LeapFrog Leapster

» see leapfrog.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the leapster sat in the part of the toy aisle that was for parents who wanted their four year old to be reading by five. i was nineteen when this thing launched, an engineering undergrad on ttnet, nowhere near the demographic. anyway, the audience was kids age 4 to 10, the parent was the one paying the $70, the cartridges were $20 each and were math, phonics, animal facts dressed up with a sonic-style sidekick.

the original leapster shipped in october '03 with a 3.5 inch screen, a stylus, a d-pad, four buttons. the runtime was a custom macromedia flash port that leapfrog and macromedia had built together so animators could make leapster software using the same tools they used for web cartoons. for some reason that detail is the most interesting part of the device, flash on a handheld two years before the iphone existed.

the leapster moved real numbers in the us toy market. by mid '05 it was the top-selling handheld at toys r us in some weeks, ahead of the gba sp in those windows. for whatever reason no real european or turkish push, the cartridges were in english only at launch and the software was tied to a us reading curriculum. the version i would have seen in turkey was on the parallel-import shelf at a downtown toy store for the price of two regular game boys.

the kids handheld category got eaten from two sides between '07 and '10. the nintendo ds had a stylus too and a real game library. the iphone arrived in '07 with the app store arriving in '08. by '10 a $70 plastic cartridge handheld looked old. leapfrog responded with the leapster explorer in july '10, kept the form factor, swapped the cartridges for a wireless download catalog, then rebranded the whole line. the original leapster stopped getting new cartridges and the catalog quietly stopped getting reprinted.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it actually was ~

this part i had to look up. the leapster was technically a 32-bit ARM7TDMI machine with 16mb of flash, a 320x240 screen, single speaker. for kids software that was plenty. cartridges held 16mb each. the software was built in macromedia flash and compiled down with leapfrog's in-house authoring tool, which meant the same artist could make a leapster cartridge and a saturday morning web cartoon without learning a second pipeline. for an edutainment device that ran for seven years that was a smart decision.

~ the unraveling ~

the educational claim was always a little soft. the cartridges taught letters and phonics fine, the games around the lessons were the kind of thing that made parents close the door and walk away. that was the business. by '08 the leapster2 added a usb port for online achievement tracking, which gave parents a dashboard. usage stats showed kids spent more time on the carnival mini-games than on the reading drills. for whatever reason the company kept selling it that way.

~ what really happened ~

leapfrog announced the leapster explorer at toy fair '10 as an upgrade. the original leapster line stayed on shelves through holiday '10 at clearance prices and then it was gone. cartridges held resale value for about two years after that on second-hand sites because the explorer was not backward compatible. by '13 the whole explorer line was already getting squeezed by amazon's fire kids tablet and a sub-$50 used ipad mini. leapfrog itself got bought by vtech in '16 and the in-house console business ended.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »