Nintendo has a colorful past of comming up with addons for their systems which turns out to fail totally. It all started back when they released the Famicom system in Japan, the unit did well but the cost of IC's for the cartridges were high. So Nintendo of Japan's (NCL) Engineers came up with an add-on for the Famicom which would use a non-standard disk, to prevent copying. The unit, called Famicom Disk System, was actually quite good and sold very well. For a few years Nintendo and its licensees made nothing but disks, not a single cart was released. But the problem with the Disk System was the agreement 3rd party licensees had to sign to be able to make the disks. Nintendo would get so high an ammount of the sale that the companies made almost nothing from the disks, so they went back to making carts in the late 80s. Also, the disks could only carry 64kb, which meant smaller games.

The Famicom Disk System lasted for a couple of years, but got killed by a massive flood of pirate disks and Nintendo's strict and unfair license agreement. Today it's almost impossible to find a Famicom Disk from that time which isnt made by pirates. Nintendo continued and produced a modem for the Famicom and was talking about launching a network which would let people do bank transactions, look at stock prices etc from home. The modem was sold, but the network never launched.

The Famicom was replaced by the Super Famicom and it was now time to come up with new accessories. Who doesnt remember all the writing about the Super Famicom CD-ROM drive where Nintendo first worked together with Sony and the add-on would be called Playstation. But Sony wanted to produce the disks for the system, which Nintendo didnt like as they kinda would loose control of the unit. Nintendo and Sony broke up and Philips came into the picture with theit CDi crap. This went well but Nintendo suddently lost interest in the CD-ROM drive, probably after seeing Sega's CD add-on, and the project went down the drain. Although Philips had the rights to make 3 Zelda games for their CDi system, and those games are really, ugh, the cream of crap, I bet Nintendo didnt like those either.

Well Nintendo was still obsessed with the idea to create a network. Around 1995 they finally launched their first network, called Satellaview. I think the network actually became quite popular, but it was launched a few years too late, since this was the time Sony finished their own CD based videogame console called PlayStation. The Satellaview network was shut down sometime in 1997. America got their own version of the Satellaview network, well kinda. Catapult Entertainment invented a modem for the SNES, and Sega's Genesis (Megadrive), called X-Band. It would allow it's users you play SNES games over the network, which was powered by Rockwell by the way. The only problem with this network was that the games had to have X-Band hookups built-in and eventhough the X-Band was a licensed product only a few developers actually went along and added support for the X-Band. The network was shut down in 1997 without causing a lot of riot among gamers.

The Nintendo64 was finally released and a rumor was out from the start that Nintendo was working on a Disk Drive, using magnetic disks like a ZIP-drive, which would be released world wide. Years went and the unit was delayed again again until the news came that they weren't going to release it World Wide anyway, but they now had invented a Modem which would work with the N64DD and a network would be set up in co-operation with Randnet.

The Disk Drive and modem was released in 1999, and has not become that popular at all in Asia, reason being that the N64 is pretty much, ok it is, dead there. So why didnt they release it in the US where the N64 still is doing quite well? Hmmm hopefully I'll be able to get that out of Nintendo... somehow. This page will someday tell you every bit about the Disk Drive, from when it was announced to when it was released to how its doing today. So stay tuned.