What was the Famicom Disk System?

Released in Japan on February 21, 1986 at 15,000 yen, and sold nowhere else but a limited Hong Kong run, the Famicom Disk System is a drive that sits beneath the Famicom. A RAM Adapter cartridge in the console's slot connects the two. Games came on proprietary Disk Cards, bright yellow or blue floppies based on Mitsumi's Quick Disk format, holding about 112 kilobytes across two sides: small now, but larger than the cartridges of 1986, and the hardware added an extra, richer sound channel that disk games used for their music.

The radical part was the shop. At Disk Writer kiosks in toy and game stores, you could bring a disk in and have a completely new game written onto it for 500 yen, against 2,600 yen for a new retail disk; blank disks cost 2,000 yen. A disk was not a purchase, it was a subscription to whatever you wanted next. The service outlived the hardware by years: Disk Writer rewriting ran until 2003.

In 1987 Nintendo added Disk Fax kiosks, where players uploaded high scores from special blue disks into nationwide contests, with prizes for the leaders: an online leaderboard, built a decade before most homes had the internet, out of floppy disks and shop counters.