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 offer 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 file (hey, we stated “fairly“) with solely 10 video games and a handful of gross sales to its title.
Briefly, 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 type of factor you see fairly often as of late, 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 recreation collector, new in field and the whole lot!
A possibility like this wasn’t one to be wasted, so Luis documented the unboxing course of with a collection of candy snaps in a protracted BlueSky thread. We imagined that such a distinct segment add-on can be exactly the type of factor that you just beautiful lot wish to try, so we have now gathered collectively a choice of Luis’ pictures (made publicly accessible through Web Archive) and laid them out for you beneath.
We’ll begin off with the field itself:
Subsequent, onto the center. The field contained two pages of official Nintendo documentation written in Japanese (clearly). Luis shared the unique on BlueSky, however consumer Cheesemeister supplied the next translation:
The Dev Package itself appeared wrapped in plastic beneath a cardboard lid. Right here it’s snapped from all angles:
Earlier than we get onto the peripheral all stacked up correctly, this is a better have a look at the opposite objects included within the transport field — unused improvement disks and labels, an N64 cart, and two cart adapters ‘N64JOINT-01’ and ‘NUS DCC-00’:
And if you compile all these items collectively, you get this almighty stack:
It is fairly the looker, eh? If you wish to learn all in regards to the historical past behind this notorious Nintendo flop, our sister website, 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 function beneath.
