GDC ’09: Nintendo shows off prototype handhelds

Nintendo failed to wow us with its keynote speech at this year’s GDC, but it still managed to offer something very entertaining in the shape of a presentation by the DSi’s project leader, Masato Kuwahara.

Kuwahara gave a tender lecture - attended and photographed by the warrior poets of Joystiq - about a couple of Game Boy successors that never made it off the R&D bench, beginning with a rather bulky follow up to the Game Boy Colour.

Developed in 1995, this handheld beast was armed with a 32-bit processor, but still wasn’t able to put out the graphics required to make the unit fly. This is presumably the fabled Project Atlantis, which was touted with a release date of early 1997 and promised SNES quality games, though it never actually materialised.

Second up from Kuwahara was a cobbled up experiment involving a Game Boy Color shoved inside a GBA SP case and fitted with a touchscreen. Being a GBC, the display wasn’t backlit and, being further dulled by the touchscreen overlay, gave too murky a picture to impress the Nintendo management.

Kuwahara quite reasonably assumes it was this concept that inspired the DS, and apparently caught the favourable attention of Shigeru Miyamoto during its early testing phase.

So, despite the DSi not yet capturing our full attention, it’s still wonderfully fascinating to see where it came from.