After 23 years, Animal Crossing's NES emulator still houses a mystery that comes down to 30 Japanese players nobody's been able to find
Aug. 5, 2024Nintendo once did the unthinkable, providing an emulator that can load external ROMs
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Animal Crossing has a secret: an NES emulator fully capable of loading and playing external ROMs. This emulator had just one official use - and efforts to document that use have been stymied by the fact that only 30 Japanese players ever got to see it in action.
If you played the original Animal Crossing, you probably remember that the game features an array of collectable NES consoles, each of which lets you play a different early generation NES game, like Balloon Fight or Super Mario Bros. That’s no mystery - that comes from the standalone NES console that has no game. If you try to interact with it, a text box simply says “I want to play my NES, but I don’t have any software.”
Moddersdiscovered years agothat this console is actually capable of loading a ROM file from a GameCube memory card, if you provide it in the proper format. So, in theory, you could load up Battletoads or Mega Man and play them in Animal Crossing if you put enough effort in. But surely there’s no way Nintendo developed and implemented a feature like this only for only hackers to be able to make use of it. Right?
At this point, we don’t even know for sure that these 30 Ice Climber-loaded controller paks were ever distributed. Assuming they were, and their owners hung onto them for all these years, there’s no guarantee the aging batteries in these things will have managed to preserve the original data. While there’s no shortage of ways to play Ice Climber these days, the letter from Tezuka and the whole package would make this an interesting curiosity - but alas, it seems this might be a case of true-blue lost media.
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