Hardware Heaven: ique Player

We look at Nintendo’s Chinese N64

» MANUFACTURER: ique/nintendo » YEAR: 2003 » COST: 498 Yuan (launch), £280 (today, boxed), £200 (today, unboxed)

The Chinese market has always been a tough one for console manufacturers to try to break into, thanks to heavy government regulations and rather loose enforcement of intellectual property rights. To try to solve this, ique was founded by Nintendo and Dr Wei Yen – an executive who had been involved in the development of the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube at Silicon Graphics Inc, MIPS Technologies and Artx. The company’s flagship product was the ique Player, a full N64 wholly contained in a control pad. TV connections, power and media plugged into the controller, while multiplayer was achieved with an external box.

Unlike the N64, the ique Player didn’t accept dedicated single-game cartridges. Instead, games had to be written to a proprietary memory card at in-store ‘ique Depot’ stations, reminiscent of Japan’s Famicom Disk Writer and Nintendo

Power kiosks. This move was intended to tackle piracy, but it wasn’t long before an alternative was developed – the ique@home program, which allowed Windows PC owners to connect their player by USB and download new games. Unfortunately, software support never truly got going. Five games were available at launch and five more were released within the first year, but only four more were released after that – the last being Animal Crossing in 2006.