Nintendo puts a finger on Game Boy launch

Nintendo will release the latest version of its handheld game player in Europe and Australia by the end of June. The Game Boy Advance is a faster successor to the industry’s best-selling Game Boy. More than 100 million of the handheld players have been sold in the 12 years since its debut. Nintendo has previously announced that the Game Boy Advance will be released in Japan on March 21 and in the United States on June 11.

Its suggested retail price is $99.95. The global introduction of the new product will solidify Nintendo’s lead in the handheld game machine market and could mean revenue of up to $10 billion if sales match those of the current model. Even so, Nintendo may suffer from missed sales opportunities because of expected difficulty in keeping pace with demand, analysts said. “Nintendo plans to make 2 million units in June, but I am worried whether this is sufficient for worldwide supply,” said Takashi Oka, an analyst at Tsubasa Research Institute. “In the near term, there will be a supply shortage.”

Nintendo plans to ship out 1 million units in Japan in the first 10 days after its debut. It will produce a total of 3 million units for two months, April and May, with plans to raise the output to 2 million units in June. After the release, 25 new software titles will be available for the machine. Of the new titles, Nintendo will release four, including “Super Mario Advance.” Other game software makers, such as Konami, Capcom and Sega, have developed the rest. The Game Boy Advance machine, which will retail for $82.48 (9,800 yen) in Japan, will be able to run the more than 1,000 existing games for the Game Boy.

The new player operates four times faster than the original unit and displays more sophisticated graphics and a wider array of colors. Up to four people can play together connected by cables, using one game cartridge among them. As of late January, Nintendo had 2.7 million orders for Game Boy Advance from retailers and distributors, Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi said. Nintendo also said it will work with Olympus Optical, a Japanese maker of electronics and optical products such as microscopes and fiberscopes, to make new card games featuring Pokemon. Each card featuring a Pocket Monster character will carry digitalized data about the character, and people will be able to read the data by scanning the card into the slot of a date-reading equipment.

Olympus will be responsible for technology to make the date-reading equipment, Nintendo said.

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