Analogue Pocket Goes Up For Pre-Order, Sells Out in Under an Hour

Pre-orders went live today for the Analogue Pocket, a portable handheld gaming system designed to play classic portable games. The hardware is impressive, and it's not too much of a surprise that once the Pocket went up for pre-order, it swiftly sold out.

Analogue Pocket pre-orders went live at 8 a.m. PT today, as noted by this tweet. Another tweet, posted just 15 short minutes after the pre-orders went live, notified prospective buyers that the Pocket's pre-orders were sold out.

"We will be producing more and do our best to meet demand during this unfortunate global state of affairs," the company said. It also shared a store link where you can be signed up to get notified when more are available.

Some folks got lucky with their pre-orders, celebrating on social media. Others missed the train, including Lord of the Rings actor Elijah Wood, who tweeted about losing his while waiting for shipping to load. Sadly, Wood will have to wait to play as himself in the Diablo-like Lord of the Rings: Two Towers GBA game.

The Pocket is an impressive-looking piece of hardware that tries to take a modern approach to playing classic Game Boy games. Rather than emulate, the Analogue Pocket uses two FPGAs to run cartridges. Also, it just looks fantastic, and it can dock with a separate device to charge the Pocket and play on a TV, You know, like another handheld device.

Analogue's retro handheld system won't be heading out to buyers until May 2021, so there's still some time between now and then for folks like Mr. Wood to get their pre-orders secured. As for me, I think I'm content with my classic Game Boy Advance SP, though I might need to snatch some carts before the prices shoot up.