Game Boy Micro

~ the obituary ~

By 2005 the screen in a Turkish student's pocket was a phone, and it had been for a few years. I was twenty-one, at university, watching broadband finally arrive at home. A separate hundred-dollar device whose only job was playing cartridges was not a purchase anyone in that orbit was making, and Nintendo had no serious retail presence in the country as far as I ever saw. handhelds came through importers at importer prices, which put them in a different conversation entirely.

So I never held one. I have looked at a lot of photographs of it since, which is a normal thing to end up doing with this particular machine, because twenty years on the Game Boy Micro is mostly famous for being beautiful.

Reggie Fils-Aime announced it at E3 on 17 may 2005 and it shipped in Japan on 13 september, then North America six days later, with Europe following in november. Fifty millimeters by a hundred and one, and eighty grams in the hand. The screen was a backlit two inches with brightness you could actually adjust, and it was noticeably sharper than the one in the Game Boy Advance SP still sitting on sale next to it.

The faceplates snapped off. You could buy others and change the front of the machine, which was an unusually direct piece of Nintendo hardware personality for the era. Not that many people outside Japan got to use them, since the extra plates were limited in North America and never sold in Europe at all.

~ the case file ~

~ the object ~

Inside it was a Game Boy Advance and nothing more. Same 32-bit ARM chip at the same 16.78 MHz, same cartridges out of the same library. This was not a generation, it was an industrial design exercise applied to hardware Nintendo had been shipping since 2001.

As an exercise it succeeded completely. The Micro is the point where the Game Boy stopped looking like a toy and started looking like a product an adult would put on a desk, all metal and clean edges, small enough to vanish into a jacket. People who own one still talk about it the way they talk about a nice watch. The problem is that nobody had asked Nintendo for a nicer Game Boy Advance, and by 2005 quite a lot of people had stopped asking for a Game Boy Advance at all.

~ why nobody bought it ~

The price was wrong in a way that could not be explained at the counter. Ninety-nine dollars against seventy-nine for the SP, for a machine with a smaller screen that could not play the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color cartridges the SP handled fine. Everything you were paying extra for was aesthetic and everything you were giving up was on the box.

Then there was the timing, which was worse. The Nintendo DS had been out since late 2004 and it played Game Boy Advance cartridges too. The DS Lite was months away and would play them in a body nearly as attractive as the Micro's. Retailers in North America understood this perfectly and quietly gave the Micro a soft launch, since floor space spent on it was floor space not spent on a DS. Satoru Iwata later said out loud that the marketing push behind the DS may have hurt the Micro, which is a polite way of describing a company competing with itself and winning.

~ what it became ~

2.42 million sold worldwide by march 2007, against 81 million for the Game Boy Advance line as a whole. Production ran to 2008, longer than the sales justified, mostly to work stock off the shelves. When it ended, the words Game Boy ended with it. Nothing Nintendo has released since has carried the name.

The afterlife has been kinder than the shop window was. Prices for a clean one climbed steadily through the collector years and modders started fitting better screens into them. The Micro settled into its permanent role as the handheld people admire rather than the one they played. That is a real thing to be. It is just not what the 2005 sales target said.

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