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Story time! I am thrilled to have finally acquired the rare Bandai Gamepad plug and play console from 1997, something so obscure there's hardly a peep on the internet about it. This odd device CHANGES THE ENTIRE NARRATIVE on plug and play history. Thread: 
If you've followed this account in the past year or so, you'll know that one of my research obsessions is finding plug and play devices that secretly house cloned NES hardware inside. Devs have been secretly making new NES games for almost 20 years and hiding them in these things
I gave a brief version of the story back in August, which you can read here:
But the even briefer version is:
- The NES is dead simple
- By the 90s it was cloned
- By the 2000s the clones cost pennies
- The "plug and play" market emerges around 2001, many using cloned NES inside
- These systems needed new software
- Devs in China make new NES games!
- The NES is dead simple
- By the 90s it was cloned
- By the 2000s the clones cost pennies
- The "plug and play" market emerges around 2001, many using cloned NES inside
- These systems needed new software
- Devs in China make new NES games!
Here are a few examples of plug and play units that secretly house NES guts with brand new games. You could theoretically get the ROMs out of these and put them on NES carts, and they'd run!
And not only did manufacturers keep cloning the NES, they started enhancing those clones, giving the NES new capabilities. My personal favorite is Zdog, here, which has new games that are *mostly* NES, but with enhanced audio and color capabilities.
I've been attempting to collect and catalog these plug and play systems that fell through the cracks, as they're sometimes really, really obscure. There's been a lot of weird eBay searching and squinting at tiny screenshots trying to see if they make my "NES radar" ping.
Back in August I spent a good couple days going through ancient websites that cataloged consoles, seeing if anything looked like it might have unique NES software inside. Something that got my attention right away was the Bandai Gamepad:
There's basically nothing about this unit on the English-language internet, and even if you search in Japanese, there's hardly anything out there. But the screenshots on the box, to my eyes, screamed "NES," so I wanted to find one. The problem is they're just. Never. Sold.
I don't know if they're particularly rare, or if there's such little demand that nobody bothers trying, but there's barely any history of these having been listed on Yahoo Japan Auctions (or anywhere else that I can find!).
The only shot in the dark I had was this February tweet from a Hard Off store in Kashihara. The tweet was six months old by that point, so odds were low they still had it, but it was our only lead.
As it turns out...they still had it! So I sent my pal @theHenryDemos on a RECON MISSION to get this for us. He had to ride a two hour train! He made a weird little documentary about it!
@theHenryDemos And...here it is! The only footage on the entire internet of the Gamepad, recording from our unit. This thing looks and sounds like NES...MAYBE. As the video shows, it's a collection of ten mini-games.
@theHenryDemos In addition to the ten games, there's also a story mode that ties them together. It even has battery backup to save your progress...which I don't think I've seen on any plug and play ever.
@theHenryDemos Now, this appears to me to at least be NES-adjacent under the hood, but it does at least one thing a stock NES can't: it allows more colors on screen, at least in the background tiles. We can't really know for sure what's going on here without getting the data out of it.
@theHenryDemos To determine the feasibility of a data dump, step one is opening it up and seeing what we're working with inside. And. Uh. They straight up soldered a big metal plate to cover up the chips inside.
@theHenryDemos I'm not willing to risk operating on this thing until we've secured a backup, I don't want to destroy the only accessible copy of the thing! So for now all we can do is observe, and my observations tell me "slightly-enhanced NES." Now, here' why this is FASCINATING:
@theHenryDemos First of all, this was manufactured by Bandai. In Japan. In 1997. To put this in perspective, Bandai was a licensed Famicom game maker. They'd put out a Famicom game just three years prior to this! Are these by seasoned Famicom devs? Are they old, unreleased games?
@theHenryDemos Second, assuming this is an NES-based plug and play, this is BY FAR the earliest known example. We don't have complete global documentation of these things as they're really obscure, but we tend to think of them starting to emerge around the year 2000 at the earliest. This is 97!
@theHenryDemos Third, assuming this is an enhancement to the base hardware...we don't see THAT happening until around 2001 or 2002. So this predates all of the Chinese manufacturing enhancements by a good chunk of years.
And fourth...forget NES-based plug and plays specifically, we don't see plug and play controllers really at all until MAYBE 1999 or 2000. Is this the first one ever?
Anyway, I'd encourage anyone with a good eye or ear for NES software to watch the videos and see if anything grabs your attention. Are there any fonts we can identify? Any songs or sound effects? Any forensic evidence telling us who made this software for Bandai?
Here's the packaging, just to show that there's nothing identifying here (and to show off @GameHistoryOrg's awesome oversized scanner).
UPDATE: You're not gonna believe what @covell_chris stumbled into at his local Hard Off.
