Game Boy Advance - Activision Game Pack

[israelg]

Hi,

 

Does anybody knows if Activision has plans to

publish a game pack for the game boy advance ?

like they did for the sony psx1, it was 30 games pack !

it should be very nice to hold in your pocket Atari

with 30 games like: pitfall!, chopper command and more...

 

I hope this will reach someone in activsion ...

 

Israel Geron T.

[tyranthraxus]

They'd probably do a rip-off pack with only 3-4 games much like how

an oldie like Yars Revenge gets its own cartridge. Those old game

compilations should be loaded with games but usually aren't even

though they only need a few kb each.

 

John

[+Kaboomer]

Ya know....I was thinking about this....why couldn't the Blue Sky Rangers do a GBA cart with the M-Network games? Or Intellivision games? That would be sweet.....I'm gonna fire off an email to Keith right away!

[ubersaurus]

In gbc yar's revenge defense, the game is alot bigger then the original was. It;s a remake thats essentially the original with bonus stages, more enemies, and interesting level ideas (like qotile with no shield..you have to steal it from enemies).

[Atari2600Lives]

well here is the real answer.......game boy advance games are not selling well enough.

 

I have seen confidential industry reports and the top game for the GBA is about at 47,000 per month sell thru and the tenth one drops down to about 1800 units...that my friends , at an average development cost of $250,000 for games already developed like Intellivision or Activision , is peanuts.

 

There is absolutely ZERO money to be made on real "MODERN" GBA carts unless your one of the top 5 games much less retro packs....this is the unfotunate truth. I am sure they will get around to doing it....but even if they announce it tomorrow , it would not make financial sense.

 

Atari2600Lives

[Atari2600Lives]

I just posted before I answered this post about Pocket PCs and the atari emulators. For under $300 (cassieopia 125) you can get a color pocket PC, run the PocketVCS emulator and you can have a couple of HUNDRED of your favorite games in a small pocket size portable machine....it looks great from the screen shots and the sound is suppose to be real good as well......any thoughts.

[MikeMika]

Actually, seeing as I work for Digital Eclipse, a majority of our work is done on GBA. (I also wrote Yars for GBC- Sorry it was one game, it was my first Game Boy title I had ever written and it was the first true homebrew 2600 title, which went legit- aka done blind without hardware or tools).

 

We get industry numbers as well. GBA is the largest platform sell in. It is kicking even PS2 butt. However, it has a higher COG than a PS2, Xbox, or GCN. We are doing great with GBA. There is a lot of money to be made, but not with original titles. It is a license driven market. The demographic skews sort of low, too. We just put out Atari Anniversary Edition not too long ago, and while it is doing well, it doesn't do the sort of cash a Spiderman or Spyro does. You can get a million seller on a GBA, though. And you can make a lot of money. We are a relatively large company that seems to be making it work.

 

I'd have to say the real reason Activision and others do not go for it is because of the game/brand recognition coupled with the cost of production. We are doing Phantasy Star Collection, and it seems publishers are a lot more interested in doing Genesis/SNES collections now, not so much the older systems.

 

But believe me, it is not for a lack of trying. We are one of the largest GBA developers and we pitch 2600 collections at least once a month. We are baiting the hook constantly. We have a solid plan to pull it off once we get an "okay".

 

Also, the numbers reported above aren't entirely accurate, but pretty close. There is a lot of crap out there, though, and that is mostly the reason. We get sell-in and sell-through data quite often, too, and we particularly look closely at it. There are always a few GBA titles in the top ten overall. On a recent title, we pushed over 70,000 one month- on a single title. However, there is a disparity. Nintendo first party games lead the pack. They have the luxury of time and money. In the GBA business, you're lucky to get more than 4 months to make a game and with that, just enough money to fund it. The quality of the majority games reflects this practice. Publishers don't take the platform as seriously, as it is a high risk for low return. A 2600 pack of say 10-30 games won't take us more than 3 months, which fits nicely within the average time frame. AND it would be more fun than the average game, and in reality, better games than those found on a Game & Watch pack.

 

So, here's crossing my fingers. We are desperate to do a collection, as we've wanted to for quite some time. We'd like to throw in history, images, trivia, etc.

 

So, if you get a chance, write Infogrames/Atari, Activision, etc. Every little bit helps.

 

Best,

Mike

[Andrew Davie]

Actually, seeing as I work for Digital Eclipse, a majority of our work is done on GBA.  

 

[snip/snip]

 

So, here's crossing my fingers. We are desperate to do a collection, as we've wanted to for quite some time. We'd like to throw in history, images, trivia, etc.  

 

 

That's really quite interesting. Me, I've had no luck finding GBA work. I even went to the effort of creating a '2600 emulator/compilation on the GBA - sure it was rudimentary, but it is/was functional and had a fair few games installed. It was a fun challenge getting the '2600 emulator running at reasonable speed on GBA - certainly mine was still slow (running about 10fps), but I was confident of hitting at least 30fps with sound - given the optimisations still available to me.

 

Cheers

A

[MikeMika]

I would definitely agree that it is hard to break in on GBA. There are so many people you compete against to work on the platform. We, fortunately, have a lot fo momentum right now. I know times are rough in the UK, though. A lot of US publishers are pulling back from contracting out there. The market here may improve soon.

 

Andrew: Do you still have my e-mail address? I am admittedly a pain in the rear to get ahold of, but I don't do it on purpose. Drop me a line. We should talk GBA, if you still have some interest in doing it.

 

Mike

[Atari2600Lives]

Mike-

 

I am an executive in the gaming business(not GBA development), I partake in the decision making capability on pulling the trigger on a retro project. the numbers, I saw for June did not look good for GBA. There is no way I would launch a retro project right now on GBA...trust me I would love to and I am working on licensing as we speak but GBA would be a no go.

 

BTW are you apologizing for Yar's? ...I liked it a lot!

[MikeMika]

Hey, you're not BS'ing by any stretch- The numbers change month to month. PS2 is the king of the hill. The last report I just saw showed PS2/GCN/Xbox slumping a bit. GBA is pretty sustained, but it is a sleeper market for that thing. The market is brutal. It is not wise for anyone to get into from a publishing standpoint unless you land the big licenses. We're doing fine, as is Vicarious Visions and other developers, but there are far fewer of us, that's for sure. I guess it would be safe to compare GBA to PC on one level (Not cost of entry), in that it is hit driven. Now add the cost of a cart, and you get exactly the scenario you are talking about. Why would someone want to enter it? However, Namco pulled some good numbers on their collections for GBA. One company we worked with last year, out of all of their SKUs (PSX/PS2, etc), our GBA SKU was the leading moneymaker.

 

A decent GBA title for us gravites to the high six figures.

 

THQ has a pretty solid model that they use, they work the numbers down to a science. They intend to stick with the market. A lot of other publishers are doing the same. In fact, they are moving to adopt the same model. It is a brutal one, though, as it can be harsh for a developer.

 

I'd hate to be down on the idea of a 2600 collection, but it is a classic game dilemna. We did Dragon's Lair for GBC. A great tech demo, but the numbers weren't as strong as some of our more modern licenses. Add to that the potential for having to acquire the rights to some of those games, and well, it gets less promising. Now, a Donkey Kong Country collection, etc, that makes it more interesting for people. The demo skews closer to the mark.

 

So in the end, it is working for a lot of us fortunate ones. I'd say you stand to lose more than the PC market, but they share a lot of traits. We're going pretty strong.

 

That said, we have gotten pretty close to the 2600 collection on a number of occassions. Really close, even without our instigation.

 

Now, A2600Lives, if you want to fund our Game Cube/Xbox/PS2/PC title, that's a different story! Please e-mail me! We have collections for those platforms, as well as a great new game that's a bit more mainstream. PS2 is really where the money is right now. Game Cube looks like it has potential this Christmas, though. Poor Xbox, my favorite, has its work cut out for it.

 

Fun topic for Corp-Geeks like me!

 

(BTW- I'm in just about the same position as you, I think!

 

Best,

Mike

[MikeMika]

... And glad to hear you liked Yars! I can go on and on about that game- it was fun to do. I know a lot of people didn't care for it, though. I met Howard Scott Warshaw while I was making it by nearly random chance and I showed it to him, he filled me in on some of the things he wanted to do with the original (I added some of those), and he signed my childhood Yars for Atari with "I couldn't have done it better myself." That was the highlight for me!

 

Best,

Mike

[Agent X]

I enjoyed Yars' Revenge on the GBC, too! Great work, Mike!

[Agent X]

Also, a few months ago, I wrote a review of Atari Anniversary Advance for GBA on the Yahoo! Shopping site. Click here if you want to read it.

[ubersaurus]

I will yet get through GB Yars, I been playin it alot over the year I've had it.

[Stella'sGhost]

I have the Atari Anniversary Advance for GBA and it really good. It is worth the price just for Tempest. It would have been really something if they had put more classic games on there.

 

I think the main problem with the GBA may be that the games are too expensive. The market for retro games my be too small to bother, I don't blame them, but how hard could it be to put more games on a cart???

[MikeMika]

Thanks, guys! That Yahoo review is great. I don't think Jeff Vavasour (Our Chief Technical Officer/Mastermind) would have stopped at just 6. He has a dream of doing a super pack. The idea of putting 30 or more on a collection is a great idea, like Activision did with their PSX collections. We agree that "bang for the buck" is a healthy alternative. Only thing, the cost and time to produce a classic pack, particularly on GBA as Atari2600Lives and those said in the thread, is the roadblock. Also, while they are quick to produce, they are usually on condensed schedules and not your normal production schedule. So that with money, we can only put so many resources on it.

 

Not to mention Jeff is a perfectionist. While some people use MAME source, etc, he doesn't even look at Mame. There are some little nuances here and there in Mame, and Jeff prefer's to build his emulators from scratch. Since he is so intensely close to the games he emulates, he notices every off pixel, slow sound, etc.

 

Also, a few things had to be done to get as close as possible to the arcade games. Asteroids uses sub-pixel rendering on the GBA, not used very often on Nintendo handhelds, and we are the first on GBA, I think, to give players the option to rotate their screen/GBA to more closely match the arcade game resolution, like in Centipede and Tempest.

 

The publisher also has a hand in which games we use. They are pretty good about this, as we give them a list of games that can be emulated within the time frame. Unfortunately, due to time, games that are best played with a trackball or paddle are also some of the easier ones to emulate/meta-emulate, and have the strongest recognition.

 

Glad you liked the goods! We hope to make more, and one of these days, we'll have our dream collection out.

 

Now if Namco could offer screen rotation on the Pac-Man games and then interlace the screen like we are doing with Phantasy Star, we'd have a sweet version of the arcade game! But I'll settle for the current collection. It's pretty sweet - arrangfement rocks, by the way.

 

Tangent: Regarding Yars, I remember my friend played the GBC version on Thanksgiving, he did the music and some art for the game, helped me design it, and was also the only tester He started to get on a roll in the morning and I think he played through his family's and his fiancee's dinner. They weren't happy with him.

 

Mike

[Atari2600Lives]

Mike-

 

I'll call you offline sometime this week.

 

Take care

 

Atari2600Lives

[Cybergoth]

Hi there!

 

I think the major problem with the GBA is, that 99,99% of the games just plain suck.

 

So far I've played over 60 titles and found only 5 that I kept in my collection.

 

It's the obvious choice of games where everybody would agree: Advance Wars, Castlevania, Golden Sun, Mario Kart. Plus X-Men (Thanks Mike! ), because I'm a fan of X-Men and the game really is well enough done for a licensed title.

 

Most of the rest is crap, crap & crap².

I'm sure that any high quality title right now would sell a buckazillion of cartridges. People like me are waiting for just that one *good* game coming...

 

Spend that extra 4-6 months, try just making making the best GBA game ever and you'll get those killer app sales figures.

 

Hell, I have my GBA for a year now, waiting & waiting for some good games, but nothing ever seems to happen...

 

I'm sure On X-Mas there'll be 10+ of these killer titles ready, but right now the whole year just sucked for the GBA owner so far.

I'm still playing more Advance Wars than any other title released in the last 8 months...

 

Greetings,

Manuel

[SmileyDude]

I think the major problem with the GBA is, that 99,99% of the games just plain suck.

 

I wholehartedly agree with this -- I've been a GBA owner since day one (in the states), and there just hasn't been anything motivating me to buy lately. I have already purchased 12 games, but until Christmas, I don't see myself buying anything else for it.

 

The homebrew scene has been much more interesting of late -- also, I've discovered a few Japanese games that should've been released here, IMO -- they're addicting, fun, and would probally sell nicely at $30.

 

I'm really surprised that more companies aren't looking at what games sell, and learning from them -- nobody could've predicted how good Advance Wars was going to sell. In fact, most would've predicted complete and utter failure.

 

The GBA is a great little machine -- but, it has inherited the legacy of the original GB/GBC and has been forced into having nothing but ports, licensed games, and original Nintendo games. And, while technically very good, the arcade game packs have been just too small, and in addition, there are usually other cutbacks, like lack of SRAM/EEPROM for high score saves.

 

BTW, is Atari Advance an emulator? Or are all the games just ported over to the GBA?

[Andrew Davie]

Andrew: Do you still have my e-mail address? I am admittedly a pain in the rear to get ahold of, but I don't do it on purpose. Drop me a line. We should talk GBA, if you still have some interest in doing it.  

 

 

Well, I thought I had your email address, but the one I've been using has been "undeliverable" for a couple of days. Just forwarded another copy to you - let me know if that arrives.

 

Cheers

A