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Did you know in Japan Game Boy Color and GBA players could trade Pokemon online, download new maps in Game Boy Wars, and compete in Mario Kart tournaments thanks to one device. It even worked with N64 and was almost used for GameCube.
Lately, we've been looking at some of Nintendo's failed experiments like Satelliew, Virtual Boy, and the Nintendo Power Cartridge system. Ideas that were ambitious and futuristic but failed in execution. The mobile system GB is a similar story. Too far ahead of its time and way too complicated for the target audience. Cuz even though it was fairly simple in concept, the pages and pages of fine print and fees made it doomed to fail. In the end, it only got 21 games, one less than Virtual Boy got. Commercially, it was also a bigger flop than Virtual Boy and didn't even sell 100,000 units. Its short lifespan did see some major releases, but some of the best games that might have made use of it, like Zelda, Golden Sun, and Animal Crossing, ultimately bowed out. Unlike some other failures, though, this time there's a happy ending. This is the full story of the mobile system GB.
In late '90s Japan, mobile phones were becoming so advanced and widespread that they'd soon be a competitive alternative to gaming handhelds. You could already play simpler games and prestigious franchises like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest were right around the corner. Phones were a threat to Nintendo's dominance in the handheld market. But they were also an opportunity. Konami was one of the mobile markets major players. So in September '99, Nintendo announced a 50/50 partnership between the two companies to establish a joint venture called Mobile 21. They aggressively started hiring 100 top tier developers and even offered new hires part ownership of the company to attract the best talent. Nintendo and Konami only retained 30% of the shares while the rest was made available to the devs as stock options. Mobile 21's purpose was to design online compatible games for Nintendo systems. They'd also create an attachment called Mobile Adapter GB that connected mobile phones to Game Boy Color and Advance. GameCube was still a couple years away, but when it came out, you could link GBA to GameCube and take your home console online, too.
Pokemon Fever was red-hot, so for maximum publicity, Nintendo announced the mobile system would launch December 14th, 2000, the same day as Pokemon Crystal. A few months before launch at Spacew World, fans were given the chance to test drive Crystal and do some online trading. According to magazines from the time, everyone thought it was awesome. Nintendo called it the future of gaming and outlets like IGN thought it had potential as the backbone of GBA's future. Unfortunately, there was a problem. Some people thought the adapter was required to play Crystal. Nintendo didn't want that misunderstanding to hamper Pokémon sales, so they delayed its release by 6 weeks. The mobile system probably wouldn't have been a success anyway, but losing its shot to launch with Pokémon was a huge blow to any potential it might have had.
That said, when the adapter finally released in January 2001, the features it unlocked in Crystal were pretty mind-blowing. Instead of a regular Poke Center, Golden Rod City was home to a much larger Pokémon communication center, complete with its own music. You could trade and battle online, download monthly newsletters, quizzes, and mini games that awarded in-game prizes. Most famously, the mobile system was the only way you could obtain the GS ball to catch Celaby. There was also the battle tower, which stored the teams and player data of other folks who'd been there, too. So, the NPCs you battled were based on actual humans and populated by different people over time. And there was some functionality with Pokémon Stadium, too. Using Crystal and a transfer pack, you could download battles as they happened at the real life Nintendo Cup tournament and watch them play out on your TV.
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And now back to the trivia. A few months later, Nintendo published Mobile Golf, a Japan-only sequel to Mario Golf on Game Boy Color. It's got RPG elements and leveling up just like its predecessor, but now with more characters, real life courses, and of course, online functionality. [Music] [Applause] [Music] It had online tournaments called Nintendo Opens, which were essentially leaderboards. wards with real life prizes. Mobile golf's directors, the Takahashi brothers, participated in Nintendo opens, and online users could send messages for tips and strategies, which the Takahashi responded to personally. You could also download new courses and a variety of golf clubs for longer drives, better backspin, and so on.
Then there was Game Boy Wars 3, the precursor to Advanced Wars that let you download new maps and mercenaries, as well as news updates. In Hello Kitty's Happy House, you could message friends and trade furniture and items with them over the internet. Mobile 21's first release was Get on the Net mini games, which is pretty much what it sounds like. A collection of 15 online mini games, plus more available for download. And that was it. Those were the only five Game Boy Color games that used the mobile system. The service launched later than intended, so most of its library wound up being Game Boy Advance games.
The biggest by far was Mario Kart Super Circuit. Mobile transfer speeds weren't fast enough for head-to-head multiplayer, unfortunately. But there were leaderboards, and Japan's 10,000 fastest players were saved as ghosts on Nintendo's servers for you to race against, or just be proud to get your own ghost on the server. Even if you weren't top 10,000 in Japan, you could still rank top 10,000 in your prefecture to receive a special in-game title like Champion of Kyoto. There were also time trial tournaments where they'd have rules like mushrooms only or you can only play as Wario. And if you ranked high enough, you could win real life prizes and qualify to play in a championship at the next space world.
Nintendo also published the real-time strategy game Napoleon. It never came out in most of the rest of the world, but Nintendo was trying to push the mobile system, so in Japan they made Napoleon a GBA launch title. Similar to Mario Kart and a few others, the online features mostly came down to leaderboards and competitions. Other games made more interesting use of online functionality, though, like another GBA launch title called Monster Guardians developed by Mobile 21. It's a darker take on the creature collecting genre that let you send your monsters over the internet to a training tower where they autonomously level up, acquire items, and catch other monsters on your behalf. After a set period of time, they'd return back to your game, and some monsters were only obtainable online. Another was Konami Starcom, a pet simulator that let you message other players online and arrange marriage your pets together to produce offspring and special evolutions. Konami also published Silent Hill Play, and over the course of its first year, released four DLC episodes with a new protagonist. Unfortunately, nowadays those episodes are lost media. Not a bad showcase, at least to start. They presented a variety of ideas and proved the potential for portable online gaming in the early 2000s.
Unfortunately, nobody cared. Just months after launch, Nintendo bundled in Mobile Golf in for free and dropped the standalone price to $30, but by the end of the year, only 80,000 units had sold. As a result, a mere 16 GBA titles were ever made compatible, most of which came from Konami and Mobile 21. The user base was just too small for publishers to bother making games for it. Even the games published by Nintendo weren't developed by them, instead relying on partner studios like Camelot and Intelligent Systems. In May 2002, just 16 months after launch, Nintendo announced Mobile System GB would close down at the end of the year. Mobile 21 shut down, too. And since the planned IPO never happened, all the developers shares became worthless.
Some argue the lack of big hitters was why the mobile system failed to take off. But as we see it, Pokémon, Mario Kart, and Mario Golf in the first 4 months was pretty respectable. They reviewed well, too, garnering eights and nines from Famitsu. It also had a variety of genres from RPGs to action adventure, sport, racing, fishing, visual novels, and tabletop games. And it was decently marketed with TV commercials, magazine coverage, giveaways, and in-person promotional events. We'd argue the real reason it failed is due to how confusing and intimidating it was to read through the fine print. Case in point, the 13-minute tutorial video Nintendo had to make for salespeople trying to sign up customers. First of all, it starts with a flowchart of hardware requirements and also comes with an additional manual for the sales rep, plus a user manual that customers need to read cuz who boy, this system was complicated. Kids couldn't buy them on their own and were required to bring a legal guardian. You'll understand why in a minute. Further restricting how many people could actually buy these things is the fact that according to a survey from Nintendo Dream magazine, only 20% of fans even had cell phones, and mobile adapters weren't sold in most game stores. Instead, you could only get them at limited qualified locations. To use the system, you had to have a phone plan with a registered carrier. Most phone companies supported the system, but some didn't. There was also a list of compatible models of phone. So if you had the wrong kind of phone, you were out of luck. Different carriers required different adapters, blue, yellow, or red. Annoyingly, you could only directly connect with people who had the same color adapter. Oh, and not so fast, kid, cuz in addition to phone service, you also need an internet plan. [Music] Do you want the money? >> Speaking of additional fees, now let's talk prices, which were just as confusing as registration. For 50 bucks, you got the mobile adapter bundled with the mobile trainer cartridge, a name seemingly left over from when the adapter was set to release alongside Pokemon Crystal, cuz you know, Pokemon trainers. The mobile trainer was for configuring your Game Boy with a mobile phone, but you could also send and receive emails, read news, and view the mobile system homepage. But even after the $50 buyin, plus $4 upfront for internet, you still had a long list of recurring fees to look forward to. Kind of like modern-day microtransactions. On the surface, they don't sound that bad. 10 cents to trade a Pokemon, $1 for monthly Pokemon news, another dollar for a Silent Hill DLC episode, and so on. Unfortunately, the devil was in the details. There were up to three companies you had to pay for everything you did online. The phone company for service, the internet company for connection, and Nintendo for the actual content. Changing your password, for example, only charges to your phone bill. But you're going to have to pay for phone and internet to access the homepage. send emails or access so-called free content and what they call paid content incurs fees from the phone company, internet company, and Nintendo plus tax. Let's say you want to play one online Pokémon battle. For that, Nintendo charges 10 cents, which isn't unreasonable. But you also have to pay 10 cents per minute to the internet company, plus more to the phone company with exact prices varying between carriers and the details of your phone plan. A Nintendo magazine from the time tells us to quote, "Try calculating for yourself how much it costs to battle another mobile user for 10 minutes. They can't tell you the answer because the price is different for everyone, but it looks like typically it would cost around $3 to battle for 10 minutes, but it depends cuz phone fees don't just vary between phone companies and phone plans. They're also different at daytime and nighttime and weekday versus weekends. It also depends where you are exactly cuz fees also go up the further apart two users are when they connect. So, good luck figuring out how much you're actually paying, then explaining it to your parents at the end of the month. In fact, this magazine says you might be quote shocked when the bill arrives. If your fees exceeded $100 in a single month, Nintendo would cut you off from paid content till the end of the next month, but you could still get your phone and internet charges for free content or basically anything else you did online. Now, you know why kids couldn't buy these things without a legal guardian. We could go on about how confusing this all was and how expensive it could get, but I think you get the point.
To be fair to Nintendo, their own fees weren't outrageous, like 10 cents for a stadium battle. And a lot of features they didn't charge a penny for, but the world was just not ready for this kind of system in 2001. The requirements and costs just piled up to such a ridiculous degree that we're kind of surprised they even sold 80,000 of them.
Before flopping, the mobile system was planned or at least considered for other titles as well. Camelot teased its implementation in Golden Sun, and Zelda Oracle of Ages and Seasons producer talked about doing episodic DLC. Some lesserknown games were announced as well, like Beat Mania GB and Derby Stallion Advance. GameCube compatibility was planned from the start, though, as far as we can tell, Nintendo only revealed features for one game, which was that the Animal Crossing team wanted to let you visit other people's villages over the network. But sending entire towns over mobile proved difficult. So instead, they settled on letting you visit people's villages by trading memory cards, which limited the scope to friends in your immediate vicinity. Presumably, other games were considered as well, and might have come to pass if the mobile system had been a success. It's fun to imagine how it might have been used in games like F-ZeroGX and Mario Golf Toad Stool Tour. Not to mention more GBA games like Pokemon and Konami's Yu-Gi-Oh titles. Maybe it's best it didn't though, as most players wouldn't get to experience those features, and the ones who did would have had to pay an arm and a leg, and us Western fans wouldn't even have the option. The phone market over here was even less ready for the mobile system than Japan's back then. So, bringing the network westward was never going to happen.
And well, that's the story of the mobile system GB. Just like Satella View and Nintendo Power before it, the system was forwardthinking and ambitious, but ultimately crushed under the weight of its own complexities to the point that 99% of its target audience weren't interested. But luckily for Nintendo, technology evolved fast in the '90s, and a few years later, Nintendo's new president, Saturui Wata, directly supervised mobile system successor, Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. He announced it in 2005 as part of his famous heart of a gamer speech. They'd learned their lesson and made a new system with a razor focus on being simple and free. >> Wi-Fi should be easy for everyone. Our goal is to make this process simple and seamless. And maybe most importantly, we will remove the most important consumer barrier because Nintendo's Wi-Fi connection will be free. He announced Animal Crossing DS was going to let you visit friends's villages over the internet, just as the original was meant to do and showed off Mario Kart DS online multiplayer. >> Mr. Watada, which character are you? >> I'm Mario. >> Millions of gamers jumped on board, and over the next few years, the system grew to include Virtual Console, the Club Nintendo loyalty rewards program, and more. The rest is history. The world wasn't ready for online portables in 2001, but we salute Nintendo for trying and learning from its failure to build a better future.
Did you know that Halo DS was actually real? Or the guy who programmed Metroid Prime's Morph Ball got shafted? For those facts and more, check out the videos on screen. Special thanks to our translator, Jacob Pixie, and Winter for proofreading and Urasia M for footage capture. And of course, thank you for watching. See you next time.