Downloading games directly to your smartphone and playing them immediately is convenient, I suppose. But this ephemeral, bloodless process is missing a familiar tangibility gamers might remember warmly from the last millennium: that comforting, solid, life-affirming feeling of jamming a game cartridge into a console slot.

Enter Pico Cassette, a Japanese outfit that says it's bringing back "the next retro" with tiny game cartridges that plug in to a smartphone's headphone jack. The tiny "cassettes" (the general Japanese term for cartridges) are built on PlugAir technology, which uses a specially designed iPhone or Android app to draw power from the headphone jack and send data using specially modulated audio signals.

Those coded sound waves are then used to unlock access to content that's stored in the cloud, according to a PlugAir explanation video. That would seem to remove one of the main conveniences of the physical cartridge format—namely, distributing and storing data permanently without an Internet connection—but there's nothing technical preventing the actual game data from being stored on the cartridges as well. In any case, there's something about the simplicity of being able to share a game with a friend simply by handing them a physical thing that plugs in to the phone (though the need for a special app is a bit of an impediment to immediate ad-hoc sharing).

Similar PlugAir products have been around since 2013 but have been used mainly to share music playlists; Linkin Park used PlugAir keys to distribute bonus tracks at its concerts, for example. Pico Cassette is the first company with plans to use the tech for game distribution, though there are no announced plans outside of Japan. The company says it's looking to license classic NES/Famicom games for mobile re-release through the format, but it would also be open to distributing new games on Pico Cassette, according to RocketNews24.

The Pico Cassette is part of a mini-boom of cartridge nostalgia in recent months. The Retro VGS console is seeking IndieGogo funding for its plans to distribute new games on the old cartridge format, while the long-promised Analogue NT is finally shipping to players interested in an (expensive) HD upgrade to their old NES and Famicom cartridges (and we've just gotten one in-hand to try out).

Some people seem willing to give up the cloud's convenience for a cartridge's permanence and childhood associations, but Pico Casesette's teaser video has probably identified the real reason for this wave of nostalgia: people just seem to really like blowing on things.