10 Of Nintendo's Weirdest & Most Forgotten Gaming Experiments
7. The E-Reader
Remember those times when you could get a toy in a cereal box? Nintendo's e-Reader sadly never capitalized on that.
Released in 2002, the Nintendo e-Reader was a card scanner you plopped into your GBA like a massive plastic tumor. Buy one of many trading card packs, ranging from Pokemon Trading Card Game packages to classic NES games, and you'll get to play with them by scanning them through the card reader. Cool, right?
Not so cool was the clunky device limitations. Bar codes can only hold so much data, so retro games like Excite Bike came bundled in packs of five cards- of which all must be swiped twice before you can even see a title screen. On top of that, the e-Reader takes up the cartridge slot in the device - of which there's only one.
So how are you even supposed to use the darn thing with, say, Pokemon Ruby?
Easy! By connecting a whole second Game Boy Advance. So just to recap, you'd have to buy the e-Reader, a link cable, a second GBA, and a pack of cards on top.
What absolute rubbish.