Rediscovering Nintendo’s Forgotten Console, the Pokémon Mini

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Yesterday, VICE’s science and tech channel Motherboard ran a great feature exploring “Nintendo’s forgotten console,” the Satellaview. This Super Nintendo add-on—if we’re being supremely picky, more a peripheral than a console proper—was only released in Japan in 1995, and allowed users to unscramble signals broadcast from a partner company, St.GIGA, to play specially selected video games on specified dates. Many titles were made available to subscribers, some exclusive to the service, and others simply SNES games, which were given a novel means of distribution. Famous faces popped up: The original Harvest Moon was separated into broadcast-proportioned episodes, likewise A Link to the Past from the Zelda series.

It might sound a little like a humble brag, but I was well aware of the Satellaview before Motherboard’s article, because I’m old. I did most of my formative gaming in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I remember seeing this strange contraption, which sat beneath the SNES unit much in the same way as SEGA’s Mega CD did the Mega Drive, on the pages of domestic games magazines, which I bought as regularly as possible (or simply soaked up in the newsagents for 20 minutes at a time before being kicked out for not buying anything). But the response to the piece proves that it certainly wasn’t a widely known piece of Nintendo history: “Been gaming since the 1980s and this is the first time I’ve seen that,” reads one response on Twitter; “Never really knew about this console,” reads another. Job done, then: public, informed.

But when I turned to the editorial crew at Motherboard in the UK, who happen to sit right beside me, and mentioned the Pokémon Mini, my line of enquiry was met by blank faces. And I can completely understand that reaction, as while I’ve been an active gamer pretty much my entire life, and have owned my share of Nintendo consoles and even wrote a documentary for Radio 1 on mobile gaming not so many years ago, the Pokémon Mini had completely passed me by until around a month ago when I saw it in the pages of a Retro Gamer bookazine, the Videogames Hardware Handbook, covering the years 1977 to 2001.

The Pokémon Mini is, as the article in question states very firmly, “a fully fledged handheld gaming system.” It’s not a single game in a single shell, like the old-school Game & Watch releases. It’s not some kind of virtual pet toy. The system, clearly featuring the famous Nintendo logo above its screen, uses cartridges. It wasn’t a Japan-only system, like the Satellaview, going on sale in the East, America, and Europe between the winter of 2001 and spring of 2002. It was fairly short-lived, with only ten official games released—each of which, as the system’s name might well imply, had a hefty degree of Pokémon branding attached. It’s officially Nintendo’s smallest-ever games console, no more than 74 mm in any direction (about half the size of the minuscule Game Boy Micro); it came in a variety of colors, like the Game Boy Pocket and most subsequent Ninty handhelds; and it ran for absolute ages, around 60 hours, on just one AAA battery. It had a built-in rumble feature, infrared connectivity for local multiplayer, and even some primitive motion control technology in its shock detector.

Basically: How the bloody hell had I missed this until now? I have one, albeit rather feeble, excuse. In 2001 and 2002, I was at the business end of my degree, and gaming wasn’t exactly something I could find a great deal of time for, nor reasonably afford given the many costs of university living: books, printing, horrendous bar bills from across the Greater Manchester area, the monthly ASDA binge. All I had with me at uni was my old Pocket-model Game Boy, Link’s Awakening and Pokémon Blue alongside Tennis and Tetris, which rarely came out from under the bed, and for a term a battered Mega Drive with its dodgy-as-hell port of Premier Manager and, naturally, a cheap-night-in-saving copy of Sensible Soccer. Anything new—even when it looked old, as the visuals of the Pokémon Mini definitely did in 2001, more original 1989 Game Boy than anything more Advance(d)—simply didn’t register on my radar. Believe it or not, studying became quite significant as I approached the end of my course.