Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance Platform
Series: Platform Studies
Celebrate Nintendos Game Boy Advance in this video game history that traces the handhelds network of hardware and software afterlives! In 2002, Nintendo of America launched an international marketing campaign for the Game Boy Advance that revolved around the slogan Who Are You?asking potential buyers which Nintendo character, game, or even device they identified with and attempting to sell a new product by exploiting players nostalgic connections to earlier ones. Today, nearly 2 decades after its release, and despite the development of newer and more powerful systems, Nintendos Game Boy Advance lives on, through a community that continues to hack, modify, emulate, make, break, remake, redesign, trade, use, love, and play with the platform. In Who Are You?, Alex Custidio considers each component of this networkhardware, software, peripheral, or practiceto illuminates the platforms unique features as a computational system and a cultural artifact. Youll learn about: The evolution of Nintendos handhelds and consoles, and how they embed nostalgia into the hardware Nintendos expansion of the Game Boy Advance platform through interoperability Physical and affective engagement with the Game Boy Advance Portability, private space, and social interaction The platformization of nostalgia Fan-generated content including homebrew, hacking, and hardware modding And much more! Although the Game Boy Advance is neither the most powerful nor the most popular of Nintendo’s handhelds, Custodio argues, it is the platform that most fundamentally embodies Nintendo’s reliance on the aesthetics and materiality of nostalgia.
About Artists & Writers:
Alex Custodio is a scholar, writer, and artist living in Montreal.