Project update 2 of 8
What an exciting campaign so far, You guys made it truly incredible and we want to thank you all for funding this project and spreading the PocketSprite love.
Anyone who’s built anything, be it a house or homepage will confirm: shifting from project to product is a challenging thing.
PocketSprite was no different. And our first challenge was finding a name. Apart from infuriating the lawyers of a certain red-hatted handheld hero, using the ‘Gameboy’ moniker would do the device an injustice: it was much more than just a hardware emulator for one platform. For starters, it could emulate multiple platforms.
Further, this is not the first "*Boy" project to exist. Every single iteration of domain names, and hence project names, had been taken. Most had been bought, abandoned, and are now infested with malware pushing popups. Others didn’t feel right.
Eventually, we settled, out of exasperation, on "8bitkey". By any definition, it was a terrible name. Too confusing phonetically, too many potential typos and squatting possibilities, and it had no soul. It was generic. It also translated to "8 penis boat jetty" in French.
We revisited the name dozens of times, fruitlessly. The project progressed. Prototypes were built. Domain names were bought and indelibly tattooed on circuit boards. It seemed like we were stuck with a terrible name. Sprite_tm consoled Steve: Everyone will just call it the tiny-keychain-thing.
Finally, after a sleepless flight back from China to Europe, Steve iterated over a list of domain names scribbled onto the back of a Cathay Pacific napkin. The first one the list was fantastic. It conveyed the size of the device. It gave credit to the product’s creator, and at the same time to the video game industry. It had geek caché, it was easy to remember, phonetically viable, and more to the point: available on namecheap.com for $8 USD.
PocketSprite was born.
Early bird investors in PocketSprite will be able to attest to the veracity of this tale: your PCBs are etched with the original, and terrible name: 8bitkey.com.
We made a little video about the assembly of the Hacker edition because we received many questions about it.
Note that you will have to glue the screen protector.
That’s it for today. Take care guys and thanks again for the incredible support.