WonderSwan

~ the obituary ~

the wonderswan never officially left japan. bandai shipped it on march 4 1999 as the last handheld design gunpei yokoi worked on before he died in a 1997 car accident. yokoi had built the game boy at nintendo and walked away after the virtual boy hurt him professionally. he founded koto laboratory in akihabara and signed a development contract with bandai to do one more handheld. he did not live to see it launched. the device came out posthumous.

what bandai released: a one-handed black-and-white handheld at ¥4,800 designed to be held vertically for some games and horizontally for others. it ran about thirty hours on a single aa battery. the wonderswan color landed in december 2000 at ¥6,800 with the obvious color upgrade. the swancrystal arrived in 2002 with a tft screen. across all three revisions the line sold about 3.5 million units and peaked at around 8% of the japanese handheld market. there was never a north american or european retail release at all.

the software lineup was the actual reason the platform mattered. squaresoft, then a big enough publisher to move handhelds on its own, brought the original final fantasy and final fantasy ii to the wonderswan color as full remakes. bandai's own digimon and gundam catalogs lived on the device. the puzzle game gunpey, named after yokoi himself, became the unofficial mascot title.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was up against ~

the game boy advance launched in march 2001 at ¥9,800 and immediately took the part of the market that wanted real third-party support. nintendo had spent twelve years building a developer ecosystem that bandai could not match in eighteen months. squaresoft, the publisher that had given the wonderswan its tentpole releases, started porting the same final fantasy remakes to the game boy advance once the relationship with nintendo thawed. the wonderswan kept getting niche releases but the slope of the curve was already negative by the end of 2001.

~ what really happened ~

bandai discontinued the wonderswan in 2003 without a formal announcement event. the last batch of new games shipped that year, mostly licensed manga titles and one final original puzzler. the official site stayed up for years after the hardware was dead, hosting download images for the few homebrew releases the community had figured out how to load. as a corporate decision it was quiet. bandai still had tamagotchi and digimon doing well enough that one failed handheld did not threaten the company.

~ the long tail ~

import enthusiasts kept the wonderswan in print in english-language game magazines for years past its actual death. emulation arrived early and was easy enough that anyone who wanted to play the final fantasy remakes could do it on a pc by 2004. the device itself has aged into a small, cheap collector piece that runs on one aa battery the way yokoi designed it to. it is the only handheld he ever finished, and it is the only handheld of its generation that you can still buy for under twenty dollars at a tokyo retro shop.

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