2008 – 2009retired
Lego Indiana Jones
“The boulder rolled on; the bricks stayed golden.”
“It folded shut like a good book, and it never lost our place.”
Launched in Japan on March 21, 2001, the Game Boy Advance brought a far more powerful ARM7 processor and better graphics to the handheld that had already defined portable gaming. It kept backward compatibility with Game Boy Color games, so your old library came along for the ride. It massively outsold rivals like Nokia's N-Gage and Bandai's WonderSwan.
Nintendo kept polishing it: the clamshell, frontlit SP arrived in 2003, a backlit SP followed in 2005, and the tiny Game Boy Micro arrived that September. By the time sales ended in 2010, the family had sold 81.51 million units worldwide. The Nintendo DS, launched in 2004, played GBA games too — so the line didn't die so much as hand over the keys.
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“The boulder rolled on; the bricks stayed golden.”
“Five to twenty dollars, countless downloads, one brand that never made the next-console cut.”
“No discs, no cartridges, no goodbye — just a console that streamed its heart out for the developing world.”