Game Boy Advance
Nintendo's 32-bit handheld released June 2001, with a landscape shape and full backward compatibility with the entire Game Boy and Game Boy Color library. The screen was notoriously hard to see until the GBA SP (2003) added a front-lit clamshell. Around 80 million sold across the GBA, SP, and Micro variants.
The Game Boy Advance launched in North America in June 2001 as the successor to the Game Boy Color, featuring a 32-bit processor and a horizontal orientation that felt entirely different from previous handhelds. A unique selling point was backward compatibility — the entire Game Boy and Game Boy Color library played on it, meaning your old cartridges still had value.
One persistent complaint haunted the original GBA: its unlit reflective screen was hard to see without strong ambient light, a problem Nintendo corrected in 2003 with the Game Boy Advance SP, which added a clamshell form factor and a front-lit display you could finally use in the dark. A third variant, the tiny Game Boy Advance Micro (2005), followed. Across all three versions, the family moved approximately 80 million units, making it one of Nintendo's most successful handhelds.
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The grey brick: four AA batteries, a pea-green screen you had to angle toward a lamp, and Tetris in the box. It was outgunned on paper by every colour handheld it faced, and it buried all of them. Nintendo kept the line it started alive until 2003.