Nintendo to launch a new Gameboy Advance 2 system in 2005?

[Super Mega C]

The DS was just a marketing ploy to prevent the PSP from gaining a foothold in the hand held market while they readied GBA2. Some may see this as a pointless waste of R&D money, but consider how much Nintendo has to lose in the handheld market to a competitor like Sony. It might not have always been inteded as this though. The dual screen might have originally been something the R&D labs cooked up as a possible feature for the GBA2. It could also be something along the lines of an experiment to see how the public would take to something so different, which is why they used such inexpensive tech with it. There are a number of posible reasons, but I'll stick with my first conclusion as the primary one.

[BryanM]

Still waiting for the GBC2

[XoPachi]

I genuinely hope the post above you was WHOLLY serious. Please give me that laugh today.

[Air Master Burst]

Considering the date it was posted it's very likely a genuine take. A lot of the louder and stupider segments of the hardcore gamer crowd at the time looked down on the DS as gimmicky nonsense for little kids.

Of course, once they all actually played a DS they changed their tune, but early impressions could get hilariously bitchy; especially among the console wars crowd.

[BryanM]

The Pennyarcade guy who does their blog text infamously thought the two screens was stupid in his first impressions, if you dig a bit you can find some of his bad takes. There's certainly a case to be made about it coming at the cost of a higher res screen (Polygon-based DS and 3DS games look a LOT better in emulation, when prescaling is applied to the geometry. Thread complete with the lead developer saying how awful it would look a few pages back, "it's meant to be shitty and tiny".) or the forward compatibility with future systems with a single screen (a dedicated "swap screens" button is too much for the normies to figure out). But as a standalone unit, it really made them unique and special.

I just always found it super cute people didn't understand Nintendo's "this new console isn't replacing our old console (despite the entirety of the history of game consoles working that way)" was a corporate lie that actually meant "we'd really like it if you kept buying our current product for a little longer". They used the same lie with the Nintendo Switch when it replaced the 3DS and Wii-U.

[To Far Away Times]

We can look back at history and laugh at it, but the DS really was unproven at the time, and the Game Boy was like the Walkman or the iPod. That's not a brand you give up easily.

I always interpreted the "third pillar" to mean that a traditional Game Boy 2 would arrive not too long after the DS, and the DS would be an experimental system, rather than Nintendo trying to trick people into buying GBA games for another few years. The DS came out two years before the iPod Touch. The GBA was on an unusually short life cycle (but was still selling quite well) and our experience with touch screens back then was those god awful PDAs.

If you told a board of Nintendo shareholders in the early 00's that you wanted to retire the ubiquitous Game Boy line and go all in on an experimental two screen system with a touch screen that probably would not go over very well.

Nintendogs, Mario Kart DS, and New Super Mario Bros were mega hits and the rest was history.

[BryanM]

Shareholders don't have any understanding or interest in the product.

Every console with a real line up of new games is an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars. None of them will ever be regarded as a disposable toy. The entertainment industry is a ruthless cutthroat hellhole where there's no room for doing anything halfheartedly.

The idea that they would later release a 1DS was utterly farcical. Only ignorant consumers who think games are easy to make could have thought it. Every game released for a platform makes that platform better. Consolidation, not fragmentation, is the goal. It was never going to be trash they randomly threw out for the hell of it like the Virtual Boy. You could hold the thing in your hand and immediately understand they believed in it, from the rechargeable battery alone.

"This thing can play Gamebody Advance games... but it doesn't replace the Gameboy Advance please keep buying the Gameboy Advance." Those words never matched their actions (or even their other words!), it was a quick marketing blurb that never meant anything more than that, that nerds blew up into meaning more than it meant. Because it's fun to speculate about crazy things! ..and because people believe what they wish were true. : /

All this was made up. Over one throwaway marketing sentence. Internet wars over what Nintendo's doing is a fun pastime. I guess the other consoles are too predictable.

The Wii-U is an example of the worst case scenario for the DS. It had five years and a Pokemon game in it, at a minimum. That's how fast they can manage to pivot, and that's the minimum consumer expectations they have to meet. They're never going to scream to customers "yeah the current thing is old shit, stop buying current thing there aren't gonna be any new games made for it anymore."

Mario 64 DS seriously had more money put into it than the entire lineup of Virtual Boy games combined : /

[Despatche]

I think the "GBA2" was just the Micro, but I don't remember this era very well. Which might be for the best, because every time I imagine going back to the mid '00s, threads like this show me the reality.

Everyone forgets now but the (English speaking) public ABSOLUTELY HATED the DS on release. Happened with the 3DS too. The entire "third pillar" thing was precisely because of this, but fortunately people realized how fucking dumb they were being, so this got dropped.

Something else people forget is that the DS came out surprisingly quickly after the GBA, all of like three years. This isn't really like what happened with the move from the GBC to the GBA.

[Air Master Burst]

I think the "GBA2" was just the Micro, but I don't remember this era very well. Which might be for the best, because every time I imagine going back to the mid '00s, threads like this show me the reality.

Yeah, the west was mostly a wasteland for shmups and 2D action between the death of the Dreamcast and the rise of VC/XBL/PSN ports a few years later. We got Gradius V, frothing demand for Ikaruga, Contra: Shattered Soldier, Taito Legends 2, some lazy Milestone ports, and those Mobile Light Force atrocities (poor Gunbird!).

There were some other scattered entries on various compilations but they mostly sucked. Metal Slug Anthology's input lag was almost unplayable, for instance (although MS3 did get a good standalone port for OG Xbox).

[BryanM]

Everyone forgets now but the (English speaking) public ABSOLUTELY HATED the DS on release. Happened with the 3DS too. The entire "third pillar" thing was precisely because of this, but fortunately people realized how fucking dumb they were being, so this got dropped.

It happens literally every Nintendo console, really. There are people who just want to buy a $500 Sony box and have Nintendo become a developer for them, they fundamentally don't have any interest in Nintendo consoles.

And every Nintendo console either bombs and sells a mere 20 million, or explodes and sells 200 million and sets the trend in gaming for the next ten to fifty years.

Something else people forget is that the DS came out surprisingly quickly after the GBA, all of like three years. This isn't really like what happened with the move from the GBC to the GBA.

Yeah, I did forget even thought I lived it. It was a crazy time for technology. Ten years of grello gameboy, three years of color, almost four years of advance, and then boom, clamshell portable that protects its own screen with a rechargeable battery and polygons. They really did have to run like hell to keep up back then.

[Air Master Burst]

clamshell portable that protects its own screen with a rechargeable battery and polygons.

Technically this also describes the GBA SP, but yeah, I doubt we'll ever see that kind of rapid evolution in gaming again.

[Blinge]

Christ Bryan

the necrobump ever

[Air Master Burst]

This thread might be older than some of our members.

[null1024]

was looking for another thread and saw this and I absolutely couldn't resist posting

God, seeing this thread... I genuinely almost forgot that Nintendo had said some dumb shit like "hey, we're not replacing the GBA line, the DS is its own thing for now" instead of actually committing.
It sounded like total corpo-speak "if this fails, well, we have a backup plan" garbage, but like, it's still really weird to see just how badly received it was at the time by some people. Entirely deserved, even if nothing came of it and the DS became the best selling handheld console ever, period.

Also, I completely forgot that the GC price dropped so low. Selling a $150 handheld next to your $100 home console must have seemed nuts at the time.
I ended up with near-launch units for both so I didn't really think about it at the time, but god damn.

[BryanM]

I doubt we'll ever see that kind of rapid evolution in gaming again.

The room temperature super-conductor memes going on lately reminds us of how much more processing power we still haven't been able to exploit yet. We've been hard bottle-necked by current materials and current architectures for a hella long time now; at least one or two paradigm shifts on the order of the transition from vacuum tubes are possible, probably.

But after photo-realism, really where the heck else do they have to go. Will they finally work on making real simulents? AI game masters that aren't limited? Will they jam wires adjacent to the spine from the bloodstream?

It all seems a little much, all just to have a better texture on a turtle shell in a Mario Kart game, you know?

[Lander]

2005, 2023... The mild schadenfreude is the same each time a gaming publication attempts to pressure <Video Game Console> 2 into existence through sheer weight of words. Cope, ya no-horsepower-having panhandlers