The Nintendo iQue Player was the Chinese exclusive Nintendo 64 plug and play console that released in the early noughties. These are now very collectible and becoming increasingly rare and expensive, and it has represented a console that I had always wanted, but until quite recently never actually owned.
As fate would have it, I now I finally have not one but two of the devices to add to my collection of obscure gaming consoles. But the big question is, is the Nintendo iQue Player worth owning? Was it ever that great, and most importantly, is the Nintendo iQue Player still awesome in the modern era?! Let’s find out!
In Our deep dive today, we’ll take a look at the iQue Player console itself, the games available or as may be the case with these things, the games not available, it’s history, the peripherals available, and how modern options can make the console even better to play in 2025 than when it first released.
The Nintendo iQue Player is a strange beast upon first glance. It is technically a plug and play Nintendo 64, so for everyone still upset at Nintendo that they didn’t release an N64 Mini after the NES Classic Mini and Super NES Classic Mini plug and plays, breaking news, Nintendo released an N64 plug and play first.
The console is entirely built into the controller, and it actually looked more like a Sega Dreamcast controller than it does look like an N64 gamepad.
Yes, it features the usual N64 A and B buttons and the diamond configuration of C buttons that make it recognisably an N64, but otherwise, it’s actually really different.
To begin with, Nintendo figured out how to set the analogue stick and Dpad so they could both be reached on the same side of the controller without the need for the central hand grip that the N64 had. Loads of people mock that the N64 gamepad was designed to only be fully accessible by players if that player happened to have three hands, but I always loved the N64 controller and loved the central grip and the way it positioned your hand with the Z trigger and stick. Nothing really has replicated that feeling quite so well.
But on the iQue Gamepad, the stick is now moved away from the centre and is positioned left where the Dpad was. The DPad has been replaced from the classic Nintendo cross to whatever this god awful bumpy pad is. Why they did that I will never understand.
The start button is still central, but way way tinier, and whilst the shoulder buttons and present and correct, the Z trigger is now positioned as a second left shoulder button. Similar to the L2 button on a PSOne controller.
So, how did this thing come about?
Quick history lesson. As big as the world is, it’s easy to forget that not all countries get access to the same things. Sometimes at all, but certainly not always at the same time and in the same form.
When it has come to the world of video gaming, China has had a very different experience compared to the rest of the world. Of the major consoles from the likes of Nintendo, Atari, Sony, Sega and Microsoft, almost none of them were ever officially released in the country.
Sega and Nintendo both partnered with local companiesrelease licensed Sega Mega Drives and Famicom clones in the country. But the same couldn’t be said for the Super Nintendo, Sega Saturn, or the likes of the Sony PlayStation.
Ultimately, this is somewhat what happened with the Nintendo 64, but it’s important to note that this didn’t happen until long after the life of the Nintendo 64 as an active console everywhere else in the world.
The original Nintendo 64 released in 1996 in Japan and in the United States, and for me in the UK it didn’t release until 1997. The N64 wasn’t as big a hit as Nintendo would have liked, and whilst it outsold the Sega Saturn and later on the Sega Dreamcast, which it was active alongside, it failed to come close to the sales of the Sony PlayStation.
Then in the year 2000, China banned video game consoles for their perceived affect on the youth. You could actually look at this move by the Chinese government as a bizarro elseworlds alternative history of what the United States could have looked like if the campaigners against Mortal Kombat and Night Trap had fully won out in the mid-90s.
The ban would last until 2015, and since then there have been official releases of PlayStation 4 and 5 consoles and Xboxs and event the Nintendo Switch. These are all much more limited than their releases elsewhere in the world and riddled with regulations.
So, where does the Nintendo iQue Player fit into this history lesson?
Well, the N64 was on its last legs come 2001, and despite any potential of the console ban before it actually happened, the fact was than Nintendo hadn’t made any moves to release hardware in the region since the NES anyway. Regulations, the ban and piracy laws made releasing consoles and games in China a nightmare than no Japanese or American company was really entertaining to go forth with.
But then again, China has a huge population, and console manafacturers would surely want to find a way to monetise as many people as possible.
But, Nintendo seemed to overcome a lot of the issues by 2003 and that year saw them release the Nintendo iQue Player in China.
So, how did they achieve this with a console ban in place? And how did they navigate the issues of piracy and regulations?
To start with, Nintendo decided to release old hardware in that the iQue Player is essentially a Nintendo 64 that they were releasing in 2003. When you consider the Nintendo GameCube would come out in late 2001 in Japan and the States, and for me in the UK in 2002, it may seem odd that Nintendo wouldn’t just focus on releasing the latest games and console worldwide.
Nintendo probably chose the path they did for several reasons. As we’ll get into.
Probably the main factor was that whilst Nintendo wouldn’t be allowed to release a console in China, they were allowed to release a plug and play devices.
Plug and play devices are types of gaming systems where you simply plug them into your TV and start playing with built in games. You don’t get extra cartridges, CDs, DVDs, disks or other peripherals.
Sometimes plug and play devices are like mini consoles and you can plug in controllers, and other times the controller has the console built in.
In the case of the Nintendo iQue Player, it is a console built into a controller. By 2003 the Nintendo 64 was seven years old and Nintendo had found a way to get the whole console into a controller that was similar in size to the admittedly bulky original N64 controller.
Nintendo probably wanted to test the waters in China with the old tech of the N64 as it would have been an easier option than trying to do anything similar with the GameCube in the region.
Nintendo were also very sneaky with releasing this non console in China when in so many ways it is a console.
Unlike most plug and play consoles the iQue Player does have removeable media, and this comes in the form of a 64MB memory card that plugs into the console/controller. Unlike on the actual N64 controller where memory packs were plugged into the top back of the controller, the memory cards on the iQue Player plug into the bottom at the back. When you take the memory card out, they actually resemble more like the Nintendo GameCube memory cards, but aren’t the same size as any other Nintendo memory card or peripheral.
They memory cards also serve a different function compared to their N64 counterparts, the N64 controller packs which only held 32kb of data. The iQue Player ones are 64 MB as they are used to hold the games themselves, as well as the save data.
One question I have not explored is how these change the usage of the games where you would use a N64 Controller Pack, as not being able to read the Chinese language, I’ll have to check with a comparison how saving ghost data in Mario Kart 64 works as an example.
The idea of these memory cards was that you could take them to physical kiosks at shops in China and plug them in to download new games. This meant Nintendo could continue to sell new games to players after they bought the system, and this was effectively a digital download. The kiosk concept was nothing new for Nintendo though as they had been doing versions of this with games for the Famicom disk system in Japan for years.
But wait, if you could download new games for the system does this mean it wasn’t really a plug and play with a set library of games built in? Yup. In my opinion Nintendo broke the rules and essentially released this as a console despite the console ban.
Add to this that you could do multi-player games, and the way this was possible was by buying extra controllers, and that to use them they would plug into a separate box which very much looked like a central console that you were plugging into.
Of course, this box wasn’t a console in itself as the hardware to make the games work would still be in the player 1 controller which was the iQue system itself.
The box was known as the multiplayer box, or for some reason which I’ve learned was a mistranslation, the Swim Box. And even if your friend had their own iQue Player, you couldn’t use two together for two or more player games, and if you wanted to do multiplayer, you’d have to have both the Multiplayer box as well as separate multiplayer controllers.
Now, as it happens, I do have a Swim box, and I have two Nintendo iQue Players, but as such there is no way to use the two together to do two player games. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t found a way for multiplayer gaming with my console though, although I’ll get to that in a minute.
So, Nintendo released the N64 as a plug and play, but made it so you could expand the library through download kiosks, and so that you could plug up to four controllers together for multiplayer games via a box that essentially made the whole setup no longer a plug and play. Did they do anything else that potentially pushed the boundary of the Chinese government’s console ban? Well, they also made it so that you could download games onto the system from your home Computer either via the internet or a disk.
The console has a port so it can be plugged into a computer, and you could seemingly purchase games online. Now, my understanding is that you could put any of the library of games onto the iQue Player from a disk but unless you had activated that you had bought a full copy, you’d be limited to just being able to play a demo.
Unfortunately, the website to purchase games for the iQue Player has long since shut down. It launched alongside the system in 2003, and in fairness to Nintendo, they only discontinued it in 2016. This is a demonstration of why physical media is and always will be king compare do digital services that eventually get shut down. Case and point, the Wii, Wii U and 3DS eShops are all gone, so huge amounts of games that were once accessible to buy online are now lost to time for new players.
I do think Nintendo were generous to keep the iQue Player’s offerings online going as long as they did though, when you consider that the system only ever had fourteen games made available for it. Yes, that’s right, only fourteen games for this system, and that brings me onto the next section, which is the games.
The games
There were a total of fourteen games released on the iQue Player during it’s lifespan and these were:
Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart 64, F-Zero X, Wave Race 64, Yoshi’s Story, Paper Mario, Sin and Punishment, Excitebike 64, Super Smash Bros, Animal Forest (more commonly known in the west as Animal Crossing), Custom Robo and Dr Mario 64.
Of the games, my first unit had Dr Mario 64, Super Mario 64, Wave Race 64, Star Fox 64 and The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time on the unit when I got it.
My second unit also had Dr Mario 64, Star Fox 64 and Super Mario 64, but unique to it were Super Smash Bros, Mario Kart 64. But no Zelda or Wave Race.
One of the things that is a huge shame with these devices is that you’d need to use one of the physical kiosks or do a purchase online to get new games, and since the iQue Player was discontinued in 2016, I don’t believe it will ever be possible to increase or change the library of games on either unit.
As a warning, if you get one of these or see one for sale, do check the games listed on the console when you get it. If there’s only a few games on there, you probably won’t be able to add new ones, and there is also the risk that some of the listed games may be demos.
Allow me to explain.
Dr Mario 64 came built into to every iQue Player as the full game, but the system also came with timed demos of Star Fox, Super Mario 64 and the Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time.
Each demo will be marked with a yellow square next to it on the game selection menu, whereas full games have a red square. Each demo had its own time limit for which you could play it. I’ve not been able to see exactly how this works as my units have the full versions of the demo games on them, but it would seem Zelda gave you ten hours to play, Mario 64 gave you seven and Wave Race gave you one hour.
If these timed demos work like the timed demos used to work on the Wii U, I’m sure they would be pretty annoying. I always hated that my demo could run out if someone came to the door or I had to answer a phone call and left the demos on the Wii U running. I would much prefer demos that you could replay as many times as you like but just gave you one level to play.
It is a shame that there are almost certainly iQue Players out there where there are listed demos with little or no time left to play them and these would effectively just become Dr Mario 64 plug and play devices.
That is…if the owner kept Dr Mario or other full games they bought on the devices. If they had deleted them, I believe that there may be no way to add them back on. I may be wrong on this, as it may be possible that a CD was available that actually had the games on and there that you could connect the iQue Player to your PC and add games on that way, but I’m uncertain if you needed to access a website to redownload games you already paid for. Certainly, purchasing new games is no longer possible.
I do have the slight hope that since these devices can be plugged into a computer with an old school USB cable, there could on day be software to add the full library of games onto the iQue Player, and maybe even just any random N64 games. But since there are so many ways to play N64 roms, I doubt there is a ton of interest in the modding and emulation community to put the work in to develop these options for the iQue Player.
If there is anything develop on this front, you can be certain that I’ll cover it in a future video and article.
One of the issues with the iQue Player is that it only has the 64 MB flash card and that isn’t enough memory for all of the different games that were available. Like the era of the Wii download store, the games aren’t assigned a specific file size in terms of MB, but instead are given a block size. Which is also how save game data was listed on the N64 back in the day.
The iQue Player flash cards could hold 64MB of data which was said to be 250 blocks. The software to run the console took up 10 blocks, so this meant that 240 blocks remained for downloading games. Dr Mario was the smallest game which needed only 13 blocks, whilst Paper Mario was the largest that needed 160 blocks.
Here’s some fun math trivia on the iQue Player and how many games it could hold.
If you wanted the most amount of games on any one device, you could have Dr Mario, Super Mario 64, Wave Race 64, Star Fox 64, F-Zero X and Mario Kart 64 for a total of six games.
Both the devices I have each have five games on each, but three games do appear on both devices.
I don’t believe that it was a solution to just have multiple flash cards to build a collection of all the games as my understanding is that it was one flash card tied to each device. This may make you question that if you cannot get more or that they cannot be swapped between devices, why have flash cards? Good question, but I believe this was so that you could take your flash cards to the physical kiosks to buy new games. This would save you having to take the whole device out with you, which in theory could have been possible as they’re realistically not that big, and could have connected to the kiosks via the USB port.
The fewest number of games you could have on an iQue Player without leaving space to add more would be Paper Mario and Super Smash Bros. This would mean you could only have two games, and wouldn’t even allow space for the smallest game which was Dr Mario 64.
If you wanted to own all Nintendo iQue Player games and not have the worry of having to visit kiosks or redownload things, you would need to have four units.
The way these would be divided up would be:
Unit 1 with Dr Mario, Super Mario 64, Wave Race 64, Star Fox 64, F-Zero X and Mario Kart 64 for a total of six games.
Unit 2 would have Zelda Ocarina of Time, Yoshi’s Story and Custom Robo on it for an additional three games. This would mean you can have nine of the fourteen games in the iQue library on just two devices.
Unit 3 would have Super Smash Bros and Sin and Punishment on it with just two games.
And finally, unit 4 would have Paper Mario and Animal Crossing for the final two games.
I do feel it is a shame that I have two devices and only have seven of the fourteen games when I could potentially have two more, and that these could include F-Zero X and Yoshi’s Story and Custom Robo, but to have these three would certainly mean I wouldn’t have been able to have Super Smash Bros which I’m happy to have.
Some other facts and stats include:
All games on the iQue Player are Nintendo produced games or based on Nintendo franchises that they hold the full rights to.
There are no third party iQue Player games.
Despite Rareware releasing so many of the Nintendo 64’s biggest games, by the time the iQue Player released, Nintendo had sold their share in Rareware to Microsoft, so no Rareware games made it to the console.
Of the games that did make it onto the console six of the fourteen games were single player games only. These were Super Mario 64, Paper Mario, Zelda Ocarina of Time, Yoshi’s Story, Animal Forest and Sin and Punishment.
Two of the games, Custom Robo 64 and Wave Race 64 allow two player modes.
The rest of the games all offered up to four player mode with the multitap accessory known as the iQue Player Swim Box. These were Mario Kart 64, F-Zero X, Star Fox 64, Excitebike 64, Super Smash Bros and Dr Mario 64.
There six games in the Super Mario franchise to appear on the console which included Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Dr Mario 64, Paper Mario, Super Smash Bros and Yoshi’s Story. Of course, Smash Bros doesn’t include Mario in the title even though he is the primary character, and Yoshi’s Story doesn’t feature Mario in the game at all, even though it started life as Yoshi’s Island 64.
The iQue Player has only one of the two Nintendo 64 Legend of Zelda games, that being Ocarina of Time, but doesn’t feature Majora’s Mask. This may be because of the time needed to translate it into Chinese, perhaps the larger game file, the under performance of the devices meaning it wasn’t eventually released within it’s small library or that it is a game that required the Nintendo 64 Expansion Pack accessory.
No games that required or even used the Expansion Pack were released on the iQue Player.
In terms of genres, the most common genre on the console is racing games with Mario Kart 64, Wave Race 64, Excitebike 64 and F-Zero X.
There are two fighting games in Super Smash Bros and Custom Robo, two shooting on rails shooters with Star Fox and Sin and Punishment and two platformers with Super Mario 64 and Yoshi’s Story, but one is obviously 2D and one is 3D.
Paper Mario was the only real RPG, though obviously Zelda Ocarina of Time was sometimes put into the RPG category historically, but with most modern classifications just calling it an action-adventure game.
Notable Nintendo 64 games that didn’t come to the iQue Player include the following:
To start with, as I mentioned there were no Rareware games, as Microsoft owned Rare when the iQue Player was released. This meant no Banjo-Kazooie, Killer Instinct or Goldeneye. Perhaps more notable was the absence of Diddy Kong Racing and Donkey Kong 64 which Nintendo retained the rights to. DK64 obviously is another example of a larger game that also required the Expansion Pack, which may explain it’s absence and Diddy Kong Racing would have been tied up in limbo as it featured the likes of Banjo, Conker and Tip Tup who remained Rareware owned characters after the split.
There were no third party games, so we didn’t get the likes of Resident Evil 2, WWF No Mercy and Turok games despite them being prominent on the original Nintendo 64.
Most interestingly are the list of Nintendo developed or published games, as there were well over thirty of these in total and obviously the iQue Player’s library topped out at fourteen.
The lack of success of the console perhaps was the cause for the limitation, or the need to translate the games into Chinese could have been to blame. These titles included:
The Legend of Zelda Majora’s Mask. As mentioned earlier, it was a bigger game and required the expansion pack.
There are no Pokemon based games including Pokemon Stadium games, Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Puzzle League and Hey You Pikachu. IN the case of the Stadium games, their main focus was bringing games over from your Game Boy games, which wouldn’t have been possible on the iQue Player as it had no way to connect with the Game Boy games, and the Game Boy itself wasn’t even officially released in the region.
Hey You Pikachu, was also based around using a microphone accessory, so this wouldn’t be possible to use either.
As for Pokemon Snap and Puzzle League, they are more of a mystery, but it may have had something to do with Nintendo not fully owning the rights to Pokemon developers GameFreak and the complications over the rights to the franchise in that regard.
Cruis’n USA was developed by Midway, but I believe Nintendo fully owned the game and the franchise, but with four racing games on the console already, and Cruis’n USA not getting a great reception that may be why it’s not there.
1080 Snowboarding is a more mysterious exclusion as Wave Race was included and these two are always seen somewhat as sister franchises.
Kirby 64 not being there is also mysterious, and I can’t really fathom a reason for its exclusion.
There were also several other Mario games not put onto the iQue. This may have been so there wasn’t Mario overload, but it was strange there was no Mario Golf or Tennis or no Mario Party game when there had been three on the N64. My one suspicion is that since the Mario Party games were notorious for people hurting their hands on butting mashing stick spinning mini games that Nintendo didn’t include them as it wouldn’t just be a controller that could get messed up, but the actual system itself as the system was built into the controller.
The final mysterious exclusion has to be Pilot Wings 64 which was released as one of the original Nintendo 64 launch games.
So, now we’ve discussed the console, and the games and even what games could have but were not on the console.
What else is there?
Is it still awesome to play in 2025 and beyond?
Well, before I answer that question, I want to touch on what the best way to play the Nintendo iQue Player in the modern era is.
I’ll have a whole separated video on this accessory device for the console in another video, but for me, a custom part made by someone known as Electro Modder in the UK really improved the iQue Player experience for modern times.
When I got my first unit it didn’t have its combined power and AV leads, and this was actually a big problem. With no way to connect the Player to the TV or power it on, I couldn’t even be sure that my unit worked.
Fortunately, I found the website of Electro Modder who builds these devices known as iQue Breakout Boards. This little device plugs into theAV/power port on the console and instead of allowing you to plug old school red/yellow/white AV cables and the power lead in, it gives you three ports. One that lets you plug in actual Nintendo 64 AV blocks, to which I could plug in a modern HDMI enabled replacement. I could also plug in a USB type C cable for easy power supply. Lastly, it actually lets you plug in a real Nintendo 64 controller which gives you the most authentic way to play these games, although this is strictly so you can play two player games.
I’ll have a full separate review of the iQue Breakout Board on the channel, so do look out for this in the near future.
Is there anything else to cover before we answer if it’s still awesome?
Well, fortunately there are ways to play the iQue Player versions of the games via emulation, so luckily for me, I won’t need to get another two units to play the remaining games in their Chinese versions.
For some games, speed runners like using the iQue Player versions of games as the in-game text takes less time to scroll through and therefore shaves precious seconds off a speed run.
But now, finally, to answer the big question. Is the Nintendo iQue Player still awesome in 2025 and beyond? The verdict is yes! Well…yes with an asterisk.
For novelty factor this thing gets a 10/10. It’s a Nintendo 64 plug and play that only came out in China. It’s also at the time of writing, the only official Nintendo 64 Plug and Play system.
Realistically speaking, that may remain true forever. Whilst we got the NES and Super NES Classic mini consoles, and later a couple of NES based Game and Watch handheld games, the introduction of Nintendo Switch Online, which itself relaced the Wii/Wii U and 3DS Virtual Console concepts mean that Nintendo is using it’s classic console libraries as a subscription based incentive and that value would reduce if there were more ways to own the back catalogue.
So if we never get an N64 Mini, this is the closest there may ever be. And think about it. The NES Mini had 30 games, the Super NES Mini had 21 games, so it stands to reason the N64 Mini wrapped up as the iQue Player would only have 14 games total.
I mention this because perhaps the biggest thing against the iQue Player is the severely limited library compared to the original N64.
So, if we were to ask if the iQue Player is awesome compared to the N64, I’d obviously have to say no. It won’t beat it in any head-to-head Geek Battle. But in its own right, the library of games is pretty awesome.
Super Mario 64 was considered the greatest video game ever made upon its release, and many considered the only game to beat it was The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, which is also on the iQue.
Mario Kart 64, Super Smash Bros and Star Fox 64 are all also legendary games that either elevated or launched their franchises.
I was never the biggest Animal Crossing fan, but it is undoubtably huge and cool that it’s N64 origins is on iQue, because it didn’t even come to the N64 in Europe or America.
Truthfully, the library of games on the iQue Player is almost like a desert island discs list of great Nintendo 64 games produced by Nintendo.
Sure, you have to be able to speak Chinese to get the most out of the games, but if playing the iQue Player has shown me one thing, it is how the games of the N64 era could really be enjoyed without loads of text or dialogue. They were just fun games.
I think the iQue Player is something best seen today as a novelty and niche product to own for collectors, but it still has a great library of games to play if you are able to access them. Unfortunately, it is a big if.
So, there you have it. My deep dive of the Nintendo iQue Player. I will have individual reviews of all the games I can play on my iQue Players and will also dig into the iQue Breakout Board in it’s own video. So make sure you smash that subscribe button on the Geek Battle Gaming YouTube channel to see all about this and other obscure and legacy consoles.
