ĭiskun, the official mascot of the Famicom Disk System.Ĭoinciding with the Disk System's release, Nintendo installed several "Disk Writer" kiosks in various toy and electronic stores across the country. Nintendo remained confident the Disk System would be a sure-fire success, and ensured that all future first-party releases would be exclusive to the peripheral. The Famicom Disk System sold over 300,000 units within three months, jumping to over 2 million by the end of the year. Marketing material for the Disk System featured a yellow mascot character named Diskun, or Mr. The same day, Nintendo released The Legend of Zelda as a launch title, alongside disk re-releases of earlier Famicom games. Following several delays, the Famicom Disk System was released on February 21, 1986, at a retail price of ¥15000 (US$80). The add-on itself was produced by Masayuki Uemura and Nintendo Research & Development 2, the same team that designed the Famicom itself. The Disk Card format presented a number of advantages over cartridges, such as increased storage capacity that allowed for larger games, additional sound channels, and the ability to save player progress. įor its proprietary diskette platform, which they dubbed the "Disk Card", Nintendo chose to base it on Mitsumi's Quick Disk media format, a cheaper alternative to floppy disks for Japanese home computers. Seeing its potential, Nintendo began work on a disk-based peripheral for the Famicom. Floppy disks were cheap to produce and rewritable, allowing games to be easily produced during the manufacturing process. It turned towards the home computer market for inspiration Nintendo specifically looked to floppy disks which were quickly becoming the standard for storage media for personal computers. To satisfy these requests, Nintendo began thinking of ways to potentially lower the cost of games. Chip shortages also created supply issues. Retailers also requested for cheaper games the cost of chips and semiconductors made cartridges expensive to make, and often cost a lot of money for both stores and consumers to purchase. Because of its success, the company had difficulty with keeping up demand for new stock, often getting flooded with calls from retailers asking for more systems.
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Its final game was released in 1992, its software was discontinued in 2003, and Nintendo officially discontinued its technical support in 2007.īy 1985, Nintendo's Family Computer was dominating the Japanese home video game market, selling over three million units within a year and a half.
The Disk System's lifetime sales reached 4.4 million units by 1990. 2, and nationwide leaderboards and contests via the in-store Disk Fax kiosks, which are considered to be forerunners of today's online achievement and distribution systems.īy 1989, the Famicom Disk System was inevitably obsoleted by the improving semiconductor technology of game cartridges. This includes the vast, open world, progress-saving adventures of the best-selling The Legend of Zelda (1986) and Metroid (1986), games with a cost-effective and swift release such as the best-selling Super Mario Bros.
However, this boost to the market of affordable and writable mass storage temporarily served as an enabling technology for the creation of new types of video games. It uses proprietary floppy disks called "Disk Cards" for cheaper data storage and it adds a new high-fidelity sound channel for supporting Disk System games.įundamentally, the Disk System serves simply to enhance some aspects already inherent to the base Famicom system, with better sound and cheaper games-though with the disadvantages of high initial price, slow speed, and lower reliability. The Family Computer Disk System, commonly shortened to the Famicom Disk System, or just Disk System, is a peripheral for Nintendo's Family Computer home video game console, released only in Japan on February 21, 1986. 1 extra channel of wavetable synth facilitated by Ricoh 2C33
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