DDelicious
- by Jim Norman
The Nintendo 64 Disk Drive (64DD) is among the firm’s most fascinating releases. An extended-delayed, rapidly discontinued, notorious flop, the 64’s cumbersome enlargement was supposed to supply the console with a further ‘middle-ground’ between cartridge and CD. As a substitute, it ended up being a black mark on an in any other case fairly spotless report (hey, we mentioned “fairly“) with solely 10 video games and a handful of gross sales to its identify.
In brief, it is a fairly uncommon little bit of equipment. Much more so is the 64DD Improvement Package — the console Nintendo despatched to studios earlier than launch so design groups might play to its distinctive options.
As you may think, the Improvement Package is not the form of factor you see fairly often nowadays, so you’ll be able to solely think about our shock when Rerez‘ Shane Luis took to BlueSky yesterday to announce that he had been requested to confirm and {photograph} one for a sport collector, new in field and the whole lot!
A chance like this wasn’t one to be wasted, so Luis documented the unboxing course of with a sequence of candy snaps in an extended BlueSky thread. We imagined that such a distinct segment add-on can be exactly the form of factor that you simply beautiful lot wish to try, so we now have gathered collectively a choice of Luis’ pictures (made publicly out there by way of Internet Archive) and laid them out for you beneath.
We’ll begin off with the field itself:
Subsequent, onto the heart. The field contained two pages of official Nintendo documentation written in Japanese (clearly). Luis shared the unique on BlueSky, however person Cheesemeister supplied the next translation:
The Dev Package itself appeared wrapped in plastic below a cardboard lid. Right here it’s snapped from all angles:
Earlier than we get onto the peripheral all stacked up appropriately, this is a more in-depth take a look at the opposite objects included within the delivery field — unused improvement disks and labels, an N64 cart, and two cart adapters ‘N64JOINT-01’ and ‘NUS DCC-00’:
And while you compile all these items collectively, you get this almighty stack:
It is fairly the looker, eh? If you wish to learn all concerning the historical past behind this notorious Nintendo flop, our sister web site, Time Extension, supplied a full rundown of the peripheral’s improvement and launch earlier this yr. You will discover that historical past lesson within the characteristic beneath.
What do you make of this unboxing? Something particularly that catches your eye? Tell us within the feedback.
[source bsky.app]
Jim got here to Nintendo Life in 2022 and, regardless of his insistence that The Minish Cap is the perfect Zelda sport and his unwavering love for the Star Wars prequels (sure, actually), he has continued to jot down information and options on the location ever since.
