Analogue Pocket Pre-Orders Sold Out in Minutes. Here’s Everything You Need to Know

The Analogue Pocket is designed as the ultimate handheld device, letting you play games for Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, Game Gear, Atari Lynx, Neo Geo Pocket Color, and more. It’s the perfect system for retro gamers who don’t want to fiddle with the original hardware.

Analogue’s previous pre-order (for the last run of the NT Mini) sold out in less than a week. But that feels like an eternity compared to the Analogue Pocket. When pre-orders went live on Monday morning, they sold out within minutes. Here’s everything you need to know about the Analogue Pocket and how to get it.

Analogue Pocket pre-order debacle

Fans have been waiting for a Pocket pre-order date since the product was announced in 2019. Recently, Analogue made it official: customers could pre-order the system on August 3 at 8 a.m. PST from the Analogue website.

Sure enough, the system went live at the appointed day and time. While some users (including myself) got lucky and got an order in, things quickly went to hell.

Many users reported the site lagging out when processing the shipping costs for the order. By the time that glitch resolved (which typically took about seven minutes), Analogue was sold out of Pockets and most of the accessories.

Via social media, Analogue announced they were sold out and told fans they could sign up on the website for notifications about future production. While it’s heartening that this won’t be the last opportunity to buy the system, many fans are understandably angry that they could sell out so quickly.

Adding insult to injury, COVID-19 delays mean the system won’t ship out until May 2021 at the earliest. This left many fans wondering how Analogue could sell out of a product they presumably had not yet manufactured.

RELATED: Analogue Pocket: The Return of Game Boy in 2020

A fancy display

If you’re wondering why fans were so hyped, you may be asking a simple question: what makes this device so special?

Beyond the FPGA hardware inside, the Pocket sports a 3.5 inch LCD screen that has a 1600×1440 resolution. As Analogue puts it on their website, this offers “10x the resolution of an original Game Boy.”

It’s also made of Gorilla Glass, so the screen will be just as sturdy as it is pretty.