Post date: Jul 27, 2015 7:48:36 AM
Users of Nintendo's current consoles - the 3DS and the Wii U - rely on the Nintendo eShop for purchasing software. Indeed, users have downloaded more than 41 million items from the Nintendo eShop.
But which Nintendo device had an eShop first? The DSi with its DSiWare service? The Wii with its Shop Channel, launched in 2006? No, it's the iQue Player - the little-known Chinese version of the Nintendo 64, which got an online game store in 2004. Many things have changed since then, but some of the core infrastructure, concepts, and employees from the iQue store are still behind the current incarnation of the eShop.
The iQue was designed to combat piracy of Nintendo games in China, so it's no surprise that it focused on making it easy to purchase games legally. Originally, one had to take the iQue Player to gas station kiosks to purchase games. In 2004, however, the iQue@Home service was launched, allowing players to buy Nintendo 64 classics over the Internet.
When the Wii was launched in 2006, Wei Yen, the leader of the respective design teams of the Nintendo 64, the GameCube, and the iQue, once again was put in charge of the online features of the Wii, and the eShop system they designed was strikingly similar to the proven iQue@Home system they developed two years earlier.
At a high level, both iQue@Home and the Wii Shop Channel allowed users to purchase games and save them to their consoles. That's not the only similarity though.
- Both used encryption on the NAND (the flash memory) of the device with a unique device-specific key to prevent games from being copied with a flash memory reader.
- Both systems shared small files called ETickets to allow the device to decrypt a game the user purchased. Thus, the large game files do not have to be individually re-encrypted for every player - just the small eTicket needs to be different, saving bandwidth. Indeed, the iQue allows a user to "cache" every game available on the platform to their own computer, so that the user only needs to download a tiny 1KB ETicket when they purchase the game, instead of 16MB of game data. In 2004, when broadband internet was not widely available, this would've been useful.
- Both services' interfaces were built as webpages, communicating with the actual shop program through a JavaScript bridge.
- Both services use public/private key cryptography to encrypt content, preventing copying of the content to another device.
- Both services used the same terminology ("ETicket" for licenses, "Title" for games)
Indeed, most of these are common with the Wii U and 3DS' eShop, which ran on the same infrastructure as their predecessor, the Wii Shop Channel. With all these similarities, it seems that the Wii Shop Channel's design was heavily based on the iQue store, and thus the iQue's store was a dress rehearsal for the Wii Shop Channel and the eShops that launched after.
Finally, the very concept of the iQue likely inspired one of the Wii's main features: Virtual Console. Like the iQue, Virtual Console offers slightly-older games for a reasonable price to give the customer an option to access past favourites without resorting to piracy. The Virtual Console even plays Nintendo 64 games, like the iQue!
So next time you buy a game on a Nintendo console, be sure to thank a strange Chinese Nintendo 64 for making it possible.