Fantastically deep history of plug & play videogame consoles

David Pescovitz 12:40 pm Fri Aug 2, 2019

Back in the early 2000s, cheap plug & play videogame consoles became ubiquitous. I remember spotting them for sale everywhere from toy stores to Walgreens. Self-contained systems, they integrated one or many games instead of allowing users to swap in cartridges or CDs. Today, Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation shares the deep and geeky history of plug & play as a launching point for his research on the TV Guide Quizmaster, "something so rare it might not even exist." Below are a few bits from the thread. See the whole thing on Twitter!

In the early 2000s, a new toy category gained popularity in the United States: the "plug & play" video game console. You probably remember seeing a lot of these! The Jakks Pacific stuff was probably the most prolific. pic.twitter.com/BSjmG5PkiX

— Frank Cifaldi the Last (@frankcifaldi) August 1, 2019

Why were there NES games in these things? Well:

– In the 90s, Chinese manufacturers cloned the NES and put all of its components on one chip

– These were used in all kinds of applications: cloned systems, plug & plays with pirated games, even educational computers! pic.twitter.com/deAFgUwDG9

— Frank Cifaldi the Last (@frankcifaldi) August 1, 2019

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