Game Boy Advance
handheld game console by Nintendo
The Game Boy Advance (GBA) is a handheld game console developed and marketed by Nintendo, which was released in Japan on March 21, 2001, and in other regions in June. It was later released in mainland China in 2004, under the name iQue Game Boy Advance. Compared to the Game Boy Color it succeeded, the console offered a significantly more powerful ARM7 processor and improved graphics, while retaining backward compatibility with games initially developed for its predecessor.
The 32-bit GBA is part of the sixth generation of video game consoles, competing against Nokia's N-Gage and Bandai's Japan-only WonderSwan. The original model was followed in 2003 by the Game Boy Advance SP, a redesigned model with a frontlit screen and clamshell form factor. A newer revision of the SP with a backlit screen was released in 2005. A miniaturized redesign, the Game Boy Micro, was released in September 2005.
By June 2010, the Game Boy Advance series including revisions, had sold 81.51 million units worldwide, massively outselling its competitors. Its successor, the Nintendo DS, launched on November 21, 2004, was backward compatible with GBA games. GBA sales ended by 2010 after over nine years.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Game Boy Advance” is handheld game console by Nintendo. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Game, Advance and handheld, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q188642. 2 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2001, 2004, 2003 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Game Boy Advance” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.