Randnet

» see randnet.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

There was no import route into this one, and that is the unusual part. Plenty of Japanese hardware reached Turkey eventually, through a shop that knew somebody or through a cousin who traveled. Randnet was not hardware. it was a subscription billed in yen against a japanese address and a japanese phone line, and the disk drive was just the thing they mailed you for signing up. you cannot smuggle a phone line.

Recruit and Nintendo announced the joint venture, RandnetDD Co., Ltd., on 30 June 1999. The service opened on 13 December that year, the same day as the 64DD itself, and the ordering worked backwards from every other console peripheral ever sold. you did not buy a drive and then find something to do with it. you signed up for Randnet, and the Starter Kit arrived with the 64DD and the N64 modem in it, browser disk included.

The base plan ran 2,500 yen a month, or 3,300 if you wanted to end up owning the hardware, dropping to 1,500 a month once that was paid off. For the money you got a browser and mail, message boards and an avatar you built yourself. There was a shopping section called GET Mall selling CDs and books. This was a full consumer online service, on a games console, in 1999, three years before Xbox Live.

Ten disks came out. that is the number that ends the story. Nintendo announced the discontinuation in October 2000 and put the subscriber count at roughly fifteen thousand, and on 28 February 2001 the service closed and took the 64DD with it, since the two had never really been separate products.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it was sold ~

The bundling decision looks insane and was actually reasonable, which is the interesting thing about it. Nintendo knew the drive had no software worth buying, so it refused to sell the drive on its merits and sold access instead. the drive rode along as an accessory to a service, the way a decoder box rides along with satellite television.

It also meant the hardware never sat in a shop window in Akihabara where somebody could pick it up on a whim, at least at first, because mail order was the channel. a machine sold only to people who had already committed to a monthly fee cannot be bought by accident, and consoles live on being bought by accident.

~ the numbers ~

Fifteen thousand subscribers is a small town. The N64 sold in the tens of millions worldwide, and Japan was never its strongest market, still it means something like one N64 owner in several hundred took the deal. every one of them was paying monthly for a network whose entire catalog of exclusive software would fit on one shelf.

The best-known 64DD disk is Mario Artist, a set of drawing and animation tools, which tells you what the drive was really for: making things and sending them somewhere. that is a 2006 idea running on 1999 hardware behind a modem, and the reason it failed is not the idea.

~ what it predicted ~

Almost everything here came back later and worked. A console with an account attached to it, and a store built into the machine that sells you software over the wire. I first heard someone describe that as new, but it was well after Randnet had been switched off and forgotten.

Being early is not a strategy, it is a cost. Randnet paid the whole cost of building a console online service in 1999, when the modem was extra and the disks were few, and none of what it proved was inherited by the company that proved it. Nintendo went online properly with the Wii, in a different decade, having learned mainly that it should never do this again with a peripheral.

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