In the early 2000s, the world of home theater was turning upside down. The already ancient VHS ceremoniously left its way to DVD, and by 2006 the replacement was completely over. And in between, there were not a few who tried to take advantage of the paradigm shift to sell their own wares, usually moneymakers for those who couldn’t afford a full-fledged player but wanted to entertain the kids.
Hasbro tried it with VideoNow, a system that used PVD discs (Personal Video Discs), which allowed to put up to thirty minutes of video at 15 frames per second, in black and white and without backlight. Too much work to watch an episode of ‘Ben 10’. Mattel also sold its Juice Box, with a resolution of 240×160 pixels, 10 frames per second, and which sold the episodes on cartridges. It lasted just three months on the marketfalling to the big (and unlikely) victor in this world of portable movies: the Game Boy Advance.
112 pixels, one after the other
In the mid-2000s, when this story is set, there were already portable DVD players (the tablets of the time), but it was coffee for coffee lovers. No father was going to spend a fortune on the player and the movie to entertain his son during a trip (for example) if you could buy a simple cartridge for the boy’s portable console. This was the logic behind GBA-TV, Majesco’s original project for Game Boy Advance, which was already in its final phase because its successor had just come out: Nintendo DS. The project, which would eventually become Game Boy Advance Videohad his days numbered from his own departure.
Video game fans will remember the name of Majesco, producer (among others) of ‘BloodRayne’ or ‘Psychonauts’, but in 2003 it was something else. His idea of showing movies on the Game Boy Advance turned the console into what is now called a “media center”. Although, seeing his technical abilities, perhaps that was too much to say.
The resolution of most cartridges was 240×160, but some technical wonders for the time (no irony), such as two-film packs, pixels down to 112. This, added to the limited color range of the Nintendo console, made the experience, although it seemed futuristic at the time, was rather disappointing. A bit like buying, at the height of the Blu-Ray era, a Barbie mp4 player.
Somebody once told me
Originally, Game Boy Advance Video released packs with two episodes of ‘Pokémon’ each (which had the opening slightly cut) absolutely messy: in fact, the first episode of the first pack was from the fourth season. In addition, there were initial packs of two episodes of ‘Dragon Ball GT’ or ‘The Ninja Turtles’, but they did not have a continuation.
Soon, other channels and producers began to be interested in the format, such as Cartoon Network (‘Ed, Edd n Eddy’, ‘Guts the Cowardly Dog’, ‘Johnny Bravo’, ‘Dexter’s Laboratory’), Nicktoons (‘SpongeBob SquarePants’, ‘The Fairly OddParents’, ‘Jimmy Neutron ‘, ‘Dora the explorer’) or even the Disney Channel (‘Kim Possible’, ‘Lilo and Stitch: the series’, ‘The Proud’). But the strong point was missing: the movies.
Yes, the packs with four chapters that barely exceeded 44 minutes in total were fine, but, would they be able to put a film in a cartridge? Well not just one: three. ‘Shark Scare’, ‘Shrek’ and ‘Shrek 2’ were released alone and later combined. How did three hours of film fit on a Game Boy Advance cartridge? Squeezing the console to the fullest… And lowering the quality of viewing.
no hacking
Majesco wanted to make sure that no one pirated Dreamworks movies at 112 pixels, so these cartridges could only be used in the following portable consoles up to Nintendo DS Lite. What the company wanted to prevent is that through the Game Boy Player, an accessory for the GameCube that allowed you to play handheld games on television, the tape could be copied to a VHS or DVD. You know, everyone’s dream: to see ‘Shrek’ in poor quality on the big screen.
Though the invention did not leave the United States, there their prices were decent (within what is possible): a pack of series cost 9.95 dollars while a movie was 19.99. It wasn’t cheaper than a DVD, but you didn’t have to buy another device to watch it either. In the end, the DVD became popular, the Nintendo DS took over the market and Nobody thought of watching a movie with the quality of the Game Boy Advance. Three years after its birth, in 2007, the project died.
And it didn’t do it without leaving corpses along the way: in addition to a good handful of series cartridges that would never see the light of day, there was ‘Madagascar’. In the end, Nintendo itself took the gauntlet that Majesco threw and included the Nintendo Video software among the downloadables for Nintendo 3DS, although they were only trailers, video clips and television episodes. What if: after reading this article you also want to see ‘Shrek’.