Did you know that North Korea made a clone console of the Nintendo Wii?
[music] And did you know, ladies and gentlemen that we got him?
Wait, what is UNOS? And why is everything in Chinese instead of Korean?
Dancing with the Stars, Frozen, NBA.
Actually, that last one kind of makes sense. But the rest of this is very
confusing. What exactly makes this console North Korean? Are North Korean
games unique or are they just same same but different? [music] What I know is
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North Korea might not immediately spring to mind when you think of gaming or even
technology for that matter, but the hermit kingdom surprisingly has a fair
bit of history in the space. In 2012, British travel company Coro Tours
commissioned Nok Information Technology to make a game to promote their packages
of tours of the DPRK. The result was a
title called Pyongyang Racer, a flash game that plays a little bit like Crazy
Taxi if there were no people, no money, and barely any cars on the road. You
basically collect barrels of oil and try not to crash. That's it. That's the
whole game. Pong [snorts] racer time. Let's go. Game rules. Do not hit cars or
vans. If you hit 10 vehicles, you will be stopped for bad driving. Are you
kidding me? Huh? Am I supposed to be able to tell
where the people that I'm supposed to pick up are?
What? If you drive on the grass, you
immediately die. Okay. What What is this? I collected a barrel of oil. Okay.
What if I hit a car? Are these other cars even moving? Are they just
stationary on the road? It's like the only purpose of this game is to
reinforce that you better stay in line or the experience is over. Do you pick
people up? I don't even understand what's happening right now. Drive
straight on. Don't stare at me. I'm on duty. Well, where is she? Am I supposed
to pick her up? I can't even approach a driveway. Is
that because that building is like a building people are not allowed to go to
or what? Yeah, this is enough weirdness for me. I think I expected to play a lot
more, but I think I'm done here. It's creepy. It's kind of like that footage
we saw recently of North Korea. There's no traffic lights. There's no other cars
on the road. You're just by yourself in a weird Steepford Wives too perfect
city. Despite what Wikipedia might say,
that is not the first and last of North Korea or even Noex games. In 2007, they
were contracted by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp to assist in the production of Java
based flip phone games, The Big Labowski Bowling, and Men in Black Alien Assault.
They're also rumored to have worked on a Wii game of some sort shortly afterward,
though we don't know for sure if it was for an actual Nintendo console or if it
was more like this. First up then is
bowling, which Oh, [music] okay. It's
meant to be oriented this way. When you navigate the menu, [music] there's no
crowds cheering. This is not your decadent capitalist bowling. Wait, do I
get to Yeah, it's got to go through. It's Everything in this has unskippable cut
scenes. I can't explain why. Got it. We only got one remote working, so
unfortunately Tanner can't join me. Oh, okay. I can be either of these Miis.
I love the frame rate on everything in this. What is that, like 18 frames per second?
Oh, if you're lucky. This really is just an outright clone of
of Wii Bowling, isn't it? [music] Pretty much. Wow. And the physics is just as good,
which is not a compliment. Oh, wow. They give you a zoomed-in view. You basically
can't miss. So, you know how you say you basically can't miss?
Yeah. On this next shot, I want you to do something a little different. Okay.
I want you to move your character all the way over to the right, and when you throw the ball, I want you to hook far
to your left. Okay. Wait, that's as far as I can go.
Yep. Uh, okay. Now, hook far to the left. [music]
And that's a strike every time. Oh, I win.
This will get you right on your way to the perfect game of 270 points.
Um, [music] you mean 300? Oh, 270. You do not get those extra two
balls in the 10th frame. Do they not have bowling in North Korea?
Like, they don't know how the rules work or what? The only place that you can really find
a lot of video games in North Korea is the bowling alley, ironically.
Uh, okay. I'm actually a little surprised at how not that bad it is.
Yeah, a lot of it is. Look at that. It's had that disco
bowling lighting effects and everything. Overall, the games lack maybe a little
bit of polish, but they're not what you would consider to be complete an utter
shovel wear every time. They're getting close, but I want to try the badminton
game. Yeah, go for it. Okay, this looks like it could be fun.
Oh, it's really too bad we didn't get the second controller working. Do we
have a second controller, but it just We have a second controller. The dongle
got lost in my pile of dongles at some point and I think fell off the table.
Oh, okay. It's really disappointing. [music]
Okay. The um [music] presses are very much just suggestions.
Yeah. [music] Why am I hitting it to the back right every time? Stop.
Oh my god. How about anywhere other than there, please? Oh, for the love of all,
it is good. There is no strategy here whatsoever, as far as I can tell. [music]
That is the case with a lot of these games. If you're dependent on the gyro,
it's going to let you down. This would be exhausting to play. Again,
with a little bit more polish, this could actually be fun.
Somebody put some work into this. Yeah. I may or may not have used a number of
work hours playing this. It's fun. It really is.
You tried the badminton one specifically? This was the first game I played because
it's badminton and I know what company I work for.
It's actually fun. Whoa.
Okay. It has mouse pointer support in like their fake Wii.
Yeah, that's actuallyly not bad. And this one doesn't require that you
have I an IR bar. [music] So, cuz it's just purely gyro.
Yeah, exactly. Oh my god, that yoga game. Who is that
flexible? Where are her hips? The one
leg looks like it's coming out of the other leg. Oh my god.
Oh, it's really too bad we didn't get the dance mat with this. Yeah, I would
not want to play Twister with her. So,
the only thing we can say for sure is that we don't know for sure what games
North Koreans have or haven't worked on. Sanctions against the country mean that
services purchased from them are often brokered through middlemen or even
entire middle companies in places like China or Hong Kong. And in some
industries, these workarounds are a particularly open secret. Pyongyangs
animation powerhouse Seek Studio has been around since 1957. Is estimated to
have 900 employees and has worked on
French animated series like The Ranch, Spain's Cursed Titanic movie, Stan Lee's
Mighty 7, and even The Simpsons movie. They're even rumored to have worked on
some Disney films like The Lion King, which could explain this scene where the
dust in the sky appears to spell e K.
Yes, I'm choosing to believe it's a K. If I'm going to have a conspiracy theory, it's going to be the deepest
one. With all of that said, the games on
this version of this console probably didn't come from North Korea. In the
initial 2019 news release about the Moren Bong game console posted on this
recently defunct propaganda news outlet, [music] the logo on the front doesn't
quite match up to what we got. That's in Korean. This is in Chinese. Though if
you kind of cross your eyes a little bit and try to make out what the pixels are,
the Korean seems to roughly match up with the Hungul for Moram Bong. While
the Chinese logo here reads Xiao Ba Wang, better known outside of China as
Subor. Oh, I know Subar. That's right. They made that Z plus console that we
reviewed back in 2019. And outside of
that, they actually have a fairly storied past. They began producing
Famicom clones in the early 1990s. And within a few years, they were the most
popular Famicone brand in China and the second most popular in Russia with a
contract to manufacture Russia's most popular Famicom console, the Dendi. They
also had a pretty recognizable spokesman, Jackie Chan, who I will be
channeling in this next segment. Wait,
does it use the camera? It does. Why would it even need that if it's got
a gyro? Well, because it shows you on the screen
and then you can be in the game. No. Yeah.
Okay, I guess you don't even need this. But here you go.
This is such a high quality camera. What just [music] happened?
I think we might have accidentally selected something. Um uh
wait. Oh, wait. I don't even need the controller then. No. Oh, okay.
You You can hit them multiple times, by the way. Oh, really?
Oh, sick.
You know, it works surprisingly okayish.
Yeah. Now, imagine if the camera were better on this. Yeah. If it wasn't like 15 frames per
second. That's actually kind of a cool game. It's like if the Connect was a
piece of As opposed to what?
Got him. This would actually be really fun with a competitive mode. Like I I
would I would play this I'd play this with my kids. [music] Oh, that's
interesting. If you look closely at the oranges, you can actually see where the
model is glued together. Oh, yeah. Look at that. [laughter]
Oh, actually that one too. It looks I think we can see it on all of them. So, yeah, three sections on each one.
Okay, we lost. Coming back to Subor's role in all of this. It's not the logo
on the front that makes a console. It's the software. And Subar has their hands
in that as well. Have you ever used one of those consoles with the 501 game
cartridges only to discover that they're filled with weird dmakes, resp-rites, or
sequels to games that have no business existing? [music] Well, that probably came from Subor's
frequent collaborator and possible parent company, Wing. Since 1993, Wing
Science and Technology Company has produced such legally dubious titles as
Super Contra 7, Tunnel Warfare, and
Pokemon Goldish. A fun fact, by the way, in 2001, they
were involved in a copyright infringement lawsuit [music] as the plaintiff [snorts] and won. Oh,
China, you so silly. [music] Anyway, sometime in the late 2000s, they ditched
the Famicom to focus primarily on making games for Subor's various Wii clones.
What exactly are these Wii clones? LTD Screwdriver, drum roll, please.
Wow. And congratulations. If you guessed old
Android TV box with a camera, you win. The circuit board printing suggests it
was manufactured in May of 2014. It uses a rock chip processor, 512 megs of RAM,
8 gigs of storage, and well, it's about as simple as any old Android TV [music]
box. And like most Android TV boxes, it
runs Android, or at least sort of it does. Yun OS was the original name for
Alios, Alibaba's version of Android. And as for the games, well, why don't we try
comparing some Wing titles to the games that eventually found their way into
North Korea. This game is interesting. Okay,
this is the correct version of table tennis that we want. This red court is
seen in one of the ads that was posted to Ari Rangi for the North Korean Wii.
So, this is a game that would have theoretically gone to North Korea.
Uh, it's a tutorial right off the bat. Everything is unskippable.
That controller is not the same as my controller. They did have a couple Oh, wa.
That's a Wii controller with one button. No, no, that's not a Wii controller.
There's still four buttons down the bottom. Yeah. So, it's somewhere in between cuz
it's got the D-pad markings on it, but it's only got a single button here. So,
it could be that that is an early mockup or it could be one of the varieties of
this that Subor released because they did have a number of them
on the market. Oh, I'm sorry. Are you I'm good.
Get in the game. Sorry. It's a skill issue.
So, basically all this thing has in it is just an accelerometer and like no
gyro, I guess. Just are you moving it? Great. Okay. and only the game, the
actual device does. This is essentially
an air mouse. You can take the dongle from this and
plug it into a computer and it will be detected as a standard HID device. You
can immediately start using it as an air mouse. So, if you wanted to use this
with a Wii emulator, you absolutely could. Oh, that's super cool. There's
concrete evidence then that Wing made at least some of the games that were
promoted in advertisements for our North Korean Wii here. Table tennis for sure
is a match. The rest are not so clear. This next image appears to show some
kind of running game on a mat. We're not
sure which one or if it's a real game at all. We do know Subor did sell several
dance mats that pair with their Wii clones from a company called Blavore,
but this looks less like a game peripheral and more like a solar panel
on the floor, which kind of checks out given what Blavor is up to these days.
Um, it is possible though that it's real and it was just designed so simply to
allow for assembly within a North Korean factory, something that Pyongyang has
been doing with Android phones for over a decade. The final image from Aryang
Mirie is maybe the most ambiguous but also the most interesting. It
prominently announces educational kids games with a number of examples. And of
the 20 pixels that are not obscured by the watermark, we can make out two big
clues. The first is this raccoon dog
looking character that appears to be interacting with a piece of paper on the ground. This is likely Neoi, the main
character of Clever Raccoon Dog, one of North Korea's most popular cartoons. If
this were a device solely made for children, Clever Raccoon Dog might be
the extent of the local cartoon properties used. But Two Space is over,
we can see what very much looks like the lead character of the much more dark and
gritty series, The Boy General. North Korea has three very popular cartoons in
its history. And if two out of three are featured, it's a safe assumption that
there were plans for a game based around the dark, gritty war drama Squirrel and
Hedgehog. Top of a few murky details about a Squirrel and Hedgehog mobile
game from 2018 called Brave Soldier, there have been some photos posted to
the Fandom Wiki depicting gameplay and pitch meetings for a rail gun shooter
arcade game supposedly for use in the Golden Lane bowling alley attached to
the Yangakto Hotel, the primary hotel that foreign tourists tend to get placed
in. But why make a one-off arcade machine of your most popular series only
to show it to foreigners who might confuse it for a Sonic the Hedgehog knockoff? Which, by the way, it isn't.
In fact, Squirrel and Hedgehog predates Sonic by well over a decade. A fact that
makes more sense when you have the context of North Korea's media industry.
Between the late 1960s and the 1980s,
Kim Jong-'s first major role in the DPRK government was creating film and
television for use as propaganda. He famously kidnapped South Korean actress
Cho Yunhi and her husband, director Shinsang O for eight years in order to
make this happen. But when he wasn't using human trafficking victims to make
anti-Japanese shame pieces, he pushed for a variety of cartoons to be created,
almost all of them involving talking animals, making Kim Jong ill,
effectively then history's most despotic furry.
In the years following his death, production of these cartoons slowed
significantly. Where they used to produce one to two episodes a year,
Squirlland Hedgehog hasn't seen a new episode enter production since Kim
Jong-'s death. And there's been virtually no new or continued
productions of Seek Properties in that time. As far as we know, the only
exception to this seems to have been Kim Jong-un's favorite show, The Boy
General, which got a reboot in 2015, nearly 20 years after originally going
off the air. The reboot lasted 50 episodes and concluded in 2019, right
around the time this Wii clone was announced. See, we got there eventually.
Let's try another game. All right, [snorts] there were a couple other ones that caught my eye. I thought I saw a
curling game. Yep. Let's see if there's actual differences in how hard you go,
cuz this would be the first game that managed to like That's not a bad little
like village thing they made. If this were paired with wonderful gameplay, all
of this would be easily forgiven. I noticed the word if there.
Every one of these games has a little caveat to it. [music] Okay. All right.
Part of the journey of discovery. All right. Okay. So, I hold the D
[music] button. Short.
What just happened? Uh, push push. Do that.
And now it's going to go all the way down. You can actually see on the right side. That's going to tell you how far
that shot is going to go. And if you wave back and forth, it's it'll sweep.
And normally that will actually uh fill up a little bit more.
Oh, I see. Okay. I haven't figured out how to get it to
properly curl. Yeah. But I know that you can at least go over
to this left and right like you would in bowling. Okay. Well, that was a bad shot.
Like I put it right on the button. No. No. They're going to completely miss
just like me. Okay. Well, hey, at least we both suck. See it filling up. Filling
up. Push forward. I overshot it again, didn't I? Damn it.
Hey, you're still in the area. You can't tell from the physics at all.
Like, it's it's not slowing down, dude. [music] It just moves at a constant rate. Like,
that looks like I keep thinking, oh, it's almost slowed down. Oh, wow. It
just lands exactly where you get it. See, I thought it'd be like Wii Golf
where it like goes to there, but then there's some fudge factor, but no, it's
just just press it right when the thing. All we've got is four more minutes left.
Why don't we get out of this game? And I believe it's I believe it's darts. I I
want to show you darts. Unskippable cut scene.
Okay, now hold on just to gosh darn. Oh. Oh, okay. So you just So you just
[music] have to get it in the right spot and then
What just happened? Well, there's gravity. So you're aiming.
What's the point of the freaking target then? Well, I don't know there then.
That was actually really close. Yeah, that that was much closer than I got it yesterday.
And then it Well, it leaves my thing in the same spot. So theoretically, I could
just
What was that? Too hard, dude.
Not cool. It It gets more frustrating, though, because you're playing 500,
right? [music] Yeah. And even if you get the exact correct
amount of points, it'll still tell you you're wrong. I could not get this game
to finish. Coming back to our wordy history lesson
that I assure you does have a point. In January 2020, all the borders of North
Korea closed. And in the past four years, no one has legally come in or
out, not even Dennis Rodman. The US Treasury has begun imposing sanctions on
companies found to be working with North Korea, even for animation. And at the
start of 2024, Kim Jong-un began shutting down radio stations, TV
broadcasts, and websites that served as a link between the DPRK and the rest of
the world. He made the unprecedented statement that a unified Korea would be
impossible. So whether the North Korean version of this console ever got made or
whether our title is total clickbait may never be known. Instead, with
willingness to outsource IT work to North Korea at an all-time low, it
appears that whatever sector workers might have worked on this or in the past
worked on white hat IT services have shifted to botnet creation and
ransomware attacks on hospitals for Bitcoin. As for Subor, unfortunately
both they and Wing seem to have succumbed to the pandemic. Subor is
adamant that they are not dead yet, but Wing's website is essentially gone with
only a file server remaining that hosts all of their software dated up until
2016 and a bunch of ROMs. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out
the AllChina PC where we briefly look at how Corsair power supplies keep ending
up in [music] North Korea.