Collection essentials #545: Nintendo e-Reader (GBA)

Here’s an interesting little accessory that has fallen into obscurity over the years. The e-Reader is an add-on that is designed to read special bar codes on cards designed for it. An LED scanner is used to read them when you swipe a card, and the information for whatever content is to be loaded is contained on the card itself and does not simply unlock something that was arbitrarily locked away from the player. 

e-Reader cards can be used to play games, or connected via cable to unlock content in other games for GBA or GameCube. Unlockable content most famously includes a variety of items in Animal Crossing, special battles and event unlocks in Pokémon Ruby & Sapphire, and brand new levels in Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3. 

Actual games that come on e-Reader cards have to be rather small and simple. A few were given away promotionally, such as Air Hockey-e given out by retailers when it came out. The only full games actually sold at retail were a handful of early NES games, at a very cheap price. These games came with five cards that had nine or ten barcodes that had to be scanned in order to start the game. You can, though, save one scanned game onto the e-Reader’s internal memory to play at any time without having to scan again.

The tabletop Pokémon Trading Card Game got in on the e-Reader action, with several of its sets having e-Reader barcodes on them. Sometimes there were two barcodes, one that contained Pokédex information, and the other that needed to be combined with at least one other specific Pokémon card in order to play a special minigame. A select few cards even had a special “hidden attack” available upon scanning one of the codes. I’m not sure if those special attacks were allowed in tournament play or not; my guess would be that they were banned.

The e-Reader came out when I was 12 years old. At that time I was particularly interested in the NES and Animal Crossing, plus I didn’t have a lot of spending money at that time, so the e-Reader seemed appealing because it offered me more of those things, and at a low cost. The e-Reader and all the cards shown in the photo are the same ones that I had in my youth. 

The e-Reader was decently successful in Japan. However, it sold rather poorly in America, and didn’t get released in Europe at all, so the amount of stuff made for it is less than it could have been. The Pokémon Trading Card Game had been huge before, but at this point it was cooling off to a low point anyway, so it wasn’t that big of a help. The e-Reader Pokémon sets are quite rare nowadays because of this and the cards fetch rather high prices. I also stopped buying Pokémon cards around this time even though I had an e-Reader, and I don’t remember exactly why, but it probably had to do with my limited budget and the fact that the cards just weren’t very plentiful. 

I did get plenty of use out of my e-Reader, playing a few NES games on it and the two Pokémon minigames I had access to. I had quite a few Animal Crossing cards, and since I was really into that game I did get to use them to get some cool new stuff. I probably would have bought more e-Reader cards had the thing actually received more support. 

I wouldn’t really recommend the e-Reader nowadays unless you’re a big Animal Crossing fan. It’s a pretty neat old piece of Nintendo technology, though. For that, and nostalgia reasons, it deserves its place as one of my collection essentials.