is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
It’s always a risk betting on new video game hardware from a little-known company: what if game developers never show up? But the $50 Thumby Color, on sale this week, is an easier sell — the two-inch handheld is cute as a button, fits on your keychain, lets aspiring programmers build and publish games right on the web, and I’m finding it so much easier to play than the tinier $30 original!
Here’s my video comparing the two and showing off playable takes on Tetris, Connect 4, Minesweeper, Doom, Bust-a-Move, 2048, and more:
Where the original Thumby uses a 133MHz Raspberry Pi RP2040 to power a black-and-white screen measuring just 0.4 inches diagonally, with a mere 1.4MB of space for games, the new Thumby Color can double the clockspeed with its RP2350 chip, has double the screen at 0.85 inches, and nearly 10 times the storage at around 14MB usable space.
As you may have just seen, that isn’t a lot of power, but it’s enough to wow in such a tiny package. (Yes, there’s legitimately a real, playable copy of Doom running on the original Thumby thanks to Graham Sanderson, with tweaks by James Brown, and you can install it here yourself!)
The original Thumby was so difficult to play. Forget thumbs, I needed to use my thumbnails to press its buttons and D-pad, and I practically needed a magnifying glass to tell the tetrominoes (Tetris shapes) apart on its 1-bit OLED.
The original Thumby, playing Doom. Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Thankfully, the Thumby Color’s D-pad actually has a tangible pivot point. It’s stiff, but I can actually roll it with a thumb! Now all those original Thumby games (the color is backwards compatible!) and new Color games have moderately usable controls — and when you add the 16-bit color LCD screen at 128 x 128 resolution, it’s far easier to make out those pixels. Especially when each tetromino gets its own color.
The Thumby Color also has new shoulder buttons a la Game Boy Advance — which are so much easier to actuate than face buttons at this size that I hope TinyCircuits will let us remap them to A and B for original Thumby titles. For now, they’re underused by current games, as are the new rumble motor and speaker.
The Thumby Color, playing a Bust-A-Move clone, with thumb for scale. Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge
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