Animal Crossing is a life simulation series developed and published by Nintendo that originated in the Nintendo 64 under the title of
Dōbutsu no Mori.
The game was later remade for the GameCube in 2002 titled
Animal Crossing, which is when the
Animal Crossing title was coined for the series outside of Japan.
The GameCube version of Animal Crossing actually allowed players to purchase items such as the original Nintendo Entertainment System, which came with a couple of games for players to actually play. The NES consoles had the game's box on top of it indicating what game the player was purchasing, but there was another NES that didn't come with a game and was only there for decoration purposes—or at least that's what it was thought for a long 17 years.
As reported by NintendoLife, Security researcher James Chambers found out that this NES console was actually a built-in emulator that Nintendo hid in the game but didn't add any games to it, unlike the other 2 NES consoles with the game boxes on top. Whenever the player interacted with the NES console, the game would tell them that they couldn't play because the NES had no software in it.
Upon closer inspection, the NES console item is actually able to read NES ROM images—as it attemptes to scan the memory card for them. Chambers tried it out and it turns out that it is indeed an actual built-in emulator that can play mot games in the NES library. He attempted to play
Pinball by using the NES emulator found in
Animal Crossing and, to his surprise, it worked. He details in depth how he was able to do this on his website so, if you want to read more about the topic,
click right here.