The Game Boy Advance platform as computational system and cultural
artifact, from its 2001 release through hacks, mods, emulations,
homebrew 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
two decades after its release, and despite the development of newer and
more powerful systems, Nintendo's 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 this book
Alex Custodio traces the network of hardware and software afterlives of
the Game Boy Advance platform.
Each chapter considers a component of this network--hardware, software,
peripheral, or practice--that illuminates the platform's unique features
as a computational system and a cultural artifact. Examining the
evolution of the design and architecture of Nintendo's handhelds and
home consoles, and the constraints imposed on developers and players,
for example, Custodio finds that Nintendo essentially embeds nostalgia
into its hardware. She explores Nintendo's expansion of the 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 e-waste--the final
afterlife of consumer electronics. 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.
