This fall SongPro, Inc. is bringing the noise to GameBoys everywhere. The African-American company is releasing SongPro MCE, a $99 device that lets GameBoy Advance and GameBoy Color users play visually-enhanced MP3s, allowing gamers to peep the album cover, lyrics, and other items while listening. SongPro has partnered with music download giant RioPort, so there should be thousands of songs available, and SongPro will sell enhanced memory packs to save songs on.

For co-founders Mark Bush and Ronald Jones it’s been a long two years from product idea to completion. Jones, an engineer, came up with the SongPro device idea and met with Bush in early 2000 to help with the business side. Unfortunately, the timing couldn’t have been worst: by Spring 2000, because of the economy, people had stopped investing in tech companies. It didn’t help that GameBoy creator Nintendo, not liking the original SongPro MCE design, took them to court. “We persevered, without any money, living on like five dollars a day,” Jones said.

Perseverance paid off: within months SongPro and Nintendo agreed to work together, microchip powerhouse Cirrus Logic came aboard to help with production, and they were able to attract powerful people to their company, including Silicon Graphics co-founder Dr. Marc Hannah.

Furthermore, they’ve gotten Nelly to endorse the product. He’ll be doing commercial spots for the device and, in turn, the company will be sponsoring him on his upcoming tour. “If I would have had the chance to [get involved] in Microsoft when it was first introduced, I wouldn’t be rhyming right now,” Nelly says. “I’m glad to be in on the ground level!”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 1st, 2002 at 2:42 am and is filed under Journalism, Music, The Source, The Source, Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.