Thread by @frankcifaldi

So uh, I just bought twenty early-2000s plug & play video game systems for a project. All of these are NES-based systems with brand new, legal games on them that are barely documented online. The mailman is going to be my Weird Santa the next couple weeks.

🎵Look at this trove
Treasures untold
How many wonders can one cavern hold?🎵

Bought the totally-undocumented New York Times Sudoku plug & play on a hunch and, yup, that's an NES. That's an official New York Times-branded NES system with a brand new game on it. It's so weird to say I just discovered a new NES game in plain sight.

It actually has a numberpad on the controller too! Talked about this in the @BootlegGames Discord, and we're pretty sure the numbers all correspond to inputs on what the NES sees as controller #2. That's so cool!!!

My understanding: enough hardware patents for the Famicom expired in 2003 that people could start selling clones legally. There had been (illegal in the U.S.) clones for years by that point, they were really cheap to make, so that's what was used for toys!

https://twitter.com/BombosMedallion/status/1062787631417843712

So if you're someone like a Majesco or an Excalibur or a Techno Source and you want to do plug & play video games, "NES-on-a-chip" becomes the default cheap tech to use, because they'd been making them so long in Hong Kong that the unit cost was very very low.

Plus you've still got a few developers who were recently making unofficial Famicom games for the markets that were still playing them (China, Russia, etc.) so you've already got NES dev teams you can contract to make the software.

So for example, this game seems to have been done by Nice Code in China: bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Nice_Code…

Nice Code had been making unofficial Famicom games since about 1999, and its staff had roots in even older Famicom dev houses like Dragon Co. bootleggames.wikia.com/wiki/Dragon_Co.