Super Mario - Jeff Ryan [80]
19 – MARIO’S TIME MACHINE
THE GAME BOY ADVANCE
There had been several enhancements to the Game Boy over the years. It gained a different colored case—the Play It Loud edition. It got smaller—the Game Boy Pocket. It gained a backlight—the Game Boy Light, and a color screen—the Game Boy Color. Nintendo put out accessories like a camera and a printer, toyed with a 16-bit version in 1995, and considered a touch pad adapter in 1998. But through it all it was still essentially an 8-bit machine, making graphics in 1999 and 2000 that were only fresh by 1983 standards.
Like moths to a bug zapper, company after company tried its hand making a handheld that could compete with the Mork & Mindy – era visuals. Sega’s Game Gear, Atari’s Lynx, Bandai’s Wonderswan, NEC’s TurboExpress, and a Chinese system called the Gamate were all robust game systems with hardly any games or support, which could never claim double-digit market share. Tiger even released Game.com, which downloaded games from the Internet and included a touch screen and stylus. Good ideas, but (as Yamauchi knew, fresh from the 64DD disaster) the timing was wrong. They were all losing to a system whose biggest hit was Super Mario Bros. Deluxe, a barely retinkered fourteen-year-old game.
The Neo Geo Pocket Color, released in 1999, had the best chance of them all. It was inexpensive (under seventy dollars), came in a variety of colors (a tactic Nintendo borrowed to sell to collectors), and after an exclusive launch with eToys made its way into all the big retailers’ showrooms. It could communicate with the Sega Dreamcast, then a hot new console. Nintendo squashed it, thanks to advanced marketing buzz of a fully updated Game Boy. Customers knew that Nintendo was worth waiting for, and kept their debit cards in their wallets.
Twelve years—a cat’s lifetime—was apparently the right amount of time to wait for a true upgrade. The word “withered” was more and more apt for the Game Boy Color: eight bits? It was a legacy machine, surviving (and thriving) because few wanted to discard all the Dr. Mario and Pokémon cartridges they had amassed over the years.
Legacy, then, would be what the next edition would embrace. Codenamed Project Atlantis, it would include a Z80 coprocessor, which would allow it to be fully compatible with all the previous Game Boy cartridges. The screen would be wider, and the whole thing would be rounded, like a junk-food fruit pie. It would add on a pair of shoulder buttons, to allow for double the game-playing complexity while still keeping the aesthetics minimal. Gamers got a robust fifteen hours per pair of AA batteries. It would have a 32-bit CPU, which would be able to easily whip up near-perfect 16-bit graphics. Think “portable SNES.”
This, in fact, was exactly what Nintendo wanted third-party game developers to think. They had all made bundles with great SNES games a decade ago, before moving onto slick polygons and control sticks. All those games needed was a little retooling, and they’d be ready for the matte-black cartridge the size of a perforated graham cracker segment. Every game from 1990 on could have a second life, a paperback release, on the Game Boy Advance.
To prove it, Nintendo pulled a stunt that would have been called slothful and small-minded