After 23 years, Animal Crossing's NES emulator still houses a mystery that comes down to 30 Japanese players nobody's been able to find

Animal Crossing has a secret: an NES emulator fully capable of loading and playing external ROMs. This emulator had just one official use - and efforts to document that use have been stymied by the fact that only 30 Japanese players ever got to see it in action.

If you played the original Animal Crossing, you probably remember that the game features an array of collectable NES consoles, each of which lets you play a different early generation NES game, like Balloon Fight or Super Mario Bros. That's no mystery - that comes from the standalone NES console that has no game. If you try to interact with it, a text box simply says "I want to play my NES, but I don't have any software."

Modders discovered years ago that this console is actually capable of loading a ROM file from a GameCube memory card, if you provide it in the proper format. So, in theory, you could load up Battletoads or Mega Man and play them in Animal Crossing if you put enough effort in. But surely there's no way Nintendo developed and implemented a feature like this only for only hackers to be able to make use of it. Right?

Well, the GameCube version of Animal Crossing that English-speaking fans are most likely familiar with is essentially an enhanced version of the 2001 N64 original, which was released only in Japan. The N64 version also featured this standalone console, and it also had the seemingly unused ability to load from a memory card - in this case, the N64 controller pak.

It turns out that the N64 version of this console emulator did get one official use - but it's such an obscure one that it's effectively lost to history. In 2001, the Japanese magazine Nintendo Dream hosted a giveaway offering 30 controller paks loaded with Ice Climber for use with the Animal Crossing emulator. According to a translation from the Nookipedia fan wiki, these controller paks also contained a letter from producer Takashi Tezuka.

Scans of that issue of Nintendo Dream are out there, but nobody seems able to determine the final fate of those 30 controller paks. One recent tweet from a curious fan (thanks, Time Extension) might just be the most attention this whole thing has ever gotten, but that "weird lost media rabbit hole" has hit a dead-end - as did another attempt to dig in shown in a 2018 Japanese tweet.

At this point, we don't even know for sure that these 30 Ice Climber-loaded controller paks were ever distributed. Assuming they were, and their owners hung onto them for all these years, there's no guarantee the aging batteries in these things will have managed to preserve the original data. While there's no shortage of ways to play Ice Climber these days, the letter from Tezuka and the whole package would make this an interesting curiosity - but alas, it seems this might be a case of true-blue lost media.

Animal Crossing is one of the best GameCube games of all time, and it lets you play some of the best NES games ever made. What could be better than this?