IQue

iQue was Nintendo's attempt at getting a foothold into the Chinese market, and tackling the perceived challenge of high piracy rates and developing original content that appeals better for the market. However, their focus shifted recently to merely provide Simplified Chinese localizations for Nintendo, that make their way back to the home market via grey imports.

iQueBrew focuses as a wiki on the Nintendo 64 iQue variant, as the other iQue variants of later consoles are out of its scope, and are generally close enough to their

Released

iQue Player

A rebranding of the Nintendo 64 released in 2003 exclusively for mainland China, although an unannounced Traditional Chinese localization for Zelda Ocarina of Time was also found on the CDN, suggesting plans for a console release in HK/TW territories (which didn't happen until the Wii in 2008).

See Games this page for more details.

iQue Game Boy Advance

Released Games

TBC

Unreleased Games

Those games were dumped recently from a leak from discarded government approval materials.

• Legend of Stafi 1
• Legend of Stafi 2
• Kuru Kuru Kururin
• Kururin Paradise
• Fire Emblem Sealed Sword
• Advance Wars 1
• Mario Kart Super Circuit

Those games were announced but never leaked:

• WarioWare: Twisted!
• Golden Sun: The Lost Age
• Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land
• Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 (ISBN)

Two original games developed by iQue were also planned but never released. They were supposedly card games. Some localizations were planned as well but dropped due to the lack of developer interest from the Japanese side, such as Pokemon games. It's unknown how far those made it.

iQue DS

Released Games

• TBC

The standalone version of Nintendogs (iQue Dogs) was cancelled, then released under its original name Nintendogs exclusively for the iQue DSi as a pre-installed game.

Unreleased Games

• Daigasso! Band Brothers
• Ridge Racer DS
• Metroid Prime Hunters
• Electroplankton
• Kirby: Canvas Curse

3DS

Chinese audiences experienced official support for the Nintendo 3DS in very different ways, each with their own region lock. Sometimes the same region had differently region-coded games and devices, which were NOT cross-compatible. Overall there were three different regions used:

• Mainland China: iQue 3DS with Simplified Chinese region.
• Hong Kong, Taiwan: 3DS with Traditional Chinese region.
• Later Chinese support (2015 and later): 3DS with Japanese region (same as Japan 3DS imports)

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Unreleased

iQue Box

A planned iQue variant of the GameCube. Not much information exist about it.

iQue NetCard (NC)

A planned add-on circa 2007 for the iQue DS that would have provided digital distribution and anti-piracy DRM as strong as the iQue Player (N64) for Game Boy Advance games. Mentions of it can be found in documentation for some Wi-Fi certificates. iQue withheld their remaining game releases on the iQue GBA to make them exclusive to this format, over concerns of high piracy rates for the already released GBA iQue games. However, neither the peripheral nor the games saw release.

iQue Wii

Cancelled very close to release (2008) over problems with government approval. The Traditional and Simplified Chinese regions are planned as their own regions in all versions of the Wii OS, and some traces of the finished localized menu exist in various games.

Nintendo instead released Simplified Chinese versions of the same games planned for the iQue Wii, and the console itself without the OS localization (instead in Japanese) in 2008 in HK/TW regions. The Chinese version of the Nvidia Shield also included some of those localizations, along with new Simplified Chinese localizations for Wii games.

Nintendo Wii U

The Traditional and Simplified Chinese regions are planned as their own regions in all versions of the Wii OS, and some traces exist of its support:

• The OS includes full fonts for Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese
• Some games like Super Mario Maker include the Chinese flag into their internal data for the online system

The Wii U proved very fast after release to be commercial failure, which probably caused it to be skipped.