Although not officially announced by Nintendo, gadget website Gizmodo appears to
have unearthed evidence of plans to release the Play-Yan MP3 player in the West.
The story is illustrated by a scanned image of what seems to be an official Nintendo brochure from the Leipzig Games Convention, showing box art for a
Nintendo MP3 Player. The item is described as coming on a Game Boy Advance cartridge and using SD cards to store music files – with up to 500 songs on a single 2GB card.
The description exactly matches that of the Play-Yan device which was released in Japan in 2004 and was more
recently updated for the launch of the Game Boy Micro. This version of the device dropped support for downloadable micro games, but retained compatibility with MPEG4 video files – which are not mentioned in the brochure description.
The rest of the supposed brochure text describes, in German, a number of different player “skins” and an additional headphone port. A European price point of €29.99 ($39) is given, with no indication of a possible North American release.
This is not the first rumour of a European release for the Play-Yan, with Nintendo Spain
previously indicating that the device would be released in 2005. Although these plans were apparently shelved, the increased popularity of the Nintendo DS as a format in recent months may have convinced Nintendo of Europe to rethink the release.
