Did You Know Gaming? has covered the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo’s popular successor to the Game Boy Color.
That starts with when hardware designer Masato Kuwahara showed a prototype Game Boy successor at GDC 2009. Called Project Atlantis, the codename was chosen because Nintendo had planned to release the system during the 1996 Olympic Games that took place in Atlanta.
When the system’s components led to it being too large to fit into a pocket, Nintendo went back to square one. After Game Boy Color was released to plug the gap, the company began working on Game Boy Advance – a process that took two years from early planning to launch.
Nintendo had manually checked that every Game Boy and Game Boy Color game would work on the new handheld, adding a physical switch to the hardware design that would detect what type of cartridge had been inserted.
What’s interesting is that Nintendo had also experimented with a touch screen panel adapter and 3D visuals for Game Boy Advance at the time – elements that would later be implemented with Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS.
There are more lesser-known facts packed into the video, which you can catch below:
