
It's funny what your brain chooses to remember and what it decides to forget.
For example, I can't remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, but I can recall with pinpoint accuracy the fact that it was reported in an early issue of EDGE magazine that the Mega Drive port of Virtua Racing caused cordless phones to ring. (It's kind of a superpower that I have, but one that has very little use in the real world.)
This memory was instantly triggered by a tweet from video game historian John Harrison, who asked where the rumour had originated.
The issue of EDGE, which appears to be the "smoking gun", dates back to July 1994, with the publication mentioning that there had been several reports of the import version of the game causing cordless phones to ring.

This was later followed up in issue 12 by a concerned employee of British Telecom, who apparently was worried it would cause havoc when the game arrived in the United Kingdom.

So, if this isn't a rumour, why did Virtua Racing cause cordless phones to ring? It's almost certainly due to the frequency at which the SVP chip found inside the cartridge runs, as this was the only game that featured it.
Were you posh enough to own a cordless phone which was impacted by this issue back in the day? Let us know with a comment.
[source x.com]
Comments 9
I take it that the chip emits some sort of electromagnetic field (RF? EMF?), which triggers the phone?
Don't quote me on this, but isn't that why old consoles had metal shielding in them? To comply with RF / EMF regulations about electrical appliances not affecting each other? I definitely remember reading a very dry document stipulating how an appliance must not affect, or allow itself to be affected by another. Or something.
I have a top end low-frequency and high-frequency scanner (this was great at finding some forgotten faulty wiring in my bathroom). The thing is, every single electrical appliance gives off some sort of field. You turn your console on and even the wired controllers give off something, even if you need to put the scanner up close. Put it near a live AC adapter and it goes off like a fire alarm.
I find myself deeply intrigued by the claim the JP version is producing some sort of uber field that interferes with other appliances.
I used to have an electric razor (philips I think) that would turn on when left next to a mobile phone, when it was about to ring or I received a text message
@Sketcz I remember watching an 8-Bit Guy video talking about some guy who, according to him, was able to for quite some time cheat landline telephone service providers by playing some cheap 1973 Captain Crunch giveaway whistle, by blowing the whistle into the phone whenever he wanted to make a long-distance phone call.
Apparently the whistle gave off the EXACT tone frequency needed for the phone system to think the user had paid for long-distance phone service.
@Sketcz You are correct; it was easier to just slap a bunch of shielding on than to design the board to reduce EMF noise. I can’t imagine that cartridge was emitting THAT much noise, but maybe if you got an old 900Mhz phone really close to it?
@KingMike the whistle trick was real. A lot of "tech savvy" people knew about it back in the day. It's also referenced in the amazing movie Pirates of Silicon Valley.
@KingMike John Draper, or Captain Crunch! He's still alive, FWIW, and is a legend among the phone phreaking community.
The whistle provided in Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes produced a 2600 Hz tone, which was the exact tone needed to hijack a phone call, in ELI5 terms. The magazine, 2600, is named after this tone, and is still active to this day.
Would it surprise you that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Apple's founders, started off as phone phreakers as well, with the Blue Box?
I was going to call BS on this myth, but I actually own Virtua Racing for both Genesis and Japanese Megadrive. So I opened them both up. The Genesis version has an RF shield that's been slapped inside and the Japanese copy doesn't.
The hardware heroes from sega. When I connected my Dreamcast and another console to an AV Scart Switch and the Dreamcast was switched off because I was playing with the other device, the fan of the Dreamcast still came on. spooky.
This is precisely why I wrap myself in tin foil and wear a tin foil hat. Now I know I can play the Japanese version of Virtua Racing on the Mega Drive without fear of being harmed. Who’s laughing now, eh?
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