Brief History of the Famicon Disk System

We are back with Classic Fries! Every Saturday, we will pull something from The Museum and reprint it for those to enjoy! This gives those a chance who never got a chance to read it the first time a second chance, since the Museum itself is so large and its hard for anyone to decide where to begin.

Today, we will, once again, be digging from the archives of 2D Gaming Central! Today, we are randomly taking a look at a another piece in video game history... The Famicon Disk System! Quite a rarity!

Enjoy!

Nintendo's answer was the Famicom Disk System. They used much cheaper floppy disks. These disks could store up to 68k of storage. At the time, this was much greater than the Famicom games released in 1984.

The gimmick behind the Famicom Disk System is that for only 500 yen, consumers could take their FDS-formatted Floppy Disks and download a game to the disk at the store through a Famicom Disk Writer.

At any time, they could change the game they had on the disk as long as the disk still worked. This allowed gamers to save their progress on the disk, as well.

The Famicom Disk System had sold 2 million units.

The game selection that was available were actually very good. Some of the games that were available for the Famicom Disk System were Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Super Mario Brothers 2 (Japan version).

However, cartridges began to evolve. The storage capacity of cartridges had literally doubled within a year after the launch of the Famicom Disk System. They even developed battery back-up allowing players to save their progress. So the Famicom Disk System never saw the light of day outside of Japan. Nintendo converted the Famicom Disk System games to cartridge format consumers outside of Japan.

Although there weren't many games available for teh system, the ones that were available were excellent. Despite the Famicom Disk System going under, FDS owners can still send their disk along with 500 yen to Nintendo of Japan and ask them to copy a game for them. This is a great piece of video game history