Nintendo’s new game and watch hacked a day before release

As exciting as it is for retro gamers to see Nintendo resurrect its first handheld consoles, with just three games on the new Game & Watch– including two Super Mario Bros.– it is not surprising to see pirates already crack open material to see if it is possible to add more titles.

Twitter user ‘stacking‘was one of the lucky few to have their Game & Watch consoles delivered yesterday, and after a brief outing in Mushroom Kindgom, they immediately demolished the handheld to see how it performed and determine its scalability potential. It seems to use completely different hardware than the NES Classic Edition a few years ago, which has already been successfully hacked.

The good news: uncovered battery that the Game & Watch seems to be loading a Super Mario Bros. NES ROM file in the device’s RAM, which means that the ROM file could potentially be swapped out with another, allowing other games to be loaded and played on the handheld. They also found that after making a slight tweak to the software that powers the Game & Watch, it still booted, meaning that alternate firmware could be created and used instead.

More importantly, stacksmashing was able to bypass Game & Watch’s ROM encryption after just a day of tinkering with creating the console. display a personalized “HACKED” message On the screen. There’s still a lot of work to do to determine if other game ROMs can be loaded and played – not just a simple ROM that displays text – but that’s a lot of significant progress in a single day.

The bad news: Based on stacksmashing’s explorations, it doesn’t look like the new Game & Watch’s USB-C port is connected to the CPU or anything other than power cables. It appears to be just for charging the internal battery, which means anyone wanting to swap out the preloaded ROM files or completely replace the firmware will have to open their device and use custom hardware to re-flash it.

This will make it difficult for anyone who doesn’t have a basic understanding of electronics to modify their own handheld, but it’s also day one of tinkering with the device. As the new Game & Watch passes into the hands of other hackers, more of its secrets will be revealed, but right off the bat it doesn’t look like Nintendo has made the same effort as with consoles like the Switch and 3DS to lock it.