Within its budding online strategy, Nintendo reportedly considered multiplayer online gaming to be of the highest priority, even above that of web browsing. The company also explored the forging of an early online strategy with Netscape, whose founding management had recently come directly from SGI, the company which had designed the core Nintendo 64 hardware.
By attaching a DD to the game console, we can drastically increase the number of possible genres." įurther information on the Nintendo 64's alternate storage strategies and the optimizations involved with cartridges: Nintendo 64 Game Pak We could get an eight-speed CD-ROM mechanism in the unit, but in the under-$200 console market, it would be hard to pull that off." : 66 Describing the final choice of proprietary floppy disks instead of CD-ROM, Nintendo game designer Shigesato Itoi explained, "CD holds a lot of data, DD holds a moderate amount of data and backs the data up, and ROMs hold the least data and process the fastest.
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In consideration of the 64DD's actual launch price equivalent of about US$90, Nintendo software engineering manager Jim Merrick warned, "We're very sensitive to the cost of the console. When that happens, you'll see Nintendo using CD as the software storage medium for our 64-bit system." : 77
But eventually, these problems with CDs will be overcome. So, we'll introduce our new hardware with cartridges. A Nintendo spokesperson said in 1993 that "it could be a cartridge system, a CD system, or both, or something not ever used before." In 1994, Howard Lincoln, chairman of Nintendo of America said, "Right now, cartridges offer faster access time and more speed of movement and characters than CDs. With the 1993 announcement of its new Project Reality console, Nintendo explored options for data storage. IGN summarized the 64DD as "an appealing creativity package" which was "targeted at a certain type of user" that "delivered a well-designed user-driven experience"-and as a "limited online experiment at the same time", which partially fulfilled Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi's "longtime dream of a network that connects Nintendo consoles all across the nation". Most games once planned for 64DD were released as standard Nintendo 64 games, ported to other consoles such as the GameCube, or canceled. It was a commercial failure, with at least 15,000 total units being sold, and was never released outside Japan. Only ten pieces of software were released until the unit was discontinued in February 2001, with 15,000 Randnet subscribers at the time. Describing it as "the first writable bulk data storage device for a modern video game console", Nintendo designed the 64DD as an enabling technology platform for the development of new genres of games and applications, dozens of which were in development for several years. The system could connect to the Internet through a dedicated online service, Randnet, for e-commerce, online gaming, and media sharing. Its games and hardware accessories let the user create movies, characters, and animations to use within various other games and shared online. Plugging into the extension port on the underside of the console, the 64DD allows the Nintendo 64 to use proprietary 64MB magnetic disks for expanded and rewritable data storage, a real-time clock for persistent game world design, and a standard font and audio library for further storage efficiency. The "64" references both the Nintendo 64 console and the 64MB storage capacity of the disks, and "DD" is short for "disk drive" or "dynamic drive". It was announced in 1995, prior to the Nintendo 64's 1996 launch, and after numerous delays was released in Japan on December 13, 1999. The 64DD is a magnetic floppy disk drive peripheral for the Nintendo 64 game console developed by Nintendo. n64/64dd.html at the Wayback Machine (archived ).
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