Does Anybody Else Remember How Advance Wars Released on September 10, 2001, or is it Just Me?

Official Art for the Wii U Virtual Console re-release of Advance Wars, from nintendo.com

Excuse Me?

Close your eyes and imagine.

It’s a beautiful September Tuesday, and the season’s tides have begun to change. The warmth of summer is becoming the cold of winter, and your mom just bought you Advance Wars: the hot, new strategy RPG from Nintendo for the Game Boy Advance. It’s fun. You’re having a great time. You lose yourself in the tiny world encased within the GBA screen, and everything feels oh so simple and easy.

And then, your mom turns the TV on.

Okay, but that was a one time thing. Nintendo didn’t know their cute little war game would release 24 hours prior to an American tragedy that eventually led to an actual war occurring. Big whoop. Move on. Besides, it was a freak accident. It’s not as if something like this would ever happen agai-

A Polygon article detailing the then recently revealed delay of Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Advance Wars is a series cursed with terrible release timings. And yet, despite what I said just one sentence ago, its first entry released at a deceptively great time. Fire Emblem had yet to make its western debut, and while series like Final Fantasy Tactics and Tactics Ogre later received GBA entries, few SRPGs in the early 2000s made Nintendo consoles their home. Even on other platforms, landmark SRPG franchises like Disgaea had yet to make their debut. With the landscape of the genre being as barren as it was, conditions aligned for Advance Wars to be a success, and succeed it did. The title reviewed incredibly well among critics, and in the 7 years following its release, 5 sequels were developed for the GBA, Gamecube, DS, and Wii, all under the satisfied eye of father Nintendo. 

It still released the day before 9/11 though.

And the Remake?

We’ll get to that.

After 2008, Advance Wars disappeared. A 2017 Eurogamer piece revealed that the cause of this may have been the fear that Advance Wars would step on the toes of the much more popular Fire Emblem franchise, but that’s hardly a sufficient explanation. FE only exploded in popularity following the 2013 release of Fire Emblem Awakening. What about the 5 years in between then and ‘08? We know that several Advance Wars titles didn’t release in Japan, so maybe that was a part of the issue, but the fact remains that we don’t know the true reason. It was a mystery indeed — a New Mystery, even… and one we stopped caring about once Re-Boot Camp was announced. 

Slated for release in December 2021, Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp was a bundle remake of the first two games in the Advance Wars series. 13 years later, the series would finally return. What few Advance Wars fans still held hope in their hearts rejoiced. The world was at peace. 

And then Russia invaded Ukraine.

So, there are two possibilities for us to consider. Possibility A is that Nintendo is a dark and mysterious force that somehow knew that both 9/11 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine were going to happen and decided to release two separate Advance Wars titles at the time both events occurred. Possibility B is that they’re just unlucky.

Either way, a real-world war suddenly beginning was reason enough for Nintendo to delay Re-Boot Camp indefinitely, with the hopes of instead releasing it at a time that wasn’t so torn by the violence and death that resulted from the very subject matter the game so whimsically depicted. But, that time never came, and Nintendo elected to release the game in 2023. It did not sell well. Shocking.

Do You Have a Point You’re Trying to Make, or…?

No. I just wanted to talk about Advance Wars.

Game development is a difficult process. Coordinating a team of dozens of people for multiple years, working with everything from programmers, to artists, to retailers, and putting together a piece of media that’s going to go out into the world is kind of a crazy thing. That’s what video games are. They’re the products of countless hours of hard work, and the results of longstanding passion for something that a group of people all truly care about. That’s why, every so often, I consider that the existence of the works of art we call video games may be the product of countless tiny miracles all coalescing into the time we live in.

And sometimes, those works of art happen to release the day before 9/11.