Nintendo 64DD

~ the eulogy ~

i missed this one by geography, and so did almost everybody. The 64DD never left japan. In december 1999 my own machine was a PC with a modem in it, and the console anybody in turkey actually had was a PlayStation, because a nintendo cartridge cost what it cost and a silver disc cost almost nothing. The idea of paying a monthly fee to a japanese ISP to be allowed to buy a nintendo peripheral was not a thing that could reach me even in theory.

The plan was announced at Shoshinkai in 1995 and shown properly in november 1996, before the N64 had really found its footing. The 64DD was a magnetic disk drive that sat under the console and connected through the expansion port on the bottom. Each disk held 64 megabytes and, more to the point, could be written to. Cartridges could not. The pitch was a console where games saved worlds instead of save files, where you could draw something and keep it.

Then it did not ship. 1997 became march 1998, which became june 1998, which became sometime in 1999, which became december 1999. Four years of delays for a storage format in the second half of the nineties is fatal on its own, because the thing the delay is racing against is the price of the alternative. By late 1999 a CD held ten times as much and cost nothing to press, and the PlayStation had already won that argument in public.

~ the dossier ~

~ randnet ~

You could not just buy one. The 64DD went out through a subscription called Randnet, run with the recruitment company Recruit, and registration was open only between 11 november 1999 and 11 january 2000 with a cap of 100,000 people. You paid 2,500 yen a month for the hardware or 3,300 to own it at the end, plus 1,500 a month for the service. The drive arrived with a 28.8k modem.

Randnet itself was a small closed internet: web browsing, email, message boards, an avatar you built and a shopping mall called GET Mall. Nintendo was building an online service for a living room in 1999, on a dial-up line, in a country where households were not yet online in large numbers. Sega had tried something adjacent with the Dreamcast a year earlier and it had also not worked. This one shut on 28 february 2001 with about fifteen thousand subscribers, which is roughly the total number of drives that ever existed.

~ what shipped ~

What shipped was strange and mostly not games. Four of the releases were Mario Artist titles, which is to say a paint program and a polygon modeler rather than anything you could win. One of them, Talent Studio, put your own face into the software through a capture cartridge. Doshin the Giant was a god game about a yellow giant reshaping an island. SimCity 64 was a full 3D SimCity years before anything like it. F-Zero X Expansion Kit shipped a track editor, which is the single most convincing use of a writable disk on that machine.

The famous casualties are the ones that were not on the list. Zelda Ura, the alternate-dungeon Ocarina of Time, ended up as Master Quest on a GameCube disc. Earthbound 64 was cancelled outright and became Mother 3 on the Game Boy Advance seven years later. Cabbage, a Shigeru Miyamoto life-simulation project, evaporated. Every one of those was a reason to buy the drive, and every one of them left before it did.

~ what got buried with it ~

Nintendo announced the end in october 2000 and the machines stopped on 28 february 2001, fourteen months after launch. Most of the surviving drives went to internet cafes and Randnet kiosks rather than houses, which is why so few of them are in circulation and why the ones that are cost real money now.

The interesting part is how many of those ideas came back once the storage stopped being magnetic. A console with writable storage, a subscription that bundles the hardware, an avatar you make and carry around, level editors as a shipped feature. Nintendo did all of that again on the Wii and the Switch and it worked. The 64DD was not wrong about what people would want. It was three years late and one format behind.

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