Every Gamer's Nightmare: Taming the Tangled Cord Beast

Hours in I start finding old AC adapters with no description at all. What the hell does this belong to, an electric condor? I have no idea!

Now this is proper - you can clearly read "Nintendo AC Adapter." It's even got the slanted SNES font so you know it's not an NES AC adapter.

Digging through power supplies made me appreciate how small the plug-in cord is on all the current systems. Look how big the Turbo Duo and Sega CDX adapters were. That's like three slots of a power strip gone.

Uh oh... expired medicine. And it's still kinda full. Maybe that's why everything hurts now.

Perhaps the most suggestive car adapter in existence. I think it belongs to a CD player. Now it's trash!

When it was all said and done, I had a three foot stretch of old ass controllers. Don’t even remember buying three Xbox pads, barely even played the damn thing. Check out the dog bone NES and analog-less PSOne controller - classic stuff.

Hm. It looked a lot more imposing when it was bundled together. Guess it's not so tough after all. Let this be a lesson to clean up your unattended box/closet/tub of wired hysteria.

To everyone enamored with the Wii - realize that Nintendo claimed each of these devices was integral to gaming. One survived, the rest were cast aside in months. How many more add-ons do we need?

May 1, 2008

Brett Elston

A fomer Executive Editor at GamesRadar, Brett also contributed content to many other Future gaming publications including Nintendo Power, PC Gamer and Official Xbox Magazine. Brett has worked at Capcom in several senior roles, is an experienced podcaster, and now works as a Senior Manager of Content Communications at PlayStation SIE.