I woke up early today to make sure I could snag an Analogue Pocket when preorders for the long-awaited handheld went live at 8 a.m. PST. Eight minutes past 8, Analogueâs online shop informed me it had completely sold out. I didnât even get to enter payment information, and I clearly wasnât the only one disappointed.
Seattle-based manufacturer Analogue made a name for itself producing aesthetically beautiful, retro-compatible consoles that do a great job of displaying old-school games on todayâs high-definition televisions. As such, the Analogue Pocket was in high demand from the moment it was announced in 2019. The systemâwith its cutting-edge 1600Ă1440 display, built-in support for Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, and adapters for Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, and Atari Lynx cartridgesâhas been touted as the Cadillac of retro handhelds.
A lot of the excitement surrounding the Analogue Pocket has to do with how it plays all these games. Thereâs no emulation involved. Instead, the high-end portable includes two FPGA (field-programmable gate array) chips that can be configured to reproduce the handheld systems in question on a hardware level, an approach which has some exciting advantages over the much more common practice of software emulation. This same technology has been used togreat effect in Analogueâs modernized takes on the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, and Sega Genesis, even if the products themselves have been hard to get hold of at times due to low manufacturing numbers.
Which leads us to todayâs preorder circus. The full timeline can be tracked easily through websites like Twitter and ResetEra, where messages of excitement about the impending preorder window quickly turn to frustration and anger as folks begin to realize they wonât actually be able to purchase an Analogue Pocket. In my case, I was able to easily add the handheld (in black, of course) and a dock for HDMI output to my cart and enter my address before being met with a gut-wrenching loading swirl as the website tried to calculate shipping costs, which a cursory perusal of social media shows was a common problem.
Pocket pre-orders are sold out. We will be producing more and do our best to meet demand during this unfortunate global state of affairs.
Signup at https://t.co/E3wd4IdMbE to be notified by email when we are able to make Pocket + accessories available again. pic.twitter.com/K3is9xG5uk
â Analogue (@analogue) August 3, 2020
My editor told me hers had eventually gone through, so I waited. And waited. And waited. Then the website timed out. After reloading, I found that I was back on the Analogue Pocket product page with an empty shopping cart. I re-added my two items, this time with a hard case and screen protector, and went to check out again, only to finally be told that the handheld and all its accessories were sold out.
In retrospect, itâs funny to be upset that I wasnât able to spend over $300 on a boutique electronic, but I nevertheless vented some of my frustration in a snippy tweet and got ready to start the work day. Many other people across the internet had similarly unhappy experiences. Popular games forum ResetEra offers a representative sample:
âSo fucking gutted that theyâre already out of stock,â said ResetEra user Liam Allen-Miller.
âThese guys really underestimated demand,â added Steeped in a Sea of Games. âHoly shit.â
âIâm a little concerned about the future of buying their products,â said TrojanAg. âIt seems like the scalpers have caught wind of them and are only going to make things more difficult.â
Analogue limited preorders to just two units per person, but that didnât stop folks looking to make a quick buck from securing what they could and putting the now sold-out items on eBay with exorbitant markups. While this sort of behavior is par for the course when it comes to in-demand products, it only added fuel to the fire for folks already upset at the process.
Look, I canât fault Analogue here. I donât know the intricacies of online commerce, but I do know that websites often buckle under load for any number of reasons. And with covid-19 still on the warpath, manufacturing has to be an absolute clusterfuck these days. Sure, I wasnât able to get the usual rush of serotonin these kinds of purchases induce in my capitalism-warped brain, but Iâm sure the Analogue Pocket will be available at some point down the line.
As you can tell, Iâve mostly talked myself down from the ledge. Even Elijah Wood couldnât get one! In the meantime, I should probably start looking for more old handheld games to play on this thing before those start going up in price, too.
