Most of them, I’m sorry to say, were junk.
It was a sombre bit of personal archaeology, all told, but therewasa silver lining.
Four of the beauties!
Dialhex, Boundish, Coloris and Soundvoyager.
If those aren’t ringing bells, I don’t blame you.
Bit Generations was a Japan-only series of seven games, published by Nintendo way back in 2006.
All but one was developed by Skip Ltd, of Chibi Robo fame.
Though that name was swiftly dropped, it was apt.
They just oozed style.
The cartridges were matte black plastic with shiny metallic labels.
By GBA standards, they felt expensive.
GBA games for the artbook crowd.
And the market for this was… almost zero.
A few resurfaced in the West as digital downloads for the Wii and DS.
The rest never made it outside Japan.
The games themselves were mini experiments.
Game-jam-throw in-things that are ten-a-penny these days on itch.io, but much rarer in the mid-noughties.
And treated with almost absurd reverence.
Soundvoyager was the boldest.
It’s meant to be played with your eyes shut, navigating with only stereo sound cues.
Each had an off-kilter all-caps title and a glitchy twist on the classic pong formula.
POOL FLOWER is straight Pong but with translucent jelly blobs wandering the court.
Hit them and they turn solid, complicating the play field and gumming up your opponent’s movement.
POWER SLIDER is pong on Venn-diagram rails, where both players take positions on one of two intersecting circles.
HUMAN LEAGUE, gives each player two parallel Pong-paddles, strung together like marionette foosball.
It looks delightful and handles poorly.
These games are best played with two people, and are each quite basic.
But they’re made with love, ingenuity and the 32-bit soundtrack legitimately slaps.
By contrast Dialhex - later released as Rotohex on the Wii eshop - is less zany.
It’s a stately match-six puzzle game, played in a hexagonal grid.
Coloured triangles fall from the top then slip down the smooth sides.
It’s a lovely thing really, and the vibe is more than a bitLumines.
On the muted GBA screen, they’re unreadable.
Last, we have Coloris, another colour-match puzzler.
Coloris plays like bejewelled.
Only, here, instead of swapping pieces around, you change their colours.
The colours are ordered on a gradient - from red to yellow, for example.
The cursor swaps randomly between the two extremes.
Match three and they evaporate.
It sounds complex, but in practice it’s intuitive.
Early levels start simple, with only four tones.
Later levels have distracting patterns, more tones and less distinct gradients.
Again, Coloris gets fiddly.
Because these weren’t full games.
Wonderful, needless little follies, made for no one and bought by goodness knows whom.
And I love them for it.
Bit Generations, in a fit of new-millennium optimism, pitched Gameboy Advance games as executive office toys.
Tiny artsy concept pieces.
It was apparent, even then, that this market barely existed.
But these days it couldn’t happen at all.
So, should you rush to eBay and buy up the last remaining Bit Generations games on import?
At sixty pounds plus, they’re insubstantial.
Considered as games alone, I’m not even sure they’re worth what I paid in 2006.
Am I going to sell them, then?
They’re gorgeous little oddities.
A talking point, as all coffee table items should be, with a gameboy alongside to play it.
