NES cartridge breathalyzer, or DrunkNES

Drunken NES – Nintendo Breathalyzer from EM Dash on Vimeo.

Drinking and retro gaming go hand in hand, so why not put a breathalyzer into a NES cartridge? Okay, so there’s no real logic in that, but I’m glad someone did it anyway. Homebrewer Batsly Adams fit a breathalyzer into a cartridge and made a little game out of it. 

You breathe into the DrunkNES (love the name) and you’ll get different reactions depending on how drunk you are. Your lushness is rewarded with a cutscene and song. What makes this clever is that we’ve been blowing into NES carts for years. Now we can blow into one plugged into the NES to make a game. It’s a great excuse to drink, too. 

The creator’s blog let’s us know what to expect from this game. There’s six stages of drunkenness: sober, getting started, buzzed, tipsy, drunk and wasted. There’s a six-digit high score table and an original 10 track musical score. The blog even says that there’s a pretty high level of accuracy from the drunk sensor. This is almost as great as meat on top of meat.