We're all pretty used to being able to do anything on our phones, including playing games, and it's not just what you think of as bad mobile games anymore. You can play the likes of PUBG and Among Us from your smartphones as well. However, we didn't always have this amazing luxury, something that Nintendo seemed to have spotted back in 2001.

We recently dug up a patent for an electronic apparatus having game and telephone functions assigned to Nintendo. This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, a phone that you can also play games on, which doesn't sound like such a big deal now, but there wasn't really anything like it back then.

The Nintendo Gaming Phone would accomplish this by having both a gaming CPU and a phone CPU that it would switch back and forth between as needed. If a call came in while you were playing something, the game would pause for you to answer it. Obviously this idea was never brought to fruition which begs the question: "Why?"

Maybe they didn't see the real need for it with the Gameboy Advance and the GameCube already on the market. We still think it would have been awesome to our younger selves back in the early 2000s.

Is this something that you would have used?