Handheld gaming is pretty cool. The rave reception of the Nintendo Switch Lite is your most recent proof. But before Nintendo tore down the walls between gaming at home and on the go, there was an entire history of games and devices designed purely for your pocket. And now, the Analogue Pocket is saving those little games for the next generation.
As opposed to closed classic consoles straight from first-party hardware makers like Nintendo and Sega, Analogue specializes in emulator boxes that can directly play your old cartridges like the Analogue Mega Sg and Analogue Super Nt. Actually, “emulation” isn’t even the right word. These devices use Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to more accurately recreate the original hardware through the open source tech hive mind.
And now the Analogue Pocket is bringing that same preservation power to pocket games. The stylish modern Game Boy-esque machine (albeit with more buttons) can play Game Boy games, Game Boy Color games, and Game Boy Advance games through the cartridge slot. Finally, Metal Gear: Ghost Babel is back! With some adapters it can also play games for Sega Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, and Atari Lynx. It even has a link cable for old-school tethered multiplayer. Just hold onto your 3DS if you want DS backwards compatibility.
Fortunately, these old games will also get a boost from the very new hardware. The Analogue Pocket has an absolutely wild 615ppi 1600 x 1440 3.5-inch LCD, way sharper than the Nintendo Switch and miles ahead of the original pea soup Game Boy display back in 1989. There’s a microSD card slot and USB-C charging. A weirder feature is Nanoloop, a built-in synthesizer and audio workstation for composing your own chiptunes music. And perhaps as a nod to devices like the Game Boy Player, Analogue will eventually release a dock for playing Analogue Pocket on your TV using 8BitDo controllers.
While I’ve enjoyed NES and SNES games on the Nintendo Switch, I really hope Nintendo gets around to putting Game Boy games in their online library as well. But if you already have the cartridges, the Analogue Pocket may be better the better option for relieving your handheld childhood when it launches in 2020 for $200. We can’t think of a bigger way to celebrate the Game Boy’s 30th anniversary.
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