Nintendo PlayChoice-10

The Nintendo PlayChoice-10 is an arcade cabinet system released in 1986. It contains up to 10 specially designed Nintendo Entertainment System games, which are much smaller than the standard NES cartridges. Up to two players would pay for time on the system, and then have access to all of the games in the cabinet. Metroid is among the ten games included for the system.

The machine was compatible with the NES, but with some key differences. An extra CPU controlled the gameplay timer, game select, and displayed hints for the current game on a separate monitor (on single-monitor systems, a button would switch between gameplay and the hint screen). Normal NES cartridges could not be used; rather, the PlayChoice used special expansion cards containing (usually unmodified) NES games along with an extra 8KB ROM to display hints. Because the PlayChoice-10 output RGB video using a slightly different palette, games did not look exactly the same as they did on the NES. It is in fact possible to replace the NES PPU with the PlayChoice-10 PPU, allowing it to output RGB natively. Nintendo also created a standalone PlayChoice which only had a single available game.

The Nintendo PlayChoice-10 version of Metroid is shown briefly in The Wizard. While playing Metroid, the second screen of the Nintendo PlayChoice-10 includes a partial map of Brinstar, technically making it the first Metroid title to include maps.