096 THE OFFICIAL NINTENDO MAGAZINE

FEATURE

A history of Nintendo’s greatest

peripherals

intendo, more than any other gaming company, is famed for its innovation. Take a moment to think about the different bits of plastic

you’ve got lying about the house right now. You’ll defi nitely have at least a Nunchuk, since every Wii comes with one. Maybe you have a Wii MotionPlus too. Perhaps you bought Mario Kart Wii and have a Wii Wheel lying around. Or the Balance Board that came with Wii Fit. Have you got any plastic instruments for use with Guitar Hero or Rock Band? How about the Wii Zapper? Or maybe you’re one of the unlucky few who were tricked into buying one of those rubbish plastic tennis racquet shells.

It’s clear that most peripherals are designed with one purpose in mind: to enhance your gaming experience in a way that standard controllers can’t. So to pay tribute to nearly 30 years of innovation, here’s our special look back at Nintendo’s glorious history of peripherals, accessories and other quirky curios that offer gaming thrills above and beyond the ordinary.

The Phat Controllers

N

ONM61.feat_perif 96 9/16/10 10:05:28 AM

Four Score 1990The Nintendo 64 may have been the fi rst Nintendo system with four controller ports, but that doesn’t mean it was the fi rst to allow four players to play at once. The NES Four Score was a special adapter that allowed four players to plug NES controllers in and play at the same time. The fi rst batch of four-player games included the mental Nintendo World Cup and racing classic Ivan Ironman Stewart’s Super Off-Road.

The NES joypad was a great controller but some arcade buffs could never really get used to playing games like Donkey Kong with a D-Pad. Enter the NES Advantage, the fi rst ever joystick on a Nintendo home system. The Advantage had a sturdy but accurate stick on top of a white base, and also featured extra Turbo buttons that you could hold down to activate auro-fi re, as well as dials to adjust the speed of the effect.

Zapper 1985One of the fi rst Nintendo peripherals ever created, the Zapper came bundled with some NES packages on launch day along with Duck Hunt. The Zapper worked by making the entire screen fl ash black when you pressed the trigger, then quickly fl ashing a white box over your target. If the Zapper senses both the black and the white then it knows you were aiming at the target and a hit is registered. This only works on old-school tellies though: if you have a modern LCD or plasma television and plug an old NES into it, the Zapper won’t work.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL?Because it was one of the fi rst ‘cool’ add-ons that helped kick off the NES’s worldwide popularity. WHY WAS IT SPECIAL?

Because it marked the fi rst time four players could play together simultaneously.

But our favourite of all the Four Score compatible games was A Nightmare On Elm Street, which did four-player platforming nearly two decades before New Super Mario Bros Wii made it popular. After that, four player gaming caught on – there was a similar four-player adapter for the SNES, and UK company Codemasters even managed to build two extra controller ports into some of their Mega Drive cartridges.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it was the fi rst time Nintendo ditched the joypad in favour of a joystick.

Although we’re big admirers of the Advantage, the high price combined with the fact that most people were happy with the default NES joypad meant that it didn’t really catch on. As with the Four Score though, Nintendo later released an updated version of the Advantage for the SNES.

NES Max 1988Take a look at the analogue slider on the 3DS. You might think it’s a pretty novel idea. Now have a gander at the NES Max. Notice anything familiar? Yes, the Max was Nintendo’s fi rst attempt at a slider-based joypad, or a ‘cycloid’ as it was called. It promised to allow players greater control when playing their games, but since none of the NES games needed analogue control the Max’s slider could still only register eight directions, meaning the whole thing was a bit of a wasted opportunity. Still, there’s no denying it was a really comfortable controller at the time, which may explain why Nintendo went down a similar route when trying to come up with an analogue joystick for the 3DS.

NES Advantage 1987

THE OFFICIAL NINTENDO MAGAZINE 097

The Phat Controllers

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it could very well be the granddad of the 3DS’s analogue slider.

NES

ONM61.feat_perif 97 9/16/10 10:05:37 AM

CLOSE, BUT NO CIGARNot every Nintendo add-on was a hit

R.O.B.The Robotic Operating Buddy looked like he could be any child’s best friend... as long as said child didn’t mind having a best friend who took ten minutes to pick up a simple disc. Though R.O.B. is a cult hero nowadays thanks to his appearances in Super Smash Bros Brawl and Mario Kart DS, in the NES days he was basically rubbish.

Power PadDance mats? Pah! Nintendo and Bandai had the idea years ago. The Power Pad was a mat with buttons on it that players could use to take part in fi tness games like World Class Track Meet and Dance Aerobics. The Power Pad was a fl op but Bandai has since released a similar mat on the Wii for the Family Trainer games.

Hey You PikachuThis Nintendo 64 game came with a large yellow microphone that you could use to talk to Pikachu and give him commands. The problem is, voice recognition wasn’t too great a decade ago and so Pikachu tended to ignore what you said. Its full title should have been “Hey You Pikachu, Listen To Me You Disobedient Git”.

Power GloveTo be fair, the Power Glove was the creation of Mattel, but it didn’t stop Nintendo creating a huge TV ad campaign for it. The idea was a sort of predecessor to the Wii Remote, in which you could put on this glove and move your hand to control the action on-screen, but it worked about as well as a solar-powered miner’s helmet.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because no matter how hard you tried you always looked like a complete idiot every time you used it.

Super Scope 1992Although the Zapper wasn’t the greatest light gun in the world, it still had some dedicated followers, so Nintendo decided the SNES needed a gun too. The Super Scope was a bazooka-shaped beast that came with a scope the player could look through. It showed a zoomed-in area of where the gun was roughly aiming, letting players fi re more accurate shots. The gun game with Super Scope 6, a cartridge containing six different lightgun games including an interesting take on Tetris in which the player had to blast away blocks. Other Super Scope games included Yoshi’s Safari, which sees Mario blasting enemies while riding atop Yoshi.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it turned the tables and let handheld gamers play their games on television.

Super Game Boy 1994If you think the DSi XL is the best way to play your handheld games on a bigger screen, you probably never experienced the wonders of the Super Game Boy. This was a special SNES cartridge with a Game Boy cartridge slot built in. If you plugged in a Game Boy game you would be able to play it on your TV, and what’s more, it would replace the four shades of grey the Game Boy was capable of with real colours. The results varied, but the novelty was enough to impress many gamers. As well as the ability to ‘colour in’ old Game Boy games, the Super Game Boy could also play new

Super Game Boy compatible games which, when placed into the device, used the SNES’s extra power to make the graphics and sound better than the Game Boy could handle.

SNES Mouse 1992When Nintendo announced Mario Paint for the SNES, some were confused as to how it would work. Sega had previously released Art Alive, a Mega Drive art game that didn’t really allow for much precision because of the

horrible controls. Ever tried to draw a circle using a D-Pad? Exactly. Nintendo’s solution was an obvious one: bundle Mario Paint with a mouse so that players could get the same sort of accuracy as they would using ‘proper’ art packages. The SNES Mouse was a standard two-button mouse, albeit a lot smaller than the mice you’d traditionally see on a PC. It was also compatible with a few other SNES games released later on, including Lemmings and Jurassic Park.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it was a simple solution to a problem, and made Mario Paint a classic.

098 THE OFFICIAL NINTENDO MAGAZINE

FEATURE

SNES

ONM61.feat_perif 98 9/16/10 10:05:39 AM

Game Boy Camera & Printer 1998

The Phat Controllers

THE OFFICIAL NINTENDO MAGAZINE 099

In a curious attempt to jump on the relatively new digital camera bandwagon, Nintendo released a special camera for the Game Boy, allowing people to take their own photos. Sure, the photos were black and white and grainer than a sandcastle, but it was still fun taking photos and messing around with them in the Game Boy Camera software. You could then connect the Game Boy Printer and print your photos out on tiny little stickers, then stick them

all over the place, annoying parents and relatives alike. The Game Boy Printer was also compatible with games like Pokémon Yellow and Super Mario Bros DX, allowing you to print off stickers and banners themed around each game. Some sites sell sticker paper to this day.

Transfer Pak 1999By the late ‘90s, Pokémon fever was at an all-time high. Playgrounds around the world were packed with kids trading and battling, and the cartoon was getting millions of viewers each day. Nintendo wanted to somehow carry this trend over to its Nintendo 64 system, but how could they do that? Enter the Transfer Pak. This handy little device came with Pokémon Stadium and plugged into the N64’s controller. All you had to do was plug your Game Boy copy of Pokémon Red, Blue or Yellow into the Transfer Pak and you could then upload your Pokémon into Pokémon Stadium, allowing you to

battle with them in full colour on the big screen. Crucially, it also worked both ways, allowing you to mess around with your Pokémon on the N64 then send them back to your Game Boy cartridge. The Transfer Pak didn’t get used for much other than Pokémon, though a couple of other games like Mario Tennis, Mario Golf and Perfect Dark supported it.

“Despite its low quality photos, the Game Boy

Camera was a predecessor

to the DSi”

E-Reader 2001Nintendo was coming up with all sorts of weird and wonderful ideas at the turn of the millennium. One of these was the e-Reader, a small device for the Game Boy Advance that could read the data on small cards that were scanned through it. These cards contained anything from full NES games (though each of these required a few cards to load all the data) to special furniture and items for the GameCube version of Animal Crossing. Naturally, Pokémon got a look-in too, with special cards allowing Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire players to fi ght special trainers and receive rare items. There were even e-Reader cards for the GBA remake of Super Mario Bros 3, featuring special Super Mario World-themed levels and power-ups. While the e-Reader was a cool idea and was pretty popular in Japan (especially combined with the Pokémon

series), it didn’t really take off in the US and so it never actually got as far as being released here in Europe.

GAMEBOY

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because despite its low quality images, it was great fun and a clear predecessor to the DSi’s cameras.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it was the fi rst time save data could be moved from a handheld to a console, like Pokémon Battle Revolution years later.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it was an attempt to add special downloadable content to games without using an internet connection.

ONM61.feat_perif 99 9/16/10 10:05:44 AM

THIRD-PARTY LAMESNot every Nintendo add-on was a hit. Check these stinkers

Bart Simpson JoystickIn the early ‘90s British joystick company Cheetah made a series of moulded plastic joysticks in the shape of famous characters like Batman and the creature from Aliens. Their NES effort was shaped like Bart Simpson, which sounds like a cool idea until you realise the B button is on the top of his head, meaning your hand sits on his spikey head as you play. Ouch.

U-ForceHere’s a good idea, how about a controller that you don’t have to touch? The U-Force was basically two big infrared sensor panels stuck together that tried (and the key word here is ‘tried’) to sense your hand movements and turn them into NES controller commands. Did it work? Put it this way: know anyone who had one?

Turbo Touch 360As the NES grew in popularity, gamer-related injuries like ‘Nintendo thumb’ did too. To deal with these, a company called Triax released the Turbo Touch 360. Instead of a D-Pad it featured a touch-sensitive panel. It was horrible since gamers kept naturally resting their thumb on the D-Pad, moving their character by mistake.

Handy BoyThe Game Boy was huge in the early ‘90s and many companies released gizmos to try and ‘enhance’ (or ‘cash in on’) it. The Handy Boy was the daddy of them all. This monstrosity contained a light, a magnifi er, stereo speakers, a big joystick thing and huge A and B buttons, making your Game Boy look like a victim in a Saw movie.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it put vibration in console games for the fi rst time ever.

Rumble Pak 1997Ah, you kids today, with your fancy video games and your 3D handhelds and your vibrating controllers... in our day, controllers didn’t vibrate at all! The fi rst ever console game to have a force feedback option was Lylat Wars, which came bundled in a big box with the Rumble Pak. This chunky little gizmo took batteries and slotted into the back of the Nintendo 64 controller. Every time your ship took a hit it would vibrate (or ‘rumble’), immersing you further in the game. Most games following Lylat Wars (including GoldenEye and Ocarina Of Time) had Rumble Pak support, and Nintendo even re-released some early N64 games like Super Mario 64 and Wave Race 64 in Japan with added

Rumble Pak support. It was such a success that force feedback eventually became a standard feature in most Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft controllers.

Expansion Pak 1999As impressive as the Nintendo 64 was, it was struggling a bit to keep up by the end of the ‘90s. That’s when Nintendo released its secret weapon, the Expansion Pak. Fitting neatly into a little compartment on the top of the console, this little red baby

doubled the N64’s RAM from 4MB to 8MB, allowing developers to create games with a higher resolution, more polygons or more colours. Some of the N64’s later games wouldn’t work without the Expansion Pak (including Zelda: Majora’s Mask), whereas others still let players without one play a lesser version of the game. For example, Perfect Dark let you play a limited multiplayer mode, but the single-player campaign needed the Expansion Pak. A total of 61 games supported it.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because had it not been for this little doohickey, Majora’s Mask wouldn’t have existed.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it tried (but failed) to take the N64 in a very interesting direction.

64DD 1999When Nintendo fi rst revealed the Nintendo 64, it also announced that a special hard drive would be coming out for the system in the future. Four years later, the 64DD was released in Japan. It took large grey cartridges that looked like fl oppy disks on steroids, and allowed gamers to save large quantities of data (64MB) onto them. Games included a special version of F-Zero X with its own track editor, a 64DD update of SimCity and Doshin The Giant.

Most interesting though was the Mario Artist series, which consisted of four art-based games that let you make your own polygonal models, animations and the like. Only nine 64DD titles were released and the add-on was scrapped fairly quickly, never to be released outside of Japan.

100 THE OFFICIAL NINTENDO MAGAZINE

FEATURE

N64

ONM61.feat_perif 100 9/16/10 10:05:45 AM

THE OFFICIAL NINTENDO MAGAZINE 101

The Phat Controllers

DK Konga Bongos 2003Probably the silliest-looking peripheral of the lot, the DK Bongos were created specifi cally for Donkey Konga, a rhythm game for the GameCube where the player drummed along to the beat. As well as the obvious sensors in the left and right drum, the DK Bongos also had a built-in microphone that could sense claps. This meant the player had to quickly fi gure out whether to slap the left bongo, slap the right one, slap both at once or clap during each song. There were three Donkey Konga games in total as well as a bongo-compatible platformer, Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat (where hitting both bongos made

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because you can say what you like about Rock Band drums, but annoying the neighbours has never been so fun.

Donkey Kong jump and clapping your hands made him clap his too). A fi fth game, DK: Bongo Blast, was to be released but that was eventually delayed and was released on the Wii instead as Donkey Kong Jet Race. It was a bit rubbish.

Wavebird 2002Nowadays it’s fairly easy to stick wireless technology into a controller, but in the GameCube days wireless controllers were still pretty unique. The cheapest option was infra-red gaming but it worked in a similar way to the Wii Remote’s pointer: you had to have the controller pointing at the system at all times so if someone walked in front of you the signal would drop and the controller would stop working. The Wavebird got round this by using radio frequencies, meaning people could walk in front of it without disrupting the signal. All you did was plug a receiver into the GameCube controller port and select a frequency channel, select the same channel on the Wavebird, switch it on and job done. Wavebirds work on the Wii and work with all Virtual Console and GameCube games as well as any Wii games that use the GameCube controller (like Smash Bros Brawl).

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it’s the only fully-working, completely wireless joypad in Nintendo’s history.

Wii MotionPlus 2009The Wii Remote is a tasty piece of kit, but some games require a level of accuracy that the Remote’s built-in accelerometers just couldn’t provide. Enter the Wii MotionPlus add-on, a nifty little widget that plugs into the bottom of the Wii Remote and adds a swanky two-axis gyroscope to the controller. What this basically does is tell the Wii exactly how you’ve rotated the controller and where it’s positioned in 3D space. In short, it lets you swing a sword, play a golf stroke, chuck a frisbee and fl y an

airplane far more accurately than ever before. Wii MotionPlus is now included as standard with all new Wii systems, and will be required for the upcoming Legend Of Zelda: Skyward Sword.

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it took the revolutionary Wii Remote and made it even better for motion-controlled gaming.

Classic Controller Pro 2009When the Wii was released in 2006 the Classic Controller was only really intended as a controller designed for the Virtual Console service. SNES, Mega Drive and N64 games were a lot easier to play on this old-school controller and so the fi rst adopters of it were retroheads looking for vintage gaming gold.In time though the Classic Controller has become a great way to play some other Wii games including Super Smash Bros Brawl, PES, Mario Kart Wii and Sonic Unleashed.

The Classic Controller Pro, a refi ned version of the controller with more comfortable buttons and grippable handles, was released along with Monster Hunter Tri and is a ruddy good joypad. Grab one now!

WHY WAS IT SPECIAL? Because it shows Nintendo’s acknowledgment that sometimes you can’t beat an old-school pad.

“The DK Bongos were probably the

silliest looking ofthe peripherals”

GAMECUBE

Wii

ONM61.feat_perif 101 9/16/10 10:05:49 AM