Anika Begay
How small can you make the Nintendo Game Boy Advance? That’s a question TinyCircuits is answering with the Thumby Color, a GBA clone that measures just two inches in size while still packing a D-pad, shoulder buttons, a rumble motor, a 16-bit color screen, and the ability to connect two together with a USB-C cable for multiplayer gaming.
Unlike the myriad of Game Boy and GBA clones released by companies like Anbernic, the Thumby Color is not an emulator. It doesn’t have the processing power to play retro games or enough storage space to hold hundreds of ROM files.
It’s powered by a 150MHz Raspberry Pi RP2350 processor paired with just 16MB of storage—yes, that’s megabytes, not gigabytes. Not being able to play actual GBA games on the Thumby Color is probably a good thing because its 0.85-inch square LCD screen has a resolution of just 128 x 128 pixels, which is less than half the resolution of the GBA.
Games are instead programmed in MicroPython. The Thumby Color will come with six open source titles pre-installed, including a first-person shooter called Monsters and a dungeon crawler called Thumb 2. It will also feature all the monochrome games that came with the original Thumby in 2021, which was the ultra-small clone of the company’s original Game Boy.
The Thumby Color isn’t a handheld you’ll want to play with for hours on end, but it’s one you can potentially stick in any environment where you want a distraction, without trying to hide flashier handhelds like the Steam Deck. It’s also a good excuse to learn a programming language, as TinyCircuits has created tutorials and guides that are freely available through its website.
TinyCircuits has opted for a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to bring the Thumby Color to consumers. The original Thumby still retails for $42, but this new color-screen version is available with a $49 pledge for a purple version, expected to ship in November. If you want a Thumby Color with a clear or transparent purple case, the price jumps to $55, and if you want a Kickstarter-exclusive black version, it’s $75.
Keep in mind that there is always a chance that a crowdfunded product will not deliver all of the features promised at the time of the campaign. It may also be significantly delayed or never delivered, with no refunds available. TinyCircuits has successfully shipped several Kickstarter products in the past, so there is a little less risk, but there is no guarantee that the product will materialize, even if its funding goal has already been reached.
