There's a very specific kind of magic that Nintendo used to deal in. It was the kind that made you believe cardboard could become robotic, and that you looked ultra-cool with a plastic bazooka strapped to your shoulder. Over the ages, it really does feel like Nintendo has tried everything under the sky, and, for me, the worst part is that most of the coolest stuff seems to have happened before my time.

Nintendo's consoles were never my cup of tea, or the first thing on my parents' budgeting priorities, so I never did get too much hands-on time with their accessories or peripherals, either. Still, this company has made some extreme oddities that would make any other company have emergency meetings about who greenlit such ideas, and if there's one thing I wish, it's that I'd gotten my hands on them back when they'd come out.

The Power Glove from 1989

Over-engineered and flawed, but with immeasurable cool points

The Power Glove is one of those peripherals that feels like it was willed into existence by a committee of kids who grew up on The Terminator. Over-engineered and tragically short-lived, this was a sci-fi gauntlet that I'd happily pick up today without hesitation, especially after struggling with the Meta Quest's controllers. There's just something so audacious about a glove that promised motion-controlled gaming all the way back in 1989, which was decades before the Wii really took off with that idea.

It's wild, too, because the Power Glove wasn't just some toy gimmick. In fact, it came out of some bona fide robotics research and industrial-grade motion tech, and yet the market shrugged it off in a year. This was an era-defining curiosity discontinued because most of its audience couldn't even convince their parents to buy one. The Power Glove's legacy still lives on, though. It wasn't precise, but my god was it ambitious. It's exactly the kind of weird, wonderful Nintendo invention I wish I'd grown up with wrapped around my forearm.

2009's Pokéwalker Pedometer

Anything to get me out of the house

There was once a version of me — a tiny, Pokémon-obsessed gremlin — who would've traded away his bicycle, his Sundays, and his monthly allowance for a Pokéwalker, or for anything Pokémon, really. At that point, my allowance went almost exclusively into buying nine-card Pokémon decks at the local toy store. But a Pokéwalker would've made me the undisputed king of the playground. A pedometer that turned your steps into XP would've been the height of technological nirvana at age ten. Even today, at twenty-six, I'd be more than happy to buy a fitness app that lets me level up anything in a game just by walking to the grocery store instead of ordering in dinner.

One look at the Pokéwalker today, 16 years later, and you realize immediately that it wasn't made to just be fancy or flashy. Cute, yes, but functional first and foremost. It tapped into something almost magical: the idea that your real-world effort directly nurtured your digital companion. That feedback loop would've made me walk laps inside my own house like a possessed Roomba, and I firmly believe it's one of Nintendo's weirdest peripherals because it downright brilliant, too. This was long before step-counting became a personality trait, after all. I still wish I had one today.

The SNES Mouse is as cute as it is obsolete

I might just get one 3D-printed, but I don't have time for court

Look at the SNES Mouse. It looks like it just rolled right off a retro-futurist mood board from Pinterest. It was functional, and arguments could be made about whether or not it was all that necessary, but you can't deny in a million years just how aesthetic it was, and still is. I'm dangerously close to commissioning a 3D-printed mouse shell that looks like the SNES Mouse just to recreate that gray-and-lilac SNES vibe.

Looks aside, this was a rather unnecessary peripheral on Nintendo's part. It made games like Mario Paint actually playable, sure, but it also existed in this weird sort of limbo where it felt obsolete five years after release. Now, however, I'd say it feels and looks iconic. The SNES Mouse feels emblematic of Nintendo's philosophy of trying something new, even if only six people on the planet need it. Apparently, I'm one of those six people, and even if I have to dive into the Etsy or AliExpress rabbit hole to find a modern mouse that looks like the SNES Mouse from 1992, I think I might just take that plunge come the next payday.

The Super Nintendo Super Scope

Even today, my NERF gun collection might be jealous of the Super Scope

The SNES is my favorite Nintendo console of all time, which makes it harder for me when I realize just how many truly unforgettable, quirky add-on devices I missed out on. After all, I didn't engage with SNES games until the late 2000s, and that too on a knock-off. As I write this, I'm staring at my tiny Nerf arsenal hanging on the wall, and all I can think about is that the Super Scope would have fit right in. This was a full-on shoulder-mounted bazooka for your SNES, and it came out in 1992. My... minus-six-year-old self would've absolutely lost his tiny mind over the Super Scope, because, well, look at it! It's the closest any of us could get to feeling like a Saturday-morning cartoon action hero.

With the Super Scope, you literally ADS'd on a Super Nintendo. Who allowed this? Why did it stop? Why doesn't it exist today in just as cool a form? I get that VR today has mostly replaced the fantasy of toy-guns-meet-video-games, but the Super Scope still looks impossibly cool. It's an honest-to-goodness retro sci-fi rifle, and I want it twice. This feels impossibly indulgent by modern standards, but man... I wish I could've blasted the SNES's beautiful polygons and sprites with this thing.

The DK Bongos with Donkey Konga

Imagine the auditory chaos I would've caused

In 2025, people in my neighborhood already aren't fond of me when I announced to the entire apartment complex that I've lost a ranked match at 3 am. Imagine what my six-year-old self would've done with the special Donkey Konga Bongos that shipped with the Donkey Kong spin-off, Donkey Konga. It's the definition of "my parents would've hated this," and that alone makes them perfect. One look at these bongos and I can hear the imaginary shouting from the house I grew up in.

Novelty is the real superpower here. These bongos were party tricks instead of mere peripherals. They were disguised as instruments, and were designed to get even your most aggressively non-gaming friend to sit down, slap some plastic drums, and suddenly care about the ape on the screen. Rhythm games come and go, but bongos? Bongos... transcend. The fact that I never interacted with DK media and didn't even know these existed until last year is a tragedy I feel on a spiritual level.

Boktai's Solar Sensor from the GBA

Kojima didn't want us to get off the game, but rather, take it outside

Turns out, Kojima literally forced players to "touch grass" back in 2003 with his game Boktai: The Sun Is in Your Hand. It was a GBA game that shipped with a solar panel built into the cartridge. You had to go outside, absorb actual sunlight, and use it as ammunition to kill vampired. It was peak Kojima, before peak Kojima was a thing. Unhinged, yes, and definitely gimmicky, but this was as brilliant a feature as they come, and I wish I could've played it when it had come out, soaking in the sun and seeing other kids my age do the same.

At twenty-six, too, I could absolutely use the vitamin D, and the idea that a game could physically drag me into the outdoors feels hilarious yet necessary. The solar sensor was a weird peripheral, yes, but it also was a design that gave the real world as much importance as it did the game world. Nothing like it exists today, and it makes me wish even harder that I'd experienced it as a sunburn-resistant kid instead of a desk-dwelling adult.

I wish more companies swung for the fences like Nintendo used to

Nintendo has always operated on this beautifully-chaotic wavelength where creativity has often mattered way more than practicality, and every one of these peripherals embodies that spirit perfectly. There were bold, bizarre, often flawed, sure, but definitely memorable. We're talking about them now, aren't we?

Looking back now, I wish more companies still swung for the fences like this, because there's magic in creating something purely to spark joy and quench curiosities. Nintendo, at its weirdest, might just be Nintendo at its best.