Gamer Builds The World's Smallest Nintendo 64 Console

People have been playing video games at home going on way back to the 70s. Some consider the heyday of gaming to be the 80s, but one of the most popular Nintendo game consoles launched in the mid-1990s and was the Nintendo 64. A gamer in Massachusetts has landed himself a Guinness World Record for the world's smallest Nintendo 64 game console.

The console hardware is only slightly larger than the game cartridge. The completely custom Nintendo 64 was a labor of love for Gunnar Turnquist, who says he was inspired to build the project because he loves the Nintendo 64, and it was the first game console he had growing up. An original Nintendo 64 console is a rather bulky machine measuring about 2.87-inches high, 10.23-inches wide, and 7.48-inches deep.

The builder's challenge was to take the hardware required to play games from inside that large enclosure and put it into something much smaller. The project required Turnquist to carefully map intricate connections of the mainboard and rewire lots of tiny circuits. The result is a functional Nintendo 64 with its own LCD on the front. The portable console measures 3.3-inches x 4.64-inches x 1.77-inches.

Turnquist highlighted the console modification and the building of the new and very small portable on his YouTube channel "GmanModz." The LCD screen attached to the portable console is 3.5-inches, and the system has a battery life of 1.5 hours. He also integrated functional N64 controller buttons.

The resulting console that Turnquist has created is very impressive. Had something like his creation been around back in the 1990s, it would've been an incredible breakthrough in gaming. Projects like this shine a light on how far technology has come in the last few decades.