Unearthing Bit Generations, Nintendo's long lost coffee table games.

My childhood home is up for sale, so I spent the weekend excavating boyhood treasures and yeeting them into a skip. Most of them, I'm sorry to say, were junk. There were some pogs, a few faded soft toys, stacks of dog-eared Sonic the Comic back-issues, more than one funfax, but little held much beyond sentimental value. It was a sombre bit of personal archaeology, all told, but there was a silver lining. At the bottom of a box, glittering like diamonds, I found a stack of near-pristine Bit Generations games for Gameboy Advance. 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. They were each little flights of fancy, announced under the name Digitylish, which I think is a portmanteau of 'digital' and 'stylish'. 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. The boxes were eggshell white, the logo emblazoned in the centre, with more than a hint of Bauhaus. And they were just slightly smaller than normal GBA boxes, and slightly more exact, wrought from precisely folded glossy cardstock. In short, they were coffee table games, made to sit pride of place in your modern living room. GBA games for the artbook crowd. Thirty-two-bit objet d'art.

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