iQue

iQue logo.

iQue is a Chinese company founded as a joint venture between Nintendo and Wei Yen, an entrepreneur who worked on several projects involving Nintendo. It was originally formed to sell the iQue Player, and later expanded to selling rebranded versions of Nintendo's handheld systems in China ranging from the Game Boy Advance to the 3DS XL. iQue planned to sell a rebranded version of the Wii in China, but was unable to do so due to China's legal restrictions involving video game consoles. iQue stopped releasing or supporting games & consoles shortly after the release of the iQue 3DS XL, changing their purpose to serve only as a localization company to localize Nintendo games to Simplified Chinese.

iQue hardware releases

Due to a ban on home video game consoles in China from 2000 to 2015, the majority of iQue's hardware releases were rebranded versions of Nintendo's handheld consoles, with their only home console release being designed to circumvent the terms of the ban.

The hardware that iQue released was as follows:

• iQue Player (only home console released by iQue; unique device built from the ground up to replicate Nintendo 64 hardware and play modified Nintendo 64 games)

• iQue Game Boy Advance

• iQue Game Boy Advance SP

• iQue Game Boy Micro

• iQue DS

• iQue DS Lite

• iQue DSi

• iQue 3DS XL (no non-XL 3DS variant was offered)

Aside from the iQue Player, all of these devices were rebranded versions of the equivalent devices released by Nintendo in other regions, although as Nintendo begun to introduce more complex software environments that distinguished systems by region, iQue systems also gained unique software environments which introduced copy protection and region locking for iQue games. While Nintendo did not implement region locking in their devices until the DSi, iQue systems and games implemented region locking starting with the iQue DS which prevented iQue games from being played on systems of other regions.

iQue software releases

iQue released very few games for each of their consoles, which was a possible contributing factor to their commercial failure. 14 games were released for the iQue Player, 8 for the iQue GBA, 6 for the iQue DS, and only 2 for the iQue 3DS XL. Notably, some iQue GBA games were cancelled before release but resurfaced years later, when they were sold in a complete packaged form on the Chinese online marketplace Taobao.

BroadOn

Wei Yen, who initially served as part of the joint venture with Nintendo which created iQue, founded a software engineering firm in 2000 known as RouteFree, later renamed to BroadOn. BroadOn served as a mostly-unknown third entity in the development of the iQue Player, developing its entire software infrastructure which was released under the iQue brand through the joint venture with Nintendo. As such, BroadOn in some ways served as the overseas representation of iQue's development efforts.