Game Boy Advance Video

~ the goodbye ~

One cartridge held one language. That sounds like a footnote and it is the whole economics of the format: a DVD carries five audio tracks on the same disc and ships to five countries, while a Game Boy Advance Video Pak was a mask ROM with the dub burned into it. When Europe got a French edition of the last three Cartoon Network compilations, those were separate physical objects with their own production runs, and no other language ever got made for anything else in the line.

Majesco Entertainment put the first paks on North American shelves on 12 May 2004, having announced the thing the previous year under the name GBA-TV. A pak held two to four episodes, forty to forty-five minutes in total, and cost $9.95. The cartridge shells were light grey so a parent could tell them apart from games at a glance. Nintendo published the Pokemon volumes itself and Majesco published all the rest.

The library grew fast for about eighteen months. June 2004 brought Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. and Cartoon Network and Funimation in alongside the original 4Kids cartridges. November 2004 added Disney Channel series, with Kim Possible and The Proud Family among them. In November 2005 the DreamWorks Movie Paks arrived at $19.99 with a whole film on sixty-four megabytes. Nintendo Power ran the paks as the grand prize in its October 2004 players poll, five winners getting an SP and twenty cartridges each.

Then it stopped. There was no farewell and no final title anybody records as final. Somewhere in early 2007 Majesco stopped ordering ROM and the remaining stock drained out through discount bins, which is how a format ends when it belongs to a licensing deal rather than to a platform.

The hardware traveled and the shelf could not follow it. What Majesco had bought was rights to a rack of American children's television, so the product could only exist where those contracts and that language already lined up, and the one-language cartridge made every new market a new manufacturing run rather than a new sticker. Game Boy Advances were everywhere in Turkey through the gray market, mostly loaded with games that needed no words at all. A sealed English-language pak of a show that never aired here had nowhere to go.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pak that will not talk to a television ~

Put a Video Pak into a GameCube Game Boy Player, which exists to throw a handheld cartridge onto the family TV, and it freezes. The screen reads NOT COMPATIBLE WITH GAME BOY PLAYER in capitals and nothing else happens. The cartridge is running a check for the accessory using the same logo authentication that rumble games used, and refusing on purpose.

That block was put in at the request of the copyright holders, to stop anybody recording the episodes onto a VHS tape or a DVD. It is worth sitting with. A device capable of showing this video on a television was built by the platform owner and sold in shops, and the video was engineered to detect it and stop. The joke is that the output was terrible anyway: 240 by 160 pixels and mono sound, blown up onto a CRT, is not a copy anybody wanted.

~ what got cut to make it fit ~

Thirty-two megabytes against a DVD's four and a half thousand is not a compression problem, it is a rewriting problem, and the choices show. The codec DC Studios wrote is documented in Majesco's patents and its output looks like early Cinepak, with quilting across nearly every frame and color bleeding at the edges of flat cartoon fills.

The edits went further than the picture. Credit sequences were mostly thrown out and replaced with plain text, and the Pokemon opening theme was shortened to buy back a few seconds. Where an episode existed both as a forty-five-minute two-parter and as a twenty-two-minute cut, the short cut is what went on the cartridge. No pak supported subtitles or captions of any kind, so a deaf child had no version of this product at all.

~ shrek at 112p ~

The Movie Paks are where the format met its limit in public. Shrek ran an hour and thirty-three minutes on its own cartridge and Shrek 2 ran an hour and thirty-two, each on sixty-four megabytes, and those were tolerable. Then somebody decided to put Shrek and Shark Tale on one pak, two hours and forty-seven minutes inside the same sixty-four megabytes, and the only way through was to drop the resolution below what the screen could show. That cartridge runs at 112p.

The DS shipped in November 2004, six months after the first paks, and by 2006 third-party flash cards were letting people load their own video onto a handheld for nothing. A sealed cartridge holding two episodes you have already seen stops being a product at that point. The paks still run in any GBA today and get collected precisely because the list stopped growing, which is the ordinary afterlife of a format that nobody has to argue about anymore.

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