Description

The Famicon Disk System was an add-on for the Famicom that used proprietary disks that were smaller than a standard floppy disk. Disks had many advantages over cartridges such as being cheaper to manufacture and having kiosks in shops around Japan which allowed people to re-write games onto a disk, this was very useful to customers as it is illegal to rent video games in Japan. The console launched with the original Legend of Zelda which would be the starting point of one of Nintendo’s most beloved series, Metroid and Kid Icarus also had their start on the add-on. All of these games had save data which was revolutionary for the time. The Disk System had many issues such as loading times which Famicom owners were not used to. Additionally third party developers were outraged by Nintendo insisting on owning 50% of the copyright to their games with many companies refusing to make games for it, in 1987 Square Enix released the original Final Fantasy on a game cartridge with a save battery, the fact that a game that big could be made on a cartridge was bad for the Disk System’s future. By 1989 the manufacturing costs of game cartridges came down which made the disk system obsolete and it was discontinued in Japan in 1990 and the NES version was never released, despite this the add-on was only released in Hong Kong in 1991 and technical support for it in Japan didn’t end until 2007 as was the case for the Famicom itself. The Disk System is one of if not the only commercially successful add-ons.