At last week’s Tokyo Game Show, Japanese company Beatrobo Inc announced a new line of mobile game cartridges called Pico Cassettes, which are meant to be plugged into your smartphone’s headphone jack. Beatrobo CEO Hiroshi Asaeda said that Pico Cassettes are meant to be a nostalgic callback to the game cartridges that ruled the console industry in the ’80s and ’90s, but there is one key difference with Pico Cassettes: They don’t actually contain any game data.

The miniature cartridges actually contain digital rights management (DRM) software, which acts as an authentication key by sending an inaudible signal through the headphone jack to unlock the game on your phone.

I’ll admit, this sounded like a terrible idea to me at first. Ever since publishers first realized they could convince their investors that piracy could be fought with draconian protection software, the video game industry has seen an explosion in DRM programs, most of which are awful.

Often requiring specialized software and constant access to the internet, DRM tends to be about as much fun as a TSA checkpoint and only slightly more effective. Since pirated software comes without the DRM, they are often more of a hassle for legitimate owners than for pirates.

So the idea of having to plug something into your phone just to unlock a game you already own sounds particularly terrible at first, but despite being a bit anachronistic, the idea actually makes a little bit of sense.

It may be cumbersome to lug around a bunch of cartridges, but they have a few of advantages over standard mobile games. For one thing, they can be used across multiple devices, and Beatrobo says that the cartridges have unique identifiers that allow you to take your savegames with you. Theoretically, this could allow you to seamlessly swap from playing on a tablet to playing on your smartphone. This also opens up the possibility of loaning games to friends just like in the olden days.

Another advantage of the Pico Cassette idea is that it would eliminate the need for other types of always-on DRM that require a constant data or wi-fi connection. A few old school games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI have made their way to mobile devices at premium price points (around $10 to $16), but both of those of these games require a connection to play, even though they do not actually need it to function.

This means that if you want to play those games on the subway or in some other location without data access, then you are out of luck. With something like Pico Cassettes, however, paranoid game publishers could still protect their IP while still allowing users to play their games whenever they want.

Image courtesy of Beatrobo Inc