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The Nintendo iQue
China is awash with video game black markets, pirated systems and ROM hacks! Take a look down eBay and you'll probably find quite a few pirate or knock of game consoles. The Wii is probably one of the most knocked off consoles and other notable knock offs exist for the NES, SNES and even the Ouya! The Ouya! The knock off for this thing looks like a PS4, meant to contain some Xbox One hardware and can support the same things as the Ouya! What about a SEGA Saturn that's actually a SEGA Dreamcast, one of the other oddities out there! Nintendo decided to fight back against the Chinese black market and from this came the iQue. Made by Nintendo, but still an oddity!
At the turn of the millenium Nintendo noticed something worrying about the spending habits of Chinese gamers, most players were buying pirated games on the black market. You could see why this is a problem, Nintendo weren't getting the money but the gamers were getting to play their favourite games. Before we go any further the Chinese gamers aren't really to blame here as the Chinese government had implemented a ban on video games meaning a black market was the only place to go to get your daily fix of Duck Hunt! How could Nintendo reach the Chinese market if the government was stopping them? They turned to Chinese-American scientist Dr Wei Yen, obviously! Yen was a software designer and entrepreneur and was a big name in the software, and later the hardware, industry. He was Nintendo's route in!
Nintendo found a loophole in the Chinese government's ban and created the iQue. Yen was the distributing arm in mainland China and was able to successfully sell the console starting from 2003. getting into China was one problem but Nintendo, and Yen, were faced with a bigger problem, the black market! Video game piracy was huge at the time and Nintnedo needed a way to safeguard the iQue's library, to do this they bypassed the retail market almost entirely! iQue games could only be bought at special iQue depots spread across China! Keeping the distribution of the games in specific locations ensured that Yen could control where the games went more easily. About the games, Nintendo wanted to make the iQue play games prior to the GameCube. Nintendo started to develop NES, SNES and N64 games but by the time of launch the system only supported N64 games. Despite this, you couldn't just stick Superman 64 into your iQue, the games for the iQue came on 64MB flash cards that plugged directly into the console, which was, in essence, just a controller, and that plugged into your TV.
There were only a handful of titles for the system, much like the ill fated Virtual Boy, but more could be downloaded when Nintendo released an online feature in 2009, 6 years after the consoles release! 3 years after the last game on the console! All the games available online were only the games that could be bought at the iQue depots and since then Nintendo haven't dipped their toes back into the Chinese video game market. Depite China lifting the ban Satoru Iwata himself stated that there were too many other obstacles to overcome in the Chinese market, even Microsoft have refused to distribute the Xbox One in China. Nintendo left the Chinese market but still remained connected to Wei Yen who later founded AiLive, the company which created the software that made the Wii Remote and Wii MotionPlus possible. Controllers that revolutionised the industry! All that from Nintendo trying to stop the Chinese video game pirates!
