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DrunkenNES Turns Your Nintendo Into a Breathalyzer

This article is over 13 years old and may contain outdated information

Blowing into an NES cartridge while drunk could earn you a high score in DrunkenNES.

The latest project from homebrew NES tinkerer Andrew Reitano puts blowing into a Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge to good use. DrunkenNES is a game that reads a player’s internal alcohol content and saves it as a high score.

To create DrunkenNES, Reitano combined an alcohol sensor with some other hardware and uses it in tandem with custom NES software. He says it’s “pretty accurate” just as long as players have had a drink in their system for more than 3 minutes.

To play, users blow into a cartridge. Depending on the reading, the game displays one of 4 different animations for 6 different states – sober, getting started, buzzed, tipsy, drunk, and wasted – each with its own chiptune score. For example, one of the animations for the “buzzed” state displays a partying bee asking: “Where da honeys at?”

High scores themselves are derived from each individual reading, not from the player’s state. Seriously though, it doesn’t sound like the safest game to try and achieve an all-time high score in. Stick to Pac-Man or Donkey Kong for that.

Source: Batsly Adams

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