Handheld generation
Analogue produces its first portable, designed to mark the end of an era
Analogue marks the end of an era with its stunning Pocket handheld
With Pocket, Analogue, maker of high-end retro consoles, has finished its mission. This handheld, which is due for release next year for $199, will play Game Boy and Game Boy Advance game cartridges, and Neo Geo Pocket Color, Game Gear and other systems with an adaptor. “I’m just struck every day, thinking, ‘This is it, this is the end of this whole category, just the most elegant, total conclusion to portable gaming’,” founder Christopher Taber claims.
They’re brash words. But he’s talking about a project Analogue kicked off in 2014 with the release of the NES-based Analogue Nt and carried through to the Super Nt and Mega Sg, which are easily the best way to play Super Nintendo, Master System and Mega Drive games on modern TVs. With Pocket, then, Analogue will have covered most major 8bit and 16bit gaming systems. But there’s more to it. For a start, Pocket won’t be restricted to running software for Nintendo’s first generations of handhelds, since it has a chip which can be flashed with configurations for a multitude of other systems, making it a single player of software for 20 years of gaming history.
For Analogue, Pocket is its first all-in-one, comprising an extraordinarily overspecced display, built-in buttons and a battery, making it a great deal more complicated to source, design and engineer than the company’s previous products. For Taber, though, this is ideal. “We can control 100 per cent of the experience now,” he says.
One of the key selling points for Analogue’s previous systems was their ‘lag-free’ performance. Like Pocket, they’re based on FPGAs, programmable chips which can be configured to behave exactly as the components in a console do. This highly accurate way of running games made for legacy hardware contrasts with emulation, which instead uses software to perform the same trick, a process which tends to introduce milliseconds of lag. So Analogue’s consoles have an inherent advantage, but they have to connect to a TV over HDMI, both adding lag that’s entirely outside Analogue’s control. Pocket, by contrast, has circuitry and a display that’s entirely under Analogue’s control, and Taber claims that no handheld compares to its low latency between pressing a button and seeing the results play out on its screen.
No handheld console display approaches its high resolution, either. “It’s wicked fucking good. I can’t overstate it,” says Taber. At 1600x1440 pixels, it boasts a finegrained density of 615 pixels per inch. An iPhone 11 has 326ppi. But while this will seem an absurd way to play Game Boy games, these numbers aren’t conjured out of nowhere. Pocket’s display is exactly ten times Game Boy’s 160x144 resolution. This means that when it scales up the games to fill its screen, there is no interpolation, no blurring, so every pixel remains sharp and defined.
Pocket continually ties its engineering back to the systems it’s designed to work with, so it makes complete sense that it’s presented in a portrait format. Its controls are laid out below the screen, just like they are on a Game Boy, rather than in the landscape format of every Nintendo handheld since. Indeed, the team wanted it to be portrait. “But the requirement for a certain battery life required it to be a certain size,” says Matthew Kenyon of
With Pocket, Analogue will have covered most major 8bit and 16bit gaming systems
Kenyon Weston, the Huddersfield-based industrial designer behind Pocket. Along with its large internal battery, the screen also defined the shapes and sizes that Pocket could be. “The question was whether it would be portrait or landscape, and we had a lot of fun battles with the pros and cons of each.”
It was, after all, important for Pocket to look physically distinct from Nintendo Switch, and also from all the retro handhelds on the market. “It’s also our biggest nod to the nostalgia of the era, so we really pushed it,” adds Kenyon, who with partner Chris Weston hasn’t designed a handheld before, but previously led the Mega Sg’s industrial design. “But the challenge was how to make it feel modern.”
“Nostalgia cheapens everything that Analogue does,” Taber says. “I don’t give a fuck about nostalgia, personally, at all. It doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s not the reason we make the product.” So while Pocket absolutely references Game Boy, its lines are, in Kenyon’s words, “graphically sharp”. In fact, it looks like it might not be entirely comfortable to hold, but he’s clear that subtle chamfered edges will make Pocket sit well in the hand, the result of round after round of prototyping, during which he and Weston drew up 3D models and sent them to Taber, who’s based in Hong Kong and would have them rapidprototyped and sent back to Huddersfield so Kenyon Weston could feel them.
Besides, Kenyon and Weston believe that industrial design is better when it comprises simple shapes that allow your hands to learn its limits, rather than sculpted ergonomic forms which tend never to really fit hands which are bigger or smaller than they were designed for. “The other benefit of the portrait format is that your hands are closer together and the weight distribution is just generally nicer,” Kenyon adds. The buttons’ placements are also the product of rounds of millimetre-by-millimetre trial and error, especially the L and R buttons on the back and the horizontal placement of the D-pad. Each movement would then affect the placement of all the other buttons.
“You can rest assured that everything controller related is fucking perfect,” states Taber. “We would never release anything less than that. Everything in the aftermarket retro category, I don’t know what’s more notorious, poor-quality emulation or poorquality controllers. Maybe the controllers.” So Pocket’s buttons are not the clicky microswitched buttons that Nintendo currently uses. They instead feature flexible membranes which make them follow the feel of the Game Boy and Game Boy Advance.
The L and R buttons, meanwhile, are positioned at the back of the casing, alongside the cartridge slot. The slot is exceedingly shallow, which means tall Game Boy cartridges protrude way above it, their top edges meeting exactly with Pocket’s upper edge, and fully exposing their printed panels so you can see them and enjoy the contrast between Pocket’s newness and Nintendo’s old grey plastic design. Kenyon assures us that the slot holds the cartridge tightly, courtesy of Analogue’s engineers, led by Ernest Dorazio.
Over the course of the past three years, during which Analogue has released Nt Mini (January 2017), Super Nt (February 2018) and Mega Sg (March 2019), the company has built up strong engineering expertise, as well as
“The benefit of portrait format is that your hands are closer and the weight distribution is nicer”
contacts among the East Asian electronics manufacturers from which it sources its components. Taber scoffs at the idea of buying them off general distributors like Mouser Electronics. “We find nothing on them,” he says. Instead, Analogue goes direct to source. “We’re resourceful and really scrappy and on the front lines.”
That’s why he’s based in Hong Kong, and how he got Pocket’s display for the sub-$200 price point it’s reached. Taber says it’s a direct result of the proliferation of smartphones, which has allowed the display industry to reach a saturation point which has meant it’s experimenting with new formats and sizes, and can be more flexible for the comparatively tiny orders that boutique electronics manufacturers such as Analogue make.
This tectonic shift in electronics has enabled this little, scrappy company to put together a high-spec handheld, and it’s behind the hardware coming from other specialists too, like synthesiser maker Teenage Engineering, which is, of course, also producing the handheld console Playdate. “Teenage Engineering is a super-fun, cool company,” says Taber. “I’ve been following them since the beginning.”
And that would be because Taber describes himself as “much more of a music guy than a videogame guy.” It’s what’s behind Analogue’s collaboration in December last year with record label Ghostly International, through which it released a special edition of the Super Nt with a white casing and custom startup animations and sounds from its signed bands, including Shigeto, Telefon Tel Aviv and Gold Panda. Mega Sg is about to receive its own, a collaboration with label Hyperdub (Burial, The Bug) which will include a cartridge loaded with original tracks from its artists that will never be released outside it.
Pocket, meanwhile, will feature a version of Oliver Wittchow’s sequencer, Nanoloop, which was first released for Game Boy and subsequently for Game Boy Advance. It’s a clear nod to the passionate chiptune culture that’s grown around Game Boy, but Taber is again firm that its inclusion is not about nostalgia for 8bit sound, since Pocket’s Nanoloop will also be able to connect to MIDI and thus be a part of live music outside chiptune’s bleeps, noise and clicks. And since the GBA version of Nanoloop costs 49 and the Game Boy version costs 69, its integration into Pocket represents great value. “You wouldn’t believe how many of these have sold over the past ten years. Tens of thousands have bought this software and have an interest in it,” says Taber.
In both form and function, then, Pocket walks a line between celebrating the Game Boy and bringing to its culture and identity something new. But more than that, it also promises to be simply the very best way to play a generation of handheld games and to access pretty much every 8bit and 16bit system ever made, both in your hands or connected to your TV via a custom dock. Because why not? “To me, Pocket is the conclusion of this entire era of videogames, for Analogue and just in general,” says Taber. “Who the fuck else is going to make something that’s better than this?”
It promises to be simply the very best way to access pretty much every 8bit and 16bit system ever made