SNES? C64? Pfft. Old news. We want a tiny Sega Dreamcast, N64, PS2 and BBC Micro under our telly, STAT
When Nintendo resurrected the NES in shrunken form, it had no idea what it had unleashed. Frantic shoppers punched each-other’s teeth out for a chance to own the diminutive retro game console and make their thumbs ache reacquainting themselves with Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man 2.
The SNES soon followed, and others have got in on the act: a tiny Mega Drive, a little PlayStation, and dinky takes on the C64, Amiga and Atari 400/800.
But these love letters to gaming’s past are so small that there’s still loads of room under our telly. So Stuff demands to see the following retro game consoles (as zapped by shrink-ray) before Santa shows up drunk in December. And, no, one of them isn’t the Amstrad CPC Mini. We’re not masochists.
The Sega Dreamcast Mini
Sega’s final console was such a commercial flop that the company stumbled backwards on to a massive spike, discharged all of its golden rings into the air, and pretty much gave up on hardware entirely.
The thing is, the Dreamcast mostly failed because people are massive idiots and couldn’t appreciate the majesty of an arcade at home. But imagine it now, as a 70-quid mini retro game console, plugging into your telly and giving you an instant fix of Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, and Virtual Tennis. Nuts to the Mega Drive Mini, Sega – we want this.
The Nintendo Classic Mini: N64
Late 2016: a tiny NES. Late 2017: a tiny SNES. Clearly, a tiny N64 is the obvious follow-up – which means it almost certainly won’t happen. After all, the big N has already had seven years and seems keener on virtual consoles these days.
But imagine if we did get a mini N64: Super Mario 64; Mario Tennis; 1080° Snowboarding; Perfect Dark; The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time; quite a lot of digital fog.
Sure, the PlayStation had the cool factor during that generation of consoles, but we’d sooner belt along with F-Zero X than have to nurse yet another twitchy Wipeout ship home.
The BBC Micro Mini
As British as a suspicious sausage sitting next to a pile of pulverised potato, the BBC Micro was the computer you ended up with when the bloke in the shop convinced your parents it was educational, because all the schools had one.
Thing is, the Beeb also had Elite. And while it lagged behind 8-bit rivals for other mega-hits, a mini retro game console take could be a cracker if bundled with titles like Exile, Chuckie Egg, Thrust, Stryker’s Run, Repton and, er, Granny’s Garden. (Cue: school break flashbacks from thousands of 40-something Brits. Sorry.)
The Sony PlayStation 2 Classic
Before you get all angry and attack Stuff HQ with specially sharpened ZX81s, by any measure the PS2 is now retro. It came out a mere 16 months after the Dreamcast. More time’s past since the PS2’s release than the gap between its debut and that of the Atari 2600.
Feeling old now? Don’t blame us. Instead, think of the games. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Shadow Of The Colossus. Resident Evil 4. Gran Turismo 4. Tekken 5. God of War. Katamari Damacy. OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast. A licensing nightmare, to be sure. But a plug-and-play dream if it existed in the real world.
The Nintendo Classic Mini: Game Boy
We’ve already sort of had this one in the shape of the Game Boy Micro, a handheld console so small that you could conceivably lose one down the back of an atom. But that tiny device still required you to shove cartridges into it like some kind of barbarian.
So we want a miniature Game Boy that’s absurdly thin, which can perhaps be shoved into a wallet, and yet that’s packed full of amazing games. Short of that, Nintendo might consider releasing a Game Boy app for Android and iOS. (And pigs might soar across the sky. Oh well. At least Delta exists, eh?)
The MAME Mini
Quarter Arcades and RepliCade have for years now been rethinking classic arcade cabinets, transforming the likes of Space Invaders and Tempest into shrunken, playable versions. The RepliCades in particular are tiny, akin to oddball handhelds. But our dream arcade retro game console goes further.
This little device would look like a tiny cab, but have a store so you could squirt officially purchased ROMs into it. You’d be able to play games using the cabinet itself, or via HDMI out to your telly. And then you’d wake up, realise this was just something you’d read on Stuff, angrily fire up MAME, and realise because of pesky licensing and reality we can’t have nice things.
Game over.