Nintendo · 2001 · Game Boy Advance
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.
The e-Reader is a Game Boy Advance accessory that reads "Dot Code" — data encoded as a dense field of microscopic dots printed in strips along the edge of a card, developed with Olympus. The player swipes the card through a slot on the side of the unit and the scanned data becomes software: a minigame, a set of item data, a level, or in the more ambitious cases an entire NES game. Nintendo released it in Japan on 1 December 2001 and in North America in September 2002. Europe never got it at all. The format's appeal was that it made software a physical, collectible, cheap-to-print object at a moment when consoles had no practical way to distribute small pieces of content. Card sets included NES titles such as Excitebike, Donkey Kong Jr., Balloon Fight and Ice Climber, each requiring a set of cards swiped in sequence; Pokémon-e trading cards that were playable TCG cards and software both; and, most substantially, the world-e levels for Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3, which added dozens of new Mario levels to a 1988 game via cardboard. Animal Crossing on the GameCube used e-Reader cards to hand players NES games and town items, tying two consoles together through a stack of trading cards. The hardware had an awkward regional history. The original Japanese unit lacked the external connector needed to link to a second system, which the later Japanese revision and the North American release both included — a distinction that determines which cards a given unit can usefully do anything with. The accessory faded quickly in the West as retailers lost interest in stocking card packs, and much of the world-e content released in Japan never reached North America. It remains one of the more inventive answers anyone gave to the question of how to deliver small downloadable content to a console generation that could not download.