Although there seems to be little mention of BT’s involvement with Nintendo in the mid-nineties, it would appear the tele-communications company was trialling a United Kingdom equivalent of Japan’s Satellaview service. Despite little record of BT’s testing, one retro gamer has uncovered the Super Nintendo cartridge which would have served a digital-download based service for the 16-bit system and is looking for answers.
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- BT’s Long Lost Super Nintendo ‘Interactive TV’ Service Trial Cartridge Discovered
I have one of these
Could you upload a picture at all as not much is known about them. Is it numbers on back
Could you please contact me as due to the rarity if genuine your looking at a 5 figure sum.
Only 600 of these were ever made. I have #1 & #600 as I did the hardware design for BT, adding the timer circuit to the Nintendo circuitry that held the downloaded game code. I stuck all of the serial number labels on these carts for the trial. The first 50 or so went out to journalists and the press, whilst another ~450 went out to those on the Interactive TV trial. There was one offered for sale on eBay a couple of years back for £5k – this was one of the press carts in the see-through plastic case, normal trail users just got them in a thin cardboard sleeve. The outer cardboard box this was shipped in still had my name on it, where it was shipped from Nintendo in the US to my office at BT Labs (now Adastral Park) and I’d reused this box shipping it to the press recipient; this was visible on the photos taken by the eBay seller. It’s good to know that there is still interest in this tech after almost 25 years.