You'll Soon Be Able To Play Games On Your Smartphone With Retro Cartridges

Laura Rosenfeld, Tech Times 21 September 2015, 11:09 am

As video games become increasingly mobile, some things get lost in that transition. The days of holding a controller in your hands, solving the puzzle of how to keep all of your consoles plugged into your TV at once and blowing into game cartridges to make them work properly again are becoming a thing of the past if they haven't gone the way of the Sega Genesis for most people already.

Of course, cartridges have not been a part of gaming technology for a while, but one Japanese startup is hoping to change that.

Beatrobo has created the Pico Cassette to fuel your nostalgia for retro video games. It's a tiny video game cartridge that looks like a smaller version of those from the Nintendo Famicom from the 1980s that plugs into your smartphone's headphone jack. These cartridges are meant to reinstill that "same sense of ownership" that gamers had with an SNES cartridge, Beatrobo founder and CEO Hiroshi Asaeda told The Verge at last week's Tokyo Game Show.

However, unlike those game cartridges of yore, Pico Cassettes do not store any software themselves. They instead send out inaudible sound to act as authentication keys for an app that you have to download and can then play.

But the cartridges aren't purely ornamental either. Each one has a unique identifier that can communicate with Beatrobo's servers so users can save games and play across multiple devices.

Beatrobo showed off a proof of concept of the Pico Cassettes with a Flappy Bird-like game at the Tokyo Game Show, according to The Verge. The company is currently working with content partners, and there are plans to bring Pico Cassettes to market after a crowdfunding campaign.