Rest in peace, Stevo.

"Who killed the GBA?"

Own up, come on, who did it? Who was it that killed the Game Boy?

There it was sitting quietly and minding its own business, keeping itself to itself. Then all of a sudden: "BLAM!" a pixellated explosion later and it was all gone. And did anybody really even notice? Did anybody even really care?

No, you didn't, did you? You were all looking at the shiny new DS with its touch screen and mircophone, cooing foolishly at the beautiful 3D graphics and marvelling at the amazing stereo sound. The possibilities were endless: wireless gaming with friends; wireless play across the internet; frantic blowing into the microphone to win points; drawing on the touchscreen to make your dreams become reality. It even had a little slot to put your Game Boy Advance games in, should you be feeling nostalgic. It does not support mulitplayer GBA though, it's more just to remind you of how things used to be, to serve as a medium to help the transition from 2D sprites and buttons to the wonders of 3D and touching the video game world.

Perhaps it's just me, but ever since I bought my DS, the only reason a GBA cartridge has been in the slot is to keep dust from getting into the workings of my precious new machine. I think that I have booted a game up on it once, maybe twice, but just out of boredom. And now it seems that the GBA is receding into the darkness in the West, the release schedules are shorter and shorter, and the games made available more and more of the same type of licenced rubbish that normally looks like padding in the normal life cycle of a console: now it just looks sad.

Make no mistake, I love the DS -having read previous columns you will know the long and sordid history of my love affair with the dual-screened marvel, it really is wonderful and I love it. But was it not supposed to be the "Third Pillar" to the Gamecube and Game Boy Advance? Was it not supposed to be the back-up support to the other more established consoles?

Initially, I believe this was the case. I feel deep in my bones (made of stone though they be) that the DS was nothing more than a short-term answer to the threat posed by the impending launch of the PSP. Although it may have been in development for a long time prior to the launch of the PSP, it appeared then that it was an attempt to steal the thunder of the new, more advanced, machine. I do not believe that anyone at Nintendo anticipated the success of the DS- maybe they knew that they were on to something special when they finally began to beta test it and roll it out to the press, but at the beginning at least, it was a stop gap measure.

For example, look at the launch line-up: two outstanding games there in the form of Mario 64 and WarioWare, and one of those was an aging N64 game that was great back in the day -and is still great now, but launching with a remake strongly smells of something fishy. Though the remake probably took a while to put together, it seems like a real no-brainer. Add to that the fact that WarioWare is not historically the most imprssive graphically, nor the most complicated gameplay-wise game out there, the blanks fill in themselves.

And then the DS exploded -not like the GBA it so ruthlessly killed, but in terms of sales. Nintendo had another success on their hands -the first time since the launch of the original GBA, and this "Third Pillar" was suddenly Pillar of the Community. If the Game Boy was Nintendo's first major cash cow, then the DS has simply become the Cow that gives golden milk, lays golden eggs and lets you touch it at the same time. Crikey.

So now the once all-conquering Christmas best-seller has been superceded, rendered obsolete and superfluous by a system that was supposedly its long-lost twin. The GBA Micro, which is undoubtedly a lovely pece of kit, is most likely the last time we will see a new hardware launch based on the GBA hardware, which is a shame, because I have had just as much fun with my GBA as my DS. Admittedly, no-one ever stared at me on the bus because I was blowing into my GBA, but that just means that the type of fun was different rather than implying that there was no fun to be had.

The GBA still sells in every territory, but it is now a matter of time before hardware production is halted. Recent sales figures in Japan show it peaking at around 3,000 units per week -a figure that Microsoft would kill for, but for a system that used to shift 20,000 units on a quiet week during the summer drought, it is a sad end. In many ways, it really is a necessary end: technology marches on and the market shifts with it. If we were all still playing the NES today, there would be no need for the wonders of the Wii, nor indeed the Gamecube. Sadly, things must change, and the GBA is the main victim of that change.

So what is next? With the launch of the Wii looming all eyes have turned in the direction of the home console market once more. The Game Boy Evolution (or whatever it may turn out to be) is far at the back of everyone's mind. At least, outside of Ninteno HQ in Japan. I have no doubt that those canny engineers are cooking up something right now that will eventually overtake even the mighty DS. For now, we watch, wait and anticipate.

RIP GBA, we had some fun times.

Iun Hockley
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