It is notable for being the only Game Boy game to support 16 simultaneous players. It used a special hardware device and cables created by the game programmer, Robert Champagne.

I was the producer on this game. The comments on the framerate are a sore point for me...When we originally designed this game, it could handle up to 16 players using a custom-made token ring cable. The frame rate with up to about 8 players was pretty good, but sucked at 16... We were going to package the cables with the game, but Nintendo insisted we support their Satellite 4 player hub even though it was a piece of poo. Framerate dropped big time. Ah well, such is life.

Of course the best part of Arena is fighting against human opponents. The game was designed to use a special adaptor to support up to sixteen players, but it was never released so you’ll have to make do with four. Internet rumour has it that linking several four-player adaptors together will allow more than four people to play, however whilst reviewing Faceball 2000 an attempt at a five-player game using this method proved unsuccessful.