Screenshot : YouTube

If you use Slack to stay in touch with your friends or work colleagues, you most likely have the client on your computer and the app on your phone, ensuring that you’re never too far from funny gifs or check-ins from your boss to make sure you’re not just looking at funny gifs when you should be writing about pop culture news (or whatever normal people do at normal jobs). Really, the list of times when you’re actually free from the oppressive connectedness that Slack affords is extremely slim, consisting mostly of just when you’re driving a car or when you’ve managed to get so far underground that wireless signals cannot penetrate, but now the list of Slack-free places has just gotten even smaller thanks to an engineer who managed to get a ridiculous version of that chat platform working on a Super Nintendo.


Technically it’s an emulated version of a Super Famicom (the Japanese SNES), and technically it’s running through an emulated game on the fake Super Famicom, but it’s a bizarre feat regardless. As reported by The Verge, Bertrand Fan made this all work with a copy of 1995's BS-X: The Story Of The Town Whose Name Was Stolen, which was really just a glorified menu that Super Famicom owners could use to access the features of the Satellaview accessory—a way-ahead-of-its-time peripheral that could receive satellite data transmissions. The original version of the game could be used to download digital games or magazines (in 1995!), provided Nintendo actually kept the satellite system online, which it has not done for nearly 20 years.

Using some new modding tools that let you mimic Satellaview files and send them into the game, Fan was able to create some custom code and update the in-game shops with data from a Slack channel in real time. Basically, the game works just as it did, with your avatar physically walking to a store and talking to a robot shopkeeper, but instead of him saying “here’s the hottest Nintendo news from 1995" or whatever, he offers the latest 10 updates from your hot Nintendo news Slack channel. It’s pretty cool in a weird and pointless way, and here it is in action:

Meanwhile, you still can’t order a pizza with an Xbox One, even though you can check a stupid version of Slack on a Nintendo game that utilizes ‘90s satellite technology.

