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
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."
Modders discovered years ago that 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?
Well, the GameCube version of Animal Crossing that English-speaking fans are most likely familiar with is essentially an enhanced version of the 2001 N64 original, which was released only in Japan. The N64 version also featured this standalone console, and it also had the seemingly unused ability to load from a memory card - in this case, the N64 controller pak.
fell down a weird lost media rabbit hole?the original N64 version of Animal Crossing (Dōbutsu no Mori) had 7 famicom games, but an 8th, Ice Climber, seems to have been released as a giveaway from Nintendo Dream magazine?distributed as a controller pak with a unique sticker pic.twitter.com/EqlHOz5ha3July 30, 2024
It turns out that the N64 version of this console emulator did get one official use - but it's such an obscure one that it's effectively lost to history. In 2001, the Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream hosted a
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