Bandai Wonderswan: The True Gameboy Successor

Nintendo has been king of the hill when it comes to handheld games consoles for almost three decades now, what started with the original Game Boy in 1989 eventually turned into an empire of best selling portable systems. However that hasn’t stopped various other companies attempting to muscle in on Nintendo’s turf, Sega, Atari, SNK and Sony have all tried over the years, but in my opinion the best of them all was Bandai’s Wonderswan.

It all started in 1996 with a man named Gunpei Yokoi. If you’re a Nintendo fan then Yokoi’s work should be very familiar to you, he designed the original Game Boy, ROB the robot, the Virtual Boy and produced Kid Icarus and Metroid on the NES. Yokoi’s philosophy at Nintendo was “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology”. The Game Boy was less powerful than some of its rivals, and it only had a black and white screen, but it was cheap, it required less batteries to run, it had more appealing games and it was smaller than its rivals. Yokoi realized that it wasn’t about who had the most advanced technology, but how you used “Withered Technology” to appeal to a mass market, a philosophy Nintendo has stuck with to this day.

Shortly after the failure of the Virtual Boy, Yokoi left Nintendo on August the 15th 1996 to form his own company called Koto Laboratory. It was here that he would design and develop a spiritual successor and rival to the Game Boy for Bandai called the Wonderswan, carrying over the “withered technology” philosophy to the design of this new system. Sadly, he passed away in a road traffic accident before the system was released.

The Wonderswan launched on March the 4th 1999, featuring nine available colours, a monochrome screen, a 30 hour battery life and roughly fifty games on launch. A version with a colour screen was released the following year, by which time the Wonderswan held an 8% market share.

A version with a clearer screen was launched in July 2002 called the Swan Crystal, but by that time Nintendo’s Gameboy advance was already on the market, and having made zero attempt to market the system in the west, Bandai discontinued the Wonderswan family of consoles in 2003.

I think this is a real shame as I believe the Wonderswan is criminally underrated when compared to other Game Boy rivals like the Neo Geo Pocket and the Sega Game Gear. The system was innovative, with a button layout that allowed for landscape or portrait gaming, perfect for arcade shoot ‘em ups and puzzle games. The system only ran on one AA battery which made it light and slim, and the screen was a decent quality compared to the Gameboy Color, especially on the Swan Crystal. A home development kit called the WonderWitch was available allowing people to make their own games at home, It could connect to the internet via a mobile phone network, it could communicate with Digimon virtual pets and the Sony PocketStation and it had a fantastic library of games including Final Fantasy, Tetris, Beatmania, Golden Axe and many more. It was beautifully simple and wonderfully designed.

These days Wonderswan systems can be picked up relatively cheaply online and emulation options are available through things like Retropie. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend going through the Wonderswan and Wonderswan Color libraries and seeing what hidden gems are available. You may just end up falling in love with a games console you didn’t even know existed.