As early as next year, avid Game Boy users will be able to play each other completely wirelessly.
Motorola revealed Thursday afternoon that it sold a wireless chipset to Nintendo that will let a Game Boy user play with up to four additional players as far as 33 feet away. Nintendo plans to release an adapter with the chipset, which attaches to the back of the Game Boy Advance or Game Boy SP in the first half of next year, Motorola said.
The adapter will initially appear in Japan, then the United States. Motorola did not release a price tag for the accessory. Nintendo did not return a call seeking comment.
"You can be sitting anywhere in the same vicinity as some of your friends – within five to 10 meters – and play together interactively," said Bridgette Cosentino, director of the wireless connectivity operations group at Motorola. "You can actually play with five players with the same software at the same time."
Motorola's chipset for the Game Boy uses a communication protocol based on the time division multiple access, or TDMA, cellular technology. TDMA has lost ground in recent years to code division multiple access, or CDMA, the cell-phone technology used by Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS, as well as to the global system for mobile communications, or GSM, which is the European standard for mobile-phone calls. So the software is pretty much proprietary, wireless industry analysts said.
Motorola's chipset also operates in the 2.4-GHz spectrum band, which is shared by microwave ovens and wireless-networking technology like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Gaming industry analysts say Nintendo's partnership with Motorola was a calculated move to compete with Sony's PSP PlayStation handheld, which is expected to hit stores in the fourth quarter of next year. Meanwhile, Motorola benefits from teaming up with Nintendo because it can now compete with Nokia, which plans to release a combination wireless phone and gaming device called the N-Gage early next month.
But Motorola has a slight advantage over its competitor in that the Game Boy accessory is an add-on feature to an already popular device on the market. Nokia, on the other hand, is introducing a new category of gaming devices.
"That's a possible problem with the N-Gage," said Billy Pidgeon, a senior analyst at Zelos Group. "To the hard-core gamer, the convergent-type device doesn't measure up as a game device because it included the phone features.... The advantage of having just a gaming device is it doesn't suffer the same (shortfalls)."
