The Nintendo 64 Transfer Pak. Best known as that thing that came with Pokémon Stadium, its usefulness outside of that was pretty thin, but this is classic Nintendo, really! I think the thing we forget when we talk about Nintendo and their various wacky peripherals is that Nintendo was first and foremost a toy company. Then they became a toy company that makes video games, and just like a toymaker doesn't expect something like... L.O.L. Surprise to be hot for longer than a season or so, Nintendo has a habit of not committing to its peripherals for very long, and the N64 Transfer Pak is a classic example! It's a good idea, implemented too late to be useful to anyone except Pokémon superfans. On top of that, there's the risk that you might delete your Game Boy data, and it would soon be replaced by the next big thing. But it was one of the only ways you could connect Game Boy games to the Nintendo 64, we just needed to uncover all its secrets! So welcome back to Punching Weight, the show where we take a look at the weird, ambitious and unnecessary, and we're gonna put an emphasis on "unnecessary" by taking a look at the Nintendo 64 Transfer Pak. But first! This video is sponsored by Squarespace. You could start your free Squarespace trial today by going to squarespace.com/stopskeletons and using the code 'STOPSKELETONS' to get 10% off your first purchase! That's squarespace.com/stopskeletons and the offer code 'STOPSKELETONS'. Stick around to the end of the episode to hear more! First, let's lay down some context: The Nintendo 64 came out in 1996. The system's 3D capabilities, as showcased by Mario 64, were a revelation, a benchmark for what the third dimension could be for an industry still working out the kinks. But at the same time, Nintendo had a problem: Its portable Game Boy system, originally released in 1989, hadn't had a meaningful hardware update in over half a decade. Interest in the system was waning, and it didn't really fit in with Nintendo's focus on the future of gaming. There was no reason to care about 8-bit, monochromatic, two-dimensional games, so a Game Boy player for the N64 was never in the cards, at least it wasn't, before a little game called Pocket Monster, a.k.a. Pokémon, ruined everything by becoming the most successful thing on the planet. [ evil laughter ] That's not to say the N64 didn't have its own problems: While the system itself was successful, Nintendo's future focus wasn't completely successful. We're talking of course about the Japanese-only disk-based add-on, the 64DD. While this was a truly innovative piece of hardware that we're still seeing the effects of today, the N64DD flopped so hard in Japan that Nintendo literally scrapped it for spare parts! We've made a couple videos about the 64DD's orphans, and the Transfer Pak falls into that camp... kinda. The Transfer Pak was showcased at Nintendo's Space World 1999, and here's a picture of it! Yeah, THAT was called the Transfer Pak, but that's clearly different from what the Transfer Pak actually was, and looks a whole lot more like another peripheral we've made a video about, the GameCube GBA Link Cable. Basically, Nintendo was going one way with the next-gen technologies of the N64, but the public was pulling them another way, with the aging tech of Pokémon. That's why we have the N64 Transfer Pak, it's a panicked stopgap between these two technologies. Now that we got all that out of the way, let's actually talk about the uses of the Transfer Pak, which... let's be honest, were mostly about Pokémon. Though it wasn't the first game to use it, we'll talk more about that in a second, the Stadium series is why most people are interested in the Transfer Pak, and probably the reason they have one in the first place. The Transfer Pak was originally bundled with Pokémon Stadium 1, though you could later buy it separately. To use it with Pokémon Stadium, you need to plug your Pokémon cartridge into the Transfer Pak, then plug your Transfer Pak into the controller, and then turn on the game. You actually have to be this careful, or you run the risk of losing your Game Boy data. Pokémon Stadium will then give you the option of using your data, a.k.a. the Pokémon you've caught and their current stats, in the game itself! Here's the kicker though: The Transfer Pak is not essential to playing Pokémon Stadium. The game has a rental system that makes importing your own Pokémon totally optional! But you could also use this to fight your friends in 3D, assuming they also had a Transfer Pak, trade Pokémon, and even take pictures of your Pokémon and print them out on the Game Boy Printer, which is a pretty big upgrade from printing out my Pokémon Snap cards at a damn Blockbuster kiosk! You could also use it to get Pokémon with rare movesets into your Game Boy roster, for example, if you beat Pokémon Stadium with a copy of Pokémon Yellow, you can use it to teach Pikachu Surf, which you can then transfer back into Yellow to unlock a whole new minigame! How cool is that?! Pokémon Stadium 2, which came out worldwide in 2001, added compatibility with the second generation of Pokémon games and updated some other features. You could now trade items between Pokémon carts, use Pokémon Stadium for Mystery Gifts look at and redecorate your room in 3D, and a couple other miscellaneous things. But the coolest Transfer Pak feature in the Stadium series has got to be the Game Boy Tower! This allowed you to actually play your Pokémon games on your Nintendo 64. It's got Super Game Boy borders, and if you've unlocked it, there's even two speed-up modes that let you play your game at twice or thrice-ish times the speed! Isn't it mind-boggling that there's an official Nintendo emulator that let you play one of its most treasured franchises in a way that it wasn't designed to be played? So this brings up the question: There was the Super Game Boy for the Super Nintendo, and the Game Boy Advance Player for the GameCube... ... was this the same thing for the Nintendo 64? And the answer is officially no... ... but technically? Kinda! The Transfer Pak is functionally just a handshake device that allows you to connect a Game Boy game to the N64 controller. It doesn't have Game Boy hardware in it per se. Really, I think the star of the show here is the N64 controller, which actually does the work of transmitting Game Boy game data to the N64's RAM, where it can actually do things with it. The Stadium games are the only games with a Player feature, and it's designed to only work with Pokémon games. However, that doesn't mean it can't NOT work with Pokémon games with a little bit of elbow grease! In 2014, game hacking enthusiast Mezmorize was able to hack ROMs of Wario Land II and Super Mario Land so that Pokémon Stadium would think it was playing Pokémon Blue, meaning that you CAN disguise Game Boy games and smuggle them past Stadium's security checks, which... how cool is that?! But it was just a proof-of-concept. This method doesn't make it a fully working emulator on the N64, because there were some issues with saving the game, and also, it's not really efficient to have to hack every Game Boy ROM to get it working. It would be a lot better if we could go to the source and just edit out the code that prevents other Game Boy games from working with Pokémon Stadium. Also, side note: There seems to be a lot of debate within the hacker community around if Pokémon Stadium even has a fully working emulator inside of it. Okay, maybe not a lot... the hacker community is probably focused on more important things, but there are rumors that it has Pokémon Game Boy data on the cart as a way to speed up load times. But we reached out to Mezmorize and they double-checked it for us, and found no evidence of Pokémon Game Boy code in Pokémon Stadium. There are other reasons to think it's a full emulator, like it was able to read Super Game Boy border data for Wario Land II, and secondly, and this is getting pretty technical, when the Game Boy Tower is checking to see if it's playing a Pokémon game, it's just checking the header, and that's it! It's not looking for other specific Pokémon code. And after all this, the most shocking fact to me is that this game is almost 20 years old, and there's still tons of ground to be broken here! We don't even have time to dive into things like Pokémon ACE hacks! But it's safe to say that the Pokémon Stadium games have yet to be fully cracked. So, the Pokémon Stadium games were the most famous uses of this wayward Nintendo peripheral, but there were actually four other pairs of games that used the Transfer Pak outside of Japan. Tch. Yeah, that's it: Four. But as you can probably tell from how much time is left on this video, there's still a lot to talk about, so let's move on, shall we, to the first Transfer Pak compatible pair of games: Mario Golf! Released in 1999, ahead of Pokémon Stadium and the actual Transfer Pak, their compatibility wasn't very well publicized, it's not even in either manual. But even though Pokémon Stadium wasn't out yet, Mario Golf superfans still had the option to import the Transfer Pak from Japan in the meantime, since the device itself isn't region-locked. The N64 and Game Boy Color Mario Golfs are really different from each other. They're both still golf games, but the N64 version is more a party game with a large roster of Nintendo characters and minigames to play with your friends, and the Game Boy Color version is more of a light RPG meant more for solo play. For the record, Mario isn't even unlocked at the start. It's called Mario Golf!! False advertising!! And an RPG campaign for the Game Boy Color game might sound a little weird, but don't forget, this was made by Camelot, whose resume included Shining Force, and would later go on to make Golden Sun. Here's how it worked: You can transfer your Game Boy Color campaign character to one of the four transfer slots on the N64 to play in N64 tournaments and minigames. Doing so builds up their experience for when you bring them back to the Game Boy Color. Beyond the characters, there's literally a menu for showing off your N64 scores on your Game Boy Color, so you can share your records on the go. And that's about it! But we need to clear something up: While researching this game, we heard all about how you can use the Transfer Pak to unlock four exclusive characters on the N64 version, but that's... not really true. There are four character variants that you can choose at the start of the Game Boy Color campaign, basically kid/adult man, kid/adult woman. These four character models are in the N64 game, but as soon as you take out the Transfer Pak or turn it off, POOF! They're gone from the N64! This feature is only there so you can level up your character while you're away from your Game Boy Color. On top of that, you can't bring over all four characters at once when you connect your Transfer Pak, since there are only three save slots on the Game Boy Color, meaning you'll always be one slot short. So really, this is for a group of friends all playing Mario Golf separately, and then coming together to throw down! Needless to say, these Game Boy Color characters are not available on the Virtual Console release of Mario Golf 64. But that's okay, because it's not really what they were designed for. Their base stats aren't great because they're intended to be levelled up more powerful than the other characters. It's a cool feature to be able to build a character across two games, but that that's just about all that you can do is pretty underwhelming. Our next game is the Mario Tennis pair which, let's be real folks, is most notable for introducing the world to our lord and savior, Waluigi, who, sidenote for those uninitiated, was only created because Wario needed a doubles pair, but Nintendo though an evil princess was too unseemly, a wrong that wouldn't be righted by the fans until 2018. The Mario Tennis games were also made by Camelot, and are a similar party game / RPG split. The difference though is that its Transfer Pak features are WAY more robust! You can even bring over all four campaign characters from one cart at once, and they stay on the N64 cart! But there's bigger fish to fry here! Both of these games unlock content on the other game, and it's a significant amount of content! If you transfer data from the N64 to the Game Boy Color, you will unlock a slew of characters and their minigames, which is cool in and of itself, but if you complete these minigames, you can then transfer THAT data back to the N64 and unlock new courts! This makes this pairing one of the most significant Transfer Pak games, and it also renders their Virtual Console re-releases merely a shadow in comparison, but especially the Game Boy Color version: Without the Transfer Pak, Game Boy Color Mario Tennis only has four Mario characters; Baby Mario, Luigi, Peach and Mario, a.k.a. the most basic Mario characters! No Waluigi, no deal! One star! It also means five fewer minigames on the Game Boy Color, and five fewer courts on the N64. It's an extra bummer because the Transfer Pak just acts as a switch, there's no real reason why these couldn't have been unlocked for their Virtual Console releases. Really, it just underscores how our wonderfully named SMA4:SMB3e from our e-Reader video was an absolute UNIT of a Virtual Console release! Our next two games are from then-Nintendo second party developer Rare: First, I wanna talk about Mickey's Speedway USA because it's a joke! If you boot up the N64 game with the Game Boy Color cart attached, you unlock Huey as a racer, a.k.a. the red one. And that's it. You get a short little cinematic and then PING! He's in the game! He's not even that great of a character stat-wise, but if you bought your copy second-hand, check your game! You might be lucky! This is the only way to unlock Huey in the North American and PAL versions, but since the Game Boy Color game never came out in Japan, you can unlock him in that version the first time you get a ghost token. ... if you're curious about that, now you know. The more interesting game from Rare was Perfect Dark, though it's more interesting for what it didn't have, rather than for what it did. And yes, a Game Boy Color version of Perfect Dark was actually released, and it even had a Rumble Pak, which is pretty cool to see outside of a racing or pinball game! Anyway, when you plug it into the Transfer Pak, you unlock a few cheats: Cloaking Device, Hurricane Fists, R-Tracker and All Guns in Solo. Now those first three aren't a big deal, they're actually quite easy to unlock, but the All Guns cheat is one of Perfect Dark's hardest cheats to get! First off, it normally requires beating the final level on the hardest difficulty, Perfect Agent, in under five minutes and 31 seconds, which is no small feat, but to even be able to attempt this challenge, you must beat all other levels on Perfect Agent first! As a kid, I was never able to do this, but with the power of the Transfer Pak, my childhood can finally be completed! But it's really anticlimactic, like, literally. Plug in the Transfer Pak at any time, and the cheats just suddenly appear. I mean, at least Mickey's Speedway had a quick little movie. But that wasn't originally all the Transfer Pak was planned to do in Perfect Dark. In 1999, Rare announced they were going to allow players to map actual pictures of people's faces onto avatars within the game using the Game Boy Camera, in a mode called Perfect Head, but by early the next year, Rare suddenly announced it was pulling support for it. Nintendo's Ken Lobb claimed that Rare had trouble getting it to run without crashing the game, but the feature itself was also an unfortunate bit of bad timing: The ability to put not just your face, but anyone's face, into a first person shooter, was a hard sell hot off the heels of the Columbine shooting. It's not a feature that's particularly missed, since there's still plenty of crazy things in Perfect Dark, however, there WAS a game that used the Game Boy Camera in this way: And that game was Mario Artist for the 64DD! ... man, we gotta get ourselves one of those. With the Game Boy Camera, players could actually take pictures of themselves and map it onto an avatar, and use it in animations or minigames! We sadly don't have our own DD, so Pug Hoof Gaming let us use some of his footage! If you'd like to see more, link is in the description below. This feature is kinda like Miis ten years before the Wii, and it's a pretty cool feature on its own, but what really caught my eye was that the avatars that you make in Mario Artist could also be transferred into the Japanese-only SimCity 64! Which means you could actually put your friends in a game instead of making your friends, well I mean, like, you can... still make your friends, but like, you make... more accurate friends... you know what I mean. ... It's really cool! There were a handful of other Japanese games that had Transfer Pak capability, but it's not really worth getting into here, since we don't have any way to really test them. But our favorite is PD Ultraman Collection 64, because apparently for that game, you could attach ANY game into the Transfer Pak and unlock stuff, sorta like Monster Rancher. Like we mentioned at the top, the Transfer Pak was a pretty late addition to the Nintendo 64, and unsurprisingly, there are a handful of games whose planned Transfer Pak compatibility didn't make it out the door. A lot of this was pointed out to us by Mezmorize, but Hydro Thunder has Transfer Pak language buried in its code, and The New Tetris does as well which, by the way, we really recommend checking out the Cutting Room Floor's page on The New Tetris. There's some other good stuff buried in there too. It's worth noting that these games didn't have Game Boy versions, but Rugrats in Paris: The Movie, which had both N64 and Game Boy Color versions, has the phrase "Transfer Pak" in its code, but is not compatible with the device. Probably the biggest game with planned Transfer Pak compatibility was WWF No Mercy. The Transfer Pak would've allowed you to transfer over points that you earned in the Game Boy Color game to the Nintendo 64, to spend at the Smackdown Mall, but the Game Boy Color version was cancelled before the N64 game launched. However, Transfer Pak language can still be found in No Mercy's code. No Mercy has a passionate mod scene, maybe someone can find a way to mod WWF Betrayal to work with the game. The Transfer Pak had a couple of neat uses, but overall was basically best for Pokémon. I went my whole life without owning one, though. I bought this thing specifically for this video, but I'm still glad I did! Knowing that I'll have complete versions of Mario Tennis, and that maybe one day, this thing'll be hacked into becoming a fully functional Game Boy player, is exciting! And we wanna make sure we give a huge thanks to Mezmorize and Pug Hoof Gaming, for helping out with this video. This video is sponsored by Squarespace! 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Ya it was awesome back then, playing it in my 36" big screen tv lol. I was happy I wouldn't have to waste my batteries. Ahahahah I am just remembering my parents saying I had to put the gameboy down and I could watch tv or play the N64. and I would pop Gameboy game into the controller pack, and go right back to playing the Red or Blue ver I was on at the time lol.
A much simpler version also exists for the SNES.
It was right there on the main menu if I remember correctly. Hard to miss.
Best part about it was unlocking the doduo and dodrio mode. Made the emulator run at 200 and 300% speed. Was amaizing.