[14] Internally, however, a team led by Satoru Okada—who had worked on the original Game Boy—was already experimenting with color screens.

Their early 1990s prototype, codenamed "Project Atlantis," featured a color display and a 32-bit processor designed by ARM.

[18][19][20] However, as competitors such as the Neo Geo Pocket and WonderSwan entered the market, Nintendo decided to create a color version of the Game Boy by combining the color screen they had been testing for Project Atlantis with a faster version of the existing Game Boy's 8-bit processor.

[14] Still under pressure from its competitors more technically advanced handhelds, Nintendo quickly started developing a successor to the Game Boy Color.

[21] Nintendo officially announced the Game Boy Advance on September 1, 1999, revealing details about the system's specifications and teasing that the handheld would first be released in Japan in August 2000, with the North American and European launch dates slated for the end of the same year.

[24] The GBA’s design featured a landscape form factor, diverging from the portrait layout of the previous Game Boy models.

The shift was the work of French designer Gwénaël Nicolas and his Tokyo-based studio, Curiosity Inc.[25][26] In a August 24, 2000 announcement, Nintendo revealed the final design of the GBA to the public, announced its Japan and North America launch dates, and revealed the ten launch games.

[29][30] By March 2001, Nintendo confirmed the $99.99 price and announced 15 launch games for the system, with over 60 expected by the end of the year.

[33] The ARM7TDMI is a 32-bit processor designed to maximize performance under power and storage constraints, making it more suitable for use in a handheld device.

Like all processors using the ARM architecture, the ARM7TDMI uses a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) design with sixteen 32-bit registers.

Although the console was marketed as a 32-bit system, Nintendo mixed 16-bit and 32-bit buses within the SoC to reduce costs, which limited memory access to a 16-bit bus.

The PPU is essentially a basic GPU that renders visuals using 96 kilobyte (KB) of Video RAM located inside the CPU CGB.

[33][39] The Game Boy Advance features a D-pad (directional pad) and six action buttons labeled 'A,' 'B,' 'L,' 'R,' 'SELECT,' and 'START.'

With hardware performance comparable to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, the Game Boy Advance represents progress for sprite-based technology.

This includes the Super Mario Advance series, and the system's backward compatibility with all earlier Game Boy titles.

Titled Shantae Advance: Risky Revolution, it was originally in development until 2004, when work halted due to the lack of a publisher.

However, some games may have compatibility issues due to certain features requiring extra hardware; for instance, WarioWare: Twisted!

[53] The first set of GBA games, including Advance Wars, Metroid Fusion, and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, were released on April 3, 2014.

[54] All Virtual Console releases are single-player only, as they do not emulate multiplayer features enabled by Game Link cables.

The redesign was intended to address some common complaints about the original Game Boy Advance, which had been criticized for being somewhat uncomfortable to use, especially due to a dark screen.

[64][65] On September 19, 2005, Nintendo released a new version of the SP, model AGS-101, that features a brighter backlit display.

Nintendo also hoped that this "fashion" feature would help target audiences outside of typical video game players.

Gladstone ultimately recommended the sleeker and backlit Game Boy Advance SP instead, despite noting that the cheaper price of the original model may "appeal to gamers on a lower budget.

Nintendo hoped to sell 1.1 million Game Boy Advance units by the end of March with the system's Japanese debut, and anticipated sales of 24 million units before the end of 2001; many marketing analysts believed this to be a realistic goal due to the company's lack of major competition in the handheld video game market.