The accessories, add-ons, and gadgets of the retro era
The NES Zapper was Nintendo's light gun accessory for the NES, bundled with the original console in North America and best known for Duck Hunt, one of the best-selling games of the decade.
The Power Glove was a motion-sensing wrist controller for the NES designed to be worn like a glove, marketed aggressively as the future of game control — and remembered as one of the most poorly functional accessories ever produced for a major platform.
R.O.B. was a plastic robot peripheral bundled with the NES Deluxe Set, designed to help Nintendo position the NES as a toy rather than a video game console in a retail market burned by the 1983 crash.
The NES Advantage was Nintendo's first-party arcade stick for the NES, bringing an 8-way joystick, large face buttons, and a turbo fire switch to home players who wanted an experience closer to their favourite coin-operated machines.
The Super Scope was Nintendo's wireless light gun bazooka for the SNES — a shoulder-mounted, infrared-based successor to the NES Zapper that required six AA batteries and worked with a modest library of dedicated games.
The Game Genie was a pass-through cartridge cheat device that allowed players to enter codes modifying game values in real time, enabling infinite lives, invincibility, and other modifications in thousands of games without any ROM modification.
The Sega 32X was an add-on unit that connected to the Genesis cartridge port and added two 32-bit SH-2 processors and enhanced graphics capability, intended as a stopgap 32-bit upgrade while the Saturn was developed — and remembered as one of gaming's greatest strategic miscalculations.
The Sega Activator was an octagonal infrared ring controller placed on the floor, designed to translate full-body movement into game inputs — a concept that predated motion gaming by fifteen years but was fundamentally unsuited to the games of its era.
The Menacer was Sega's wireless infrared light gun for the Genesis, launched to compete with Nintendo's Super Scope and offering a modular design that could be assembled as a full rifle or used as a compact pistol.
The Multitap was a multi-port adapter allowing up to four or five players to connect simultaneously to a single console, enabling the multiplayer party games that became a defining feature of the SNES and PlayStation eras.
The Atari Driving Controller was a dedicated paddle-style dial controller bundled with Indy 500 for the Atari 2600, using a rotary encoder to provide 360-degree analogue steering input decades before analogue sticks became standard.
The Vectrex was a unique all-in-one home gaming unit with a built-in vector display monitor, producing crisp, geometric graphics unlike any other home system and avoiding the colour and resolution limitations of television output entirely.
The Visual Memory Unit was the Dreamcast's memory card, but with a twist that made it one of the most ambitious controller accessories ever produced: a built-in LCD screen, d-pad, and buttons that turned the humble save-file holder into a standalone handheld gaming device.
The Rumble Pak was Nintendo's force-feedback accessory for the Nintendo 64, the first mainstream device to make a home console controller physically vibrate in response to on-screen events — a feature so successful it became a permanent standard of the industry.
The Game Boy Camera and its companion Game Boy Printer turned Nintendo's handheld into a digital photography toy, letting players capture low-resolution black-and-white photos, doodle on them, use them in minigames, and print them onto adhesive thermal paper.
Forty-four inputs across three pieces of hardware, including foot pedals and a physical eject lever you had to hit before your mech exploded. It cost $200 and came with a game attached.
Nintendo put rewritable disks in the Famicom and installed kiosks across Japan where you could have a new game written onto your old one for ¥500 — digital distribution, in 1986, staffed by a human being.
Active-shutter LCD 3D glasses, on an 8-bit console, in 1987 — the same technology living rooms would rediscover twenty-three years later, running at half the frame rate and supporting eight games.
A writable magnetic disk drive that bolted to the underside of the N64 — announced in 1995, delayed for four years, sold in Japan only to subscribers of an internet service, and discontinued inside fourteen months.
A SNES cartridge with a Game Boy inside it — not an emulator but the actual handheld hardware, playing monochrome carts on a television with colour palettes and decorative borders.
A card scanner for the Game Boy Advance that read data printed as dot patterns along the edge of trading cards — a delivery mechanism for NES games, minigames and extra levels in an era before console downloads.
A satellite modem for the Super Famicom that downloaded games broadcast at fixed times — including new Zelda episodes with live radio narration. Much of what it carried was never sold and was long presumed lost.
A floor mat of twelve pressure sensors that turned NES games into running, jumping and dancing. It began as Bandai's Family Trainer in Japan and sold half a million units in North America.
A controller attachment that let Nintendo 64 games read Game Boy cartridges — most famously so players could battle their own Pokémon in 3D in Pokémon Stadium.
Sega's CD-ROM add-on gave the Mega Drive a second 68000, scaling and rotation hardware and CD audio. It sold 2.24 million units and is remembered for both Sonic CD and a wave of grainy full-motion video games.
A 4 MB memory module that doubled the Nintendo 64's RAM. A handful of late games could not run without it — Donkey Kong 64, Majora's Mask and most of Perfect Dark.
Active-shutter LCD glasses for the Famicom, released in Japan in 1987 for ¥6,000. Seven games supported them. It was Nintendo's first attempt at stereoscopic 3D, eight years before the Virtual Boy.
A $199 28.8k modem that put a web browser and online play on the Saturn in 1996. There were no game servers — players dialled each other directly — and only six games supported it.