp!
So why do I love my Game Boy Advance? For keeping 2D gaming alive in a 3D world. There's no shortage of great 2D games on the market today, but back in the early 2000's you would be hard pressed to find more than a handful anywhere in the console space. Thank goodness for quality handhelds.
And once the GBA took off, developers couldn't ignore the platform's popularity, so folks really started putting effort into making great games for it, and thanks to the nature of the beast, those games weren't the latest first person shooters or 3D action games. They were 2D, and they were fantastic. Yeah, a lot of them were remasters of Super NES & Genesis games, but then there was stuff like The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, the Castlevania trilogy, Metroid Fusion and Zero Mission, and Sonic the freaking Hedgehog! Nintendo and Sega buried the hatchet and there was now a fully original 2D Sonic the Hedgehog adventure on my Game Boy Advance. It's hard to describe just how monumental this felt back then, but trust me if you weren't around for it, this was beyond huge.
Nintendo handhelds remained the last bastion for quality 2D games for a long time, and the Game Boy Advance played host to some of the best there's ever been. It also spawned a handful of crazy new franchises like WarioWare and Golden Sun that are still very well loved today. Just a top notch system all around.
What's your Game Boy Advance story?
