Rumble Pak

The Rumble Pak plugs into the socket under the Nintendo 64 controller and shakes it when the game says so. It shipped in Japan with Star Fox 64 in spring 1997 under the name Jolt Pak, reached the UK in the Lylat Wars box that autumn at £15 on its own, and within a year Sony had put the same idea inside the pad.

Fast facts

• First shipped with: Star Fox 64 (Nintendo, Japan, spring 1997), “packaged free with Japanese copies of the game” (N64 Magazine, April 1997).
• Original name: Jolt Pak — “the Peripheral Formerly Known as the Jolt Pak” (Nintendo Official Magazine, June 1997).
• Fitting: “slots in where the memory card normally sits”; powered by two AAA batteries.
• UK price: £15 alone, or bundled with Lylat Wars at £60 (N64 Magazine, September 1997).
• The competition: Datel’s £25 ShockWave pack with a built-in 1Mb memory card; Sony’s DualShock.

The Jolt Pak

N64 Magazine announced it in its first issue as “a Jolt Pack” that “reproduces explosions in the game as vibrations in your controller”, already guessing that Nintendo would sell it separately in Europe since Blast Corps would support it too. By June Nintendo Official Magazine had the final name and a description: “Resembling a Memory Pak on steroids … takes two AAA batteries and produces a satisfying jolt whenever your craft takes a hit.” It called the Pak “the first decent force-feedback device for a home console”, which it was not — Edge’s review of Star Fox 64 the same month traced its “lineage … back to the halcyon days of Afterburner”, and the same issue’s Tobal 2 review complained that “the built-in ‘jolt’ mechanisms of Sony’s analogue pad fail to raise the tension”. Sony’s Japanese Dual Analog pad already vibrated.

Nintendo marketed the Pak hard in Japan. A television advertisement shot in March 1997 gathered pop singer Kyoko Hiroki and “150 other young actors … clustering around a huge screen showing Starfox 64 and pulling silly faces as the Pak shook in their hands”. A British reader asked N64 Magazine what “Buru” meant on the Japanese packaging; the magazine’s own verdict on the import was that “we giggled like schoolgirls at the free Rumble Pak, which wedges into the bottom of the Controller and wobbles when you’re hit”, and it ran a competition asking readers what else the socket could be used for.

Shindou

Nintendo was pleased enough with the Pak to retrofit it. In summer 1997 it re-released Super Mario 64 and Wave Race 64 in Japan as Shindou (“Improved”) editions, “practically identical to the games you may already own, except they now include the necessary software morsels to support the Rumble Pak”. N64 Magazine’s Japan correspondent thought it “breathtakingly audacious” to charge 6,800 yen “for the added thrill of a mild vibrating sensation coursing through his body every time he, er, beaches his craft”, and the reviewer allowed that “you may have written it off as a novelty, a marketing gimmick” before conceding that “the effect of the Rumble Pak is immediately apparent”.

In Britain

Star Fox 64 arrived in Europe as Lylat Wars at £60 with a Rumble Pak in the box, “prices as high as £80 had been mooted”, and spare Paks “for multi-player purposes” at £15. Datel’s ShockWave undercut the design rather than the price: at £25 it built in a 1Mb memory card, because with Nintendo’s Pak “you’ve got to switch packs when you want to stop rumbling and start saving games”.

Sony’s answer

Sony’s Dual Analog pad had vibration in Japan and lost it for Europe. A reader who bought the UK pad and Rally Cross told Edge in December 1997 that there was “no response from the so-called vibrating feedback” and that “support for this feature had been removed from the European version”. Edge offered “disputed reliability and compatibility to issues of cost” as the reasons, and judged that “the effect paled slightly when compared to N64’s Rumble Pak”. The DualShock, with rumble restored, was a preview talking point by March 1998 and in a $149 US PlayStation bundle by July.

See also

• Star Fox 64
• Nintendo 64
• DualShock
• Analogue Control
• Force Feedback