I’m a Game… Boy
The Gameboy. It was the holy grail of childhood entertainment growing up in the early 90’s. If you think about it, there was really nothing like it. I remember spending hundreds of hours staring at the greenish-yellowish screen playing games from Tetris to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and even Home Alone. Yes those were the days, sitting in the back of the station wagon with a pile of cartridges and a half dozen AA batteries.
That’s why Analogue is so intriguing to me. Yes they’ve been around for a couple of years now, but with my new focus on and deep dives into hardware appreciation, Analogue and their reimagined Gameboy called the Pocket is a thing of beauty.
The Hardware
The Analogue Pocket is a $249 limited edition handheld gaming device that caters to the nostalgic (and hopefully gainfully employed) millennials like me who grew up feasting on the hundreds of games available for Gameboy. But Analogue has stepped it up and brings the hardware to a new level – where it belongs in in the 2020’s. Everything is proportional to the Gameboy but the quality is just, better. With a larger high res screen that can flip between modes from the old time green to a full color for whatever you desire, and a matte black or white design it has the juice.
The Pocket won Red Dot awards for design, and landed Analogue on Fast Company’s prestigious “10 most innovative consumer electronics companies of 2022” list, but Analogue has a whole range of modern takes on classic systems. Analogue tackled a series of equally impressive throwback consoles including the Super Nt (Super Nintendo) and the Mega Sg (Sega Genesis) – both beloved gaming consoles from my youth. And more recently, Analogue released a limited edition run of transparent colored Pockets which are now sold out.
Their next product which is now available for pre-order is the Duo – a console that covers the bases of all NEC game types with ports for chips and a CD-rom drive. It also has inputs for the original controllers but offers a bluetooth modern Duo controller as well.
Oh, and I would be remiss not to mention that these systems all play the original cartridges and discs of the original gaming systems as opposed to emulation, so the experience is the same but with some additional modern conveniences and sleek product design.
The Business Model
Analogue’s business model is a complete anomaly. They operate almost like a limited edition Kickstarter but under their own branded direct-to-consumer website analogue.co. My friend Vishnu is quick to remind me that it is a formula that Supreme uses with great success, though I’m not sure of a parallel in the tech hardware space. But it’s actually kind of fitting for a company that capitalizes and feeds nostalgia to produce limited run products. The Pocket, for example, is out of stock and both the Super Nt and Mega Sg are sold out. The only products you can currently buy on the site are adapters, oh and of course you can place a pre-order for the Duo.
For a small company like Analogue they are essentially focusing all efforts on developing new hardware products, determining their production run quantities, and then phasing out the products shortly after – which seems like a lot of work for not a lot of payoff at first glance. That is, unless they are able to stir up the limited run, nostalgia-fueled frenzy and have the margins to make it work, in which case it might actually be a genius blueprint. One that allows them to stay in the media, and more importantly, in the hearts and minds of their target audience.
Speaking of audience… as I said at the top of the article the Analogue products cater to the sweet spot of consumers – 30-40 year olds who have money to burn, appreciate a high quality product and user experience, but have nostalgia for the early gaming systems of their youth.
Marketing and Brand
I have to say that Analogue’s branding is what originally caught my attention. Sure I have fond memories of too many gaming hours on my Gameboy and Sega Genesis as a youth, but nowadays I’m really more of a sucker for hardware product design and branding.
Analogue takes a minimalist approach to their site with beautiful product renders or photography (sometimes it’s hard to tell) over flat black or white backgrounds. The concept of leaving sold out products up on the site is smart, it gives a sense of awe and wonder and drives the demand for the next product. The announcements section is straight out of a Kickstarter page.
The products themselves are minimalistic with matte finish. The unboxing experience seems to be high quality – on the level you might expect from an Apple product. Everything has been carefully thought out to create a magical contrast between modern sleek design and retro analogue gaming experience – it’s a spectacle to behold.
So What’s Next?
It’s intriguing to speculate what the future holds for Analogue. The Duo is upcoming, though it was first announced almost three years ago and is still in pre-order phase which just began this year. It also seems like a bit more of a risk than the other systems which were by all accounts more popular than NEC, but we’ll have to wait and see.
Will Analogue continue forward and tackle systems like the Playstation, Nintendo 64 and beyond? It seems possible. It also makes you wonder what other type of companies could take a page out of Analogue’s playbook. I’m just glad to see companies nailing their hardware products and using unique market strategies that captivate their customers.
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