Blaze Entertainment has spent seven years making a thing the industry insists nobody wants: games on plastic cartridges. On 30 October the company puts its most serious attempt yet on sale, and the timing is almost comically good.
The Nexus, in numbers
The Evercade Nexus is the successor to 2024’s EXP-R, and the headline change is that Blaze has finally fitted analogue sticks. Eurogamer notes this is the first time the Evercade line has had them, which matters more than it sounds: a d-pad-only machine was always going to struggle with 3D games.
The spec, per Stuff: a 5.89-inch IPS panel at 840×512 with 500 nits peak brightness, 215×111×34mm, 410g, front-facing stereo speakers, WiFi 6, wireless headphone support plus a 3.5mm jack, TATE vertical mode for arcade shooters, roughly five hours of battery, USB-C charging. The resolution is the odd one out — lower than the EXP-R’s, on a bigger screen.
Pricing: £169.99 / $199.99 for the standard Nexus, which bundles a cartridge containing Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie. A Nexus 64 Edition at £189.99 / $229.99 comes in Nintendo 64 colours, limited to 2,000 units via Blaze’s partner Funstock, with a hard case, screen protector, poster and certificate of authenticity.
Banjo, from the source code
The pack-in is the interesting part. These are not emulator cores running a ROM dump. Blaze says the Banjo games were rebuilt as native Evercade releases using the original 64-bit console code as their foundation, developed with Rare’s involvement, running at 60fps with widescreen support and reworked camera controls. Destructoid’s hands-on at Blaze’s London Community First Play event found the D-pad version on the £49.99 Super Pocket plays better than it ought to.
There’s also EverSync: local wireless multiplayer between two Nexus units, no internet, and only one player needs the cartridge. A small, sensible feature. The absence of a sleep mode at launch is less sensible — Destructoid reports you must power the thing fully down between sessions, with Evercade promising a firmware fix later. The Nintendo DS had sleep mode in 2004.
DOOM on a cartridge, and the smarter buy
Alongside the hardware, Blaze is releasing a DOOM Collection cartridge for $29.99 / £24.99 on the same date: DOOM, DOOM II, TNT: Evilution, The Plutonia Experiment, Master Levels, No Rest for the Living, SIGIL, SIGIL II, plus a Deathmatch map pack, per Bleeding Cool. It runs on every Evercade device, including the Super Pocket, and lands as cartridge #11 in the home computer range in a special red colourway.
A DOOM Edition Nexus exists too — $249.99, limited to 3,000, with a Mars-red case, keychain, poster, bonus comic and numbered certificate. The Gadgeteer makes the useful point: the limited handheld does not include the Banjo pack, and existing Evercade owners should buy the $29.99 cartridge, not the console. That cartridge has already sold out at Funstock US.
Why this is the right moment
Here’s the context that turns a niche handheld into a genuinely interesting story. Circana’s data put US physical software sales at $85 million in July 2026 — the worst month for physical since tracking began in 1995. Nintendo took 63% of year-to-date physical spend, PlayStation 32%.
Meanwhile Sony will stop releasing new PS5 games on disc from January 2028, and Kotaku has spotted “Important Notice” stickers on PS5 boxes in stores saying exactly that. Take-Two’s Strauss Zelnick says discs “don’t really make sense for the consumer” for games like GTA 6. The UK trade body ERA called Sony’s decision “a triumph of corporate convenience over consumer choice.”
Against that backdrop, Blaze’s pitch is stubbornly old-fashioned. Sean Cleaver of Evercade told Destructoid: “We make sure that we’ve got no downloads, we stay physical, we don’t feature-creep our way out of it, there’s no subscriptions, you just go to a shop or a retailer — which retailers love because we’re bringing people there.” He also said publishers themselves want it: “they all love physical, they love physical games, they love physical media.”
The part I find most interesting
Cleaver’s best line is about abundance, not nostalgia: “We solved a problem that people didn’t know they had. They didn’t know that too much choice was ruining their fun.” A Temu handheld with 50,000 preloaded games gets played for ten minutes and shelved. A cartridge with ten games gets finished.
I find that observation more persuasive than most of the writing about AI-era abundance, and it applies well beyond games. Evercade has 80-plus licensed cartridges, deals with Capcom, SNK, Namco, Sunsoft and Rare, and a business model built on the assumption that ownership is a feature rather than a legacy inconvenience. Whether the Nexus sells is a question about 410 grams of plastic at £169.99. Whether the argument is correct — that constraint is a selling point — looks increasingly like the interesting question of the year.
Launch is 30 October. Preorders are live at Argos in the UK (with an exclusive carry case) and Best Buy and Amazon in the US.
