Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 359: Famicom Disk System

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

Jeremy Parish sloooowly loads input from Chris Kohler and Kurt Kalata to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Nintendo's Famicom Disk System, the most important console expansion never to have made its way to America. Cover art by John Pading. Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

Good news. You're listening to Retronauts, a part of the Greenlit Podcast Network. To check out the dozens of other great shows on the network, or to join our growing podcast family, check out Greenlitpodcasts.com. This weekend, Retronauts, tighten your belt, boyos. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Retronauts. Please insert Discside B. We're back. Now we can load the game because we're on side B. This is the Famicom Disc System 35th anniversary. A Lollapalooza, Hubble Blue, I don't know.

Whatever it is, we're celebrating 35 years of the one of the greatest or at least most significant video game peripheral add-ons of all time. I think, you know, there's a conversation to be had here about whether the PC engine CD-ROM 2, or CD-ROM CD-ROM. What is it called? CD-ROM. Yeah, that's it. CD-ROM. Yeah, CD-ROM. Or the Sega CD is a, you know, a more effective, better use of the peripheral expansion concept. But the Famicom Disc System is right up there. And in terms of sort of groundbreaking and long-running franchises and concepts that, you know, debuted on that system, it's really, or that expansion, it's really, really hard to top the Famicom Disc System. And it's something we've never really discussed in isolation on returnouts before. We've talked about obviously the NES, and there's been a couple of episodes recently with Matt Alt and Bill Mudren about Gunpe Yokoi, and he contributed a lot, or his team contributed a lot to the Faminecom disc system. But for the device itself, this is, unless I'm, you know, being senile again and forgetting something.

And if so, Bob can definitely tweet at me and let me know. you fool because that happens a lot. I'm very forgetful these days, but I don't think this is a case where I'm being forgetful, which is good because the disc medium is so easy to erase with magnets that we've got to have some memory stored here permanently. Anyway, so that's my preamble. Who else do we have here, players two and three up on the East Coast here? Who's player two. I'm Kurt Kolata. I run Hardcore Gaming 101, and I helped put together an entire book about the Famicom Disc System. You did, and that is why you are here. That's one of the reasons you are here. Definitely the Hardcore Gaming 101 Famicom Disc System retrospective book is a huge

factor. Like when I thought, who do I want to talk about this? Your name was right up there because you worked on that very comprehensive, very excellent book. And, you know, someone who has not, to my knowledge, put together a book on the Famicom Disc System, but never then less knows it pretty well inside and out, exhaustively, an expert in all matters, including this one we have on the West Coast. Chris Kohler, editorial director at Digital Eclipse. I hope to someday read Kurt's book about the Famicom Disc System. I recommend it.

I will. And thank you for hyping me up as the inside and out expert on the Famicom Disc System, when, in fact, I definitely am not. But I have played a lot of the games. Right. And you've probably talked to people who worked on the system. I probably have, yeah. And, you know, I own at least one working one and three or four broken ones.

So that qualifies me as much as anything. That's probably about the ratio of working to broken ones that exists in the wild at this point. I actually, to put together a kind of comprehensive retrospective that'll, you know, be on My YouTube channel, I think this week, I actually acquired a new in-box Famicom disk system, but I have not plugged it in yet to see if even though it is brand new in disk, it still works. There is a really good chance that it is actually Fubar, you know, at birth. I'm pretty sure it is. I'm pretty sure like 100% it absolutely is.

Like whatever drive belt is in there has fallen apart by now. Yeah, most likely. Yeah, it's probably like dust and I'll just shake the system and it'll kind of crumble out and dust and flutter away in the wind. As will we all one day. Yes, as will we all one day. But not as soon as the Famicom Dis Systems Drive Belt. Right.

But I do have a working one that I use, you know, on a fairly regular basis, meaning, you know, a few times a year. And it was definitely refurbished for me and so far is still up and running. But it's kind of crappy looking and it didn't have a box. So that's why I had to track down the shiny new one for documentation. But anyway, that is the magic and the mystery at the Famicom Disc System. It is a very fragile peripheral that nevertheless played a big part in Nintendo's fortunes, I would say, in the kind of mid to late 80s. And even though we did not receive the Famicom Disc System over here,

there were many games that debuted on the disk system that made their way to the U.S. And some of the features of the disk system, as Nintendo was like, how can we reproduce these in, you know, in cartridge format resulted in some pretty big innovations and design changes, technology changes that, you know, had lasting impact and continued to resonate until cartridges became obsolete. So, you know, what would that be like mid, like 2005 or so or whenever DS and its little flash ROMs took over? over for the Game Boy Advance? Sure. So 20 years, 20 years there of history and importance. So good stuff. Anyway, so before we get started, let me ask each of you,

what is your own experience with the Famicum disk system? Chris, I feel like you are the person I know who has been aware of and conversant with the disc system for the longest. So I feel like you go way back as old friends. Well, let's see. I guess, well, I got a twin Famicom back in college and then was excited to find putting in a disc that the disk drive, of course, did not work. And then I finally, I think a couple of years later, got a working one.

But then I never really, I mean, I think so much of my experience with disk system games has been using emulators just because the hardware is so fuss. and it's difficult to obtain the discs and things like that. And I don't know. I think that I certainly did. I can certainly say when I moved to Japan and I was living there in 2002, 2003, I really, really wanted to at least once complete the, like, Super Mario Brothers 2 on an actual disc, which was a huge pain in the neck because some of those final levels in Mario 2 are so.

difficult or difficult to try to get through the mazes in those levels without using a strategy guide. So it was using something off of game facts to like go bit by bit through 8-4 and stuff like that and not get sent back to the beginning. And that was probably... Oh, oh, when you say Super Mario Brothers 2, you meant the Japanese one. Yeah, I mean the Japanese version. I don't be dokey-doki-doki panic. I mean Mario 2 and the yeah, sorry, the disc system, Japanese Mario 2. And that was probably the most hardcore amount of time I spent, you know, just me and an actual disc system, you know, playing a game on it, was really trying to get through

that one game at least once. And then, you know, beyond that, it's been a lot of, like, dabbling with the system itself. Of course, then I got that cool thing that's, like, the SD card reader that you plug into the RAM adapter for the Famicom to system, which, uh, really is a. is a game changer, because then you really just don't have to mess with discs at all. But I do like collecting, I mean, you know, so I mean, it's like, I like playing via emulation and or, you know, sort of modern hardware upgrades rather than using the magnetic disks themselves.

But I love collecting VAMICOM disk system stuff. I wanted to, since I was so into Squarespaceoft, you know, and their stuff, I wanted to go get all their disc system releases, which there were a great deal of, which we can get into later. But I loved the fact that for some reason, they just sort of went nuts with the packaging on all of these different things, not only Square, but all publishers, rather than simply, you know, Nintendo released all their games in very simple little disc, you know, holders with small instruction manuals and, like, small plastic cases. But it was almost like the era of big box PC games for Famicom Disc System games, because you had these sometimes big, you know, larger boxes

they'd put them in. Taito sold some of their games like Bubble Bobble in like a plastic pencil case, like a zipper pencil case type thing. They put their discs in and, you know, you saw all kinds of just wild, wild stuff. Yeah, I've got a few of those kind of extreme weirdo releases like Relics Uncoku Dinsets is, or Uncoku something or another, is it comes in like a large aluminum case, like a snap case that comes with, you know, the game in its case and then also a, like a monstrous manual, you know, a bestiary sort of thing. And then there's the three wavejack games that come with the disc system game and also a tape cassette of the music because their kind of gimmick was that they got popular idol singers of the era to, like teen idols to sing pop songs and then star in the games. So, yeah, it was definitely, you did see the Famicom, the cartridge-based system, the console, leaning more toward the culture and approaches that you saw with personal computers at the time in interesting ways with the disk system. That's something we never really got over here.

So, Kurt, how about you? What's your experience? What it prompted you to say, I must complete, put together a complete book on. the Famicom Disc Systems' life and library? I first found out about it when doing Castlevania stuff because the first two Nintendo Castlevania games started on the Famicom Disc System. And it was just messing around with emulators.

After that, you know, checking out some of the other Nintendo titles, like Dokey Dokey Panic was when everybody was talking about once people forget out what emulators were. It wasn't until I started investigating some of Canami's other library that I started really getting into it. One of the first ones I discovered was the Amonanoke. Seki, which on the cover looks like a gigantic Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom Ripoff. Yeah, I mean, we can play it.

It definitely is that. But it has a Bionda Kamido style of, like, a grappling hook. And it has really, really good music like most an anime game did, are do. So when I went to Japan about 10 years ago, I was like, I'm going to get a twin Famicom and one of those, you know, as many discs I could find. And I did find Alman Okonokiecki, and there was a, some store in Kyoto that had a junk bin full of, like basically every Famicom. game system that I wanted are they were like 500 yen each and you know they were untested but luckily all of them worked okay when I got home but when I was researching all the other games outside of the usual Canami and Nintendo stuff there wasn't a lot of material in English about

what all these games kind of were because you know you might take a gamble and something that sounded cool and just end up being like an inscrutable adventure game so at some point I was approached by Dustin Hubbert who works with the website Gaming Alexandria and he's like we want I want to do something like this. We want to investigate the entire library, but I don't have the experience with RPGs and adventure games. And I was like, you know what? I think it'd be really cool to put this resource together. So that's when we both kind of jumped in and took turds going through its library. And it was an interesting adventure because there's a lot of interesting games, but there's also a lot of garbage.

Yep, I agree. It's always fun to, you know, go to a Japanese retro shop and just browse through the disk system shelf. Because everything looks so enticing. You're like, what is this? This is interesting. It's got like, you know, a little plasticine model photos on the cover. It's got an intriguing title. What is Fire Bam? But then you actually play these games, and most of them are kind of bad. But, you know, there's still some real great stuff mixed in with the garbage. As with, you know, all 8-bit consoles, especially on the Japanese side of things. You get the good and the bad.

It's like the facts of life, except it costs anywhere between $15 and $150 a pop. So, yeah, my own experience. is kind of similar to yours, both of yours, in that probably like 10 years ago, I acquired a Famicom twin, or Twin Famicom, and was covering Tokyo Game Show and stopped at a retro shop and said, you know, I'm going to buy one of these.

And it was from Super Potato or someplace. So, of course, it worked. It had been refurbished. So I picked up Dokey Dokey Panic and a couple of other games and took it to my hotel room and plugged it in. And even though I was playing on an LCD screen with horrible lag, I was still like, wow, I'm playing the original Super Mario Brothers. That's cool. Or Super Mario Brothers, too, except it's not. And more recently, you know, when I started doing the NES works videos, I did pick up a working standalone Famicom Disc System just so I could dive into disk system stuff for review or for coverage or video recording whenever necessary. So it's, you know, my little companion.

that sits there underneath my analog NTE and just kind of occasionally gets called into service. And so far has continued to work for me, God bless it. Anyway, so that is our respective histories with the Famicom Disc System. But the history of the Famicom Disc System itself goes back, as you can probably guess based on the fact this is the 305th anniversary spectacular episode of Retronauts, goes back to February of 1986. when it launched in Japan. And, you know, I don't think Nintendo has ever necessarily said, here is why we made the Famicom Disc System. But I do think it is possible to sort of sleuth it out

and figure out why the system or the peripheral came into being. I have a few notes on the, yeah, a few notes on the document that I put together for this episode. Do you guys kind of agree with what I've put down here? The three-year fad cycle is the first. point. I might need to explain that. That's actually something Matt Alt brought up in a recent episode we recorded talking about Gunpei Yokoi. And something he's unearthed, you know, reading through Japanese documentation of Nintendo and its history, is that Nintendo Corporation

Limited President Hiroshi Yamauchi, the guy who ran the company back in the 80s and kind of oversaw the launch of the Famicom and, you know, subsequent hardware, believed that fads happened in three-year cycles. And so his belief was that something would sell well for three years, and then even the most successful thing would eventually fade away. And so, you know, I think the Famicom disk system kind of slots neatly into that cycle. The Famicom launched in July 1983. And so just slightly less than three years later, you know, kind of hedging their bets and getting ahead of the game a little bit, you have the disc system. peripheral add-on to kind of expand the capabilities and the possibilities of the disk system.

But then, you know, there are some other more reasonable and I think practical considerations as well, such as the growth of software piracy and kind of the threat of an imminent software crash for the Famicom. I don't know if either of you have done any reading about that at the time. the Famicom, not crash, but kind of a, I don't know how you describe it, but it was something that people writing in, you know, columns and magazines at the time that were saying, you know, the things aren't going so great with the Famicom. Because you did have, you know, you started to see Booleg Software appearing around this time. Nintendo didn't have a licensing plan in place when they first launched the Famicom.

That was something they built into the NES in Europe. in the U.S., but it was something they kind of had to retrofit into the Japanese market. And so, you know, the disk system was a way to do that. It was a way to kind of say, hey, you know, this is where the future of the Famicom is. If you want to make games for the future, you need to kind of play by our rules. You want to get in on this shiny new expansion that everyone's going to be playing, and it's going to be the home of all the really great games. So it was a, you know, kind of a tactical approach that way.

But also, you know, in 1986, the Famicom was starting to look a little long in the tooth. You had Sega launched the Mark 3, the master system, which was, you know, a lot more impressive on a technical level than the NES. And, you know, kind of waiting in the wings, you had NEC and Hudson. I guess it was more Hudson in Japan. I don't know. It's confusing. But they were working on the PC engine that would launch in 1987. And, you know, I think it was, there was some writing on the wall that the next things were coming and that Nintendo had to kind of step it up.

And so you had the disc system. Yeah, I mean, when they were working on the disc system, you know, given the timeline here, Super Mario Brothers had not yet become a huge hit, right? I mean, Mario was September 85 in Japan. So, you know, as far as anybody knew, you know, there were no, like, massive, you know, hit games on the Famicom that were going to extend. end its life cycle so you know they're working on this thinking that this is going to be the next thing you know and this is going to be what's going to get them past um and rom games like those very early games that were that didn't have any extra hardware on the cartridges themselves to expand the capabilities of the famicom um were getting a little long in the tooth um and so they

were probably thinking that like they were going to have to move on to something new and also I mean who you know who knows like at this point it wasn't even a given that the ROM cartridge format was going to be how video games were delivered to people going on in the future because there was no, you know, there was no sense that this was definitely going to be it. So, I mean, maybe they were thinking like, oh, well, we've got to move to floppy disks because that just makes a lot more sense than this thing we were doing. More space on these things. They're cheaper.

Everybody's going to do it. We got to do it. Yeah, and the Famicom was made in 1983, and it was made pretty much to play Donkey Kong as best as possible. And there were a lot of arcade games that are like that, you know, like the decent port of stuff like Zivius, but arcade hardware was moving pretty fast. And I think they were also feeling the pressure from computer games because they were just infinitely more complex than the sort of simple arcade stuff they could do.

And I don't know if this is necessarily in the mind when they created it, but Portopia, the Famicom port of that had come out in 1985. And there was a tremendous success, but it was an adventure game where you couldn't save the game. So it kind of cut that short a little bit. Like, there were passwords, and a lot of games still continue to use passwords, but everybody hated them, especially the more complex the games got. Right. I mean, it's kind of important just to, yeah, to note, as you are, that there was no such thing as a cartridge with a save battery at this point.

You did have cartridges. There was a, the super cassette vision game, Dragon Slayer, let you put, I believe, double A batteries into the cartridge to save your game. and I think they may have done that with a Famicom game prior to this, but I mean, they had not introduced yet the now standard sort of lithium battery were going to save your games. And so it held the Famicom back. And that was sort of one of the things that was kind of find out, like, especially with Square, prior to this, you know, their whole thought, their mentality was

we make PC games that these are games for adults, you know, these are high-quality adventure games where you save your game and you know you you play multiple days weeks months the famicom just didn't support that and it was looked at as more of a toy or more something for just sort of arcade style games so it was really giving game developers the ability to create games in which you would save your game in which there was a persistence to each session of your game, that was something that the Famicom DIST system was giving to developers. And that's why I think you saw, I mean, you start seeing developers jump in with these more complex games immediately. I mean, it really was like it was a substantial upgrade to the

Famicom because in an age before Safe Batteries, it suddenly made it possible for the Famicom platform to handle these longer gameplay sessions. you saved your game. And, of course, the first Dragon Quest was a cartridge game that used passwords. And then famously, Dragon Quest 2, even after the introduction of save batteries, you know, Dragon Quest 2 still stuck with passwords, which was sort of a funny thing because, you know, sort of infamously the passwords for Dragon Quest 2 were like ridiculously long. And then eventually they gave up after that as well.

And they switched to batteries for three and thereafter. Yeah, and the idea of the Yeah, and the idea of the concept of a, a console peripheral that expanded its capabilities had been around for a long time. You had, you know, the StarPath Supercharger for Atari 2,600, and both the Colico Vision and the Sega SG-1000, and in fact, the Famicom itself had launched with the, you know, kind of this view in mind of this is a console, but you can turn it into a computer by buying, you know, add-ons, like a keyboard and a tape cassette drive and so on and so forth, a printer in the case of the

Cleco Adam, that would basically turn it into something new and different, like a fully featured home computer. But I feel like the Famicomdisc system is the first time there had been an opportunity for a console maker to sort of take stock of what had come before, like the previous generation, you know, the older approach to building on consoles and say, you know, there's a leaner, more efficient way to expand the capabilities of the hardware. And it doesn't have to be a full-fledged computer. It doesn't have to be, you know, this thing that's going to take up your whole living room. It can be something that sits tidily underneath your console and, you know, is kind of this compact unit, but still extends the, the capabilities and the value of your console without causing you, you know, without requiring you to pay a full price to buy a brand new console.

It's like, you know, still not cheap. It wasn't, you know, it was more expensive than buying a game, but it was less expensive than buying a brand. new console. And, you know, in that sense, the, the disk system really does kind of represent a like a second generation approach to console expansion capabilities. And as such, you know, it still isn't perfect for sure, but it does kind of sidestep a lot of the issues and problems that it happened with, you know, previous attempts, we saw in previous attempts, and at the same time gets a lot of things right. The disc system. system, as you kind of hinted at, it had a much higher storage capacity than cartridges at

the time. The base cartridges, I think, were like maxing out at 32K. And the disk system, I want to say it was like 800K. Is that right? Maybe it's a little under 64K aside, I think. So it's 128K. I'm extremely wrong. Okay. So 128K. But that's still, you know, that's still four times the size of Super Mario Brothers. So that immediately gives you. you a lot more flexibility, you know, really cuts a bottleneck in terms of what the system can do. It added an extra sound channel. It added, did it add more RAM? There is, you know, the device that connects into the system is called the RAM adapter. And I've never really been clear on that. Oh, yeah, it has to have more RAM because I don't know how much RAM the Famicom has,

but it's like a trivial amount. That's like a lot of the memory macrop chips. Those are like how they address the ROM parts and stick them into memory and be able to manage all that because it can't address very much at the same time. So it has to load a decent chunk of the disk into the memory. Otherwise, it would be constantly loading and loading and loading, which... I've played Relics. You can still see in a couple of badly programmed games like Relics. I mean, it's basically fooling the Famicom into thinking that it's a cartridge, right?

I mean, there's like, as far as I know, there's like PRG, RAM and CHR. So it's basically just sort of loading that the data into RAM and then the Famicom just thinks it's running a cartridge. And then, you know, later it just replaces it with more data and the Famicom just, you know, keeps running it. Oblivious to the fact that it's running off a disk. It's not really running off a disk. It's like stored on a disk, but then they move it to the chips and the RAM adapter and that's what it's running off of. Right. Yeah, that makes sense that the disk system kind of spoofs being a cartridge and talks to the NIA,

to the Famicom in its own language. But at the same time, it adds that extra sound channel. It adds the ability to write back to the storage medium. So you're not just reading the disc. You're also writing. And obviously, that could be used for save files. And there was, you know, a very key title released at the disk systems launch, The Legend of Zelda, that took advantage of that.

But there were other opportunities that the disc system opened up, you know, if you were creative. I'm not sure exactly what those were off. top of my head, but I feel like Otoki was one of those games that kind of, you know, took that hardware and did something really fun and different with it. There are a couple of interesting, there is, this is maybe getting ahead of ourselves, the Santa Claus Takarabako, which isn't really a game. It was meant to be something that you would buy and you would put a personalized little message into it and then give it a friend.

So it was like a virtual Christmas card. basically, and with a couple of really small mini-games that were kind of trivial. I can't think of too many other things. There was, um, I mean, was it Dori Miko? I think it was some sort of music program that Canami made, but I don't remember how it worked. I was going to say certainly when you think about the, um, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, uh, that usually had contests attached to them. The idea that you would save your score or your performance in a certain game and then be able to take that disc, uh, in and have somebody read that at the store and then send that information to Nintendo as part

of a high score contest was certainly enabled by this. Yeah, the difference in media color is interesting because you'll pick up used Famicom Disc System games and most of them are yellow, but sometimes you come across the blue discs and there doesn't seem to be any relative rarity or scarcity of those. There's no, you know, like collector's value attached to them that I'm aware of. but nevertheless, you know, it is, it is kind of surprising. Sometimes it's like, oh, wow, my Zelda 2 is blue, and I don't know why. Yeah, the blue ones are slightly, well, they have, well, first of all, they're slightly better physically because they actually have shutters on them and the magnetic disc is not just exposed.

But they, I think that specifically those have, I'm talking out of my butt here and I apologize. And Kurt, maybe you know a little bit better, but they're, they are slightly upgraded. to be used for these games that had contests attached to them or had the possibility of being able to send your data to Nintendo. I think they may have, I don't know if they're larger. I don't know if they're split in a different way where there's a certain sector that holds that data. But I do know that like the blue disc games,

the games that came on those blue discs, like you couldn't write those games to a yellow disc, but you could write whatever you wanted to a blue disc. So they weren't like backward compatible. I don't think there's any extra like space differentials, But yeah, I think they were just made for those specific purposes. Yeah. So the actual physical media of the Famicom Disc system is a, it's called a quick disk, which I believe was a technology created by Sharp, who had a kind of ongoing relationship with Nintendo, you know, Masuuki, would. Murah, who designed the NES, the Famicom, came to Nintendo from Sharp, and Sharp created

the twin Famicom for like a licensing thing. But Nintendo also used Sharp's quick disk format, which is basically, you know, kind of like a three and a half inch disk, but slightly smaller and lower capacity. But it's magnetic media. You plug it into the disk drive, and you can hear the motor whirring, you get the chunk of the, the chunk of the, the, the disc being inserted and kind of lowering into the drive. It's a very physical kind of visceral experience compared to, you know, modern consoles where you just insert a CD-ROM and it sort of disappears quietly. It's nothing like that.

It is much more of like a, there's a little bit of labor attached to it. You have to eject the disc. You have to press a lever and it causes it to pop out slightly and flip it over, insert it back in. I don't know. There's something very satisfying about it to me, but... I like the sort of clickety-clack noises. It's very charming, but at the same time, it gives me anxiety because I'm like,

is this the game that's going to destroy my poor belt? Yeah. So the hard drive, the disc drive is powered by a very flimsy and easily destroyed, like, rubber belt inside. And that is, you know, key to... The Achilles heel of the Femicom disc system is the Crap-O belt. There's always this one stress point with the Nintendo device. Like one thing that is just like everything else is so good and you guys blew it on this.

And in the case of the system, it is the belt. And at some point, every belt just turns, like I said, into dust and wafts away in the breeze or I don't know, gums up the inside of the system. And you'd think that you would just, oh, I'll just buy a new belt, open it up, pop the belt on, done. but you can't because you then have to make minute adjustments to the speed of the drive and the speed of the belt to get it to work properly. And that's where sort of amateur would be DIY repairers of a Famicomidist system run into serious problems. It does actually require a level of like near professional knowledge to be able to do it. So that's why there's people that do it.

But it's, you can't just do it at an afternoon if you've never done it before, basically. Yeah, it's definitely one of those things. If you want a Famicom disk system to continue to work and to work well, it's worth investing the money and having someone who knows what the hell they're doing to look at it and refurbish it for you. It's just so fussy on its own. And, you know, that's very different than Nintendo cartridge consoles. I mean, you did have the bent pins on the American NES, or at least the first model,

which is also kind of an unusual stress point, fail point for an Nintendo console. But generally, with a cartridge, you stick it in. If your contacts are clean, it's just going to work. But on the disk system, there are so many errors that you can experience. There's just like this bounty. Every time you play a game, and I've already seen some of these errors on my system. And none of them seem to be like, hey, your belt is dead. but you know you'll be playing something and then all of a sudden you'll just get a little black

screen it says like error code whatever it gives you some uh some hex code that you have to look up online and say oh well that means the disc is bad or oh that means the belt speed is wrong or whatever and you never know you just never know there is there is kind of like that insert the disc and offer a small prayer that your game will work correctly and you know if you were in Japan, you know, not only during the diss system's life, but for quite a while thereafter, Nintendo would repair the disc system for you for either free or a nominal fee. It went on for a long time. The fact, I know about what it was like 2003, 2002, 2003, when they finally said, we're not going to be, hey, we're not repairing this systems anymore, so get them in now.

And, you know, what was funny was after that happened, so I was living, um, in Kyoto at the time. And after Nintendo said, oh, yeah, we're not going to repair disk systems anymore. I remember reading about that. I was like, oh, wow. Suddenly, in stores in Osaka, like Super Potato and Game Tontadon and stuff like that,

mysteriously, a whole bunch of brand new in box, first-party disc system stuff started appearing. And you could just buy brand-new copies of Zelda and Mario 2 and things like that. And they just started appearing in all these shops. And I think that was probably, you know, somehow Nintendo divesting itself of its holdings in this system stuff finally in 2003 and getting rid of it through some method. That would make sense. But yeah, that was that was pretty late because I was already working at Oneup.com by the time that was announced.

So that would have been at the very earliest, the latter half of 2003. So they continue supporting that. thing for quite a while, which is, which is admirable. Yeah, and it went in tandem with the fact that you could, I mean, this is all sort of around the same time, but I believe it was 2004 that they finally pulled the AV Famicom, the final version of the family computer, and they finally stopped manufacturing that. So up until 2003, 2004, you could get your disk system repaired by Nintendo, and you could go into a store and buy a brand new Famicom that they were still making.

That's just so... Then they finally shut it all that. Yeah, that's just hard to imagine. That would be the equivalent now of walking into a store and buying a PlayStation 1 new inbox. I guess a PS1. It would be the redesigned version of it, but still, you know, a 20-year-old system. Well, I guess PlayStation is 25 now. So it would be the equivalent to buying a brand new Xbox or GameCube.

Right. PS2. Anyway, the point is, they supported that thing for a long damn time. They did. And the disc writer kiosk gave the, uh, the disc system a lot of additional legs. You know, even, even though the, uh, the actual life of the disc system as a viable platform wasn't that long. it was also kind of in that three-year trend cycle, the fad cycle. But even after, you know, Nintendo kind of lost interest in it in the 1988, 89, it was still a viable thing that continued

going forward. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that, you know, for what, 500 yen or whatever, five bucks, however much it was, you could buy a, or I guess maybe the discs, the rewritable discs themselves were a little more expensive, but you could buy one of these and take it to Lawson's or some other convenience store and plug it into a kiosk that they had there and you had your choice of games. You could write a game to the front of the disc and to the back of the disc, you know, for, you know, a few bucks. Well, I think you're, you're confusing and I think a little bit with the later Nintendo Power Systems where you could buy, you know, you just bought a blank Super Famicom cartridge and you put it in the kiosk. With the disc writer, A, I don't

think you could buy blank discs. Oh, yeah. You did have to pay a fee for, yeah, it wasn't like you just go out and just like buy a pack of discs and get them written. You had to go to the store and the disc writer kiosk would be behind the counter and you would say, okay, I want to get such and such a game. I don't have a disc. They'd say, okay, they'd take a blank disc, put the game on it and then sell you that for 2,000 yen for the disc plus 500 yen for the game. And then you could take back your old discs and get them rewritten, but you could never

just simply buy blank discs. You always had to get it either where you were by. you're getting your old disc, rewritten, you're buying a new disc with the game on it. And it was all done by the store. It was not a self-service kiosk. Ah, I did not realize that. Okay, thank you for clarifying. As I was not a child in Japan, living in Japan in the late 80s and early 90s, I did not realize that.

I forget offhand. I think there was one specific game that was sold so cheaply that, like, that was the game that people recommended you buy. Oh, like you bought a really cheap. Just to get a disc, basically? Yeah, like the retail price was very low for it, but I forget what game it was. I see, I see. Oh, I see.

So basically, rather than buy a blank disc and get your game written on it, you go out and buy this crappy game that is cheaper than buying a blank disc and then get it rewritten. Yeah. And, you know, in some games, even, they only took up one side of the disc in the first place. So if you bought, I forget what game, but like, well, it was Super Mario Brothers. It's very easy one. Super Mario Brothers, too. If you buy Mario 2, that's just one side of the disc. So now you've got another side of the disk to load up with whatever you want.

So even if you didn't want to rewrite your old games, sometimes you would find yourself with free disk space and you can go buy a game for 500 yen. Yeah, when Nintendo launched the disk system, they put a bunch of the older kind of black box NES games, you know, those equivalents out as discs. So you had stuff like Mahjong, baseball, tennis, soccer, that sort of thing. Like these 1983, 84 vintage sports games and all of those fit on. to a single disk side. So it's pretty uncommon to find a, you know, one of those games in the original packaging and for it not to have something on the backside. This actually explains a lot to me. I didn't realize that's quite how it works, but, you know, I picked up all the, the Famicom Disc System launch titles, and that includes all those sports games and Mahjong and so forth,

and pretty much all of them have something on the backside. And I was like, that's weird because, like, these are clearly the retail releases, but then there's all. this other game on the back, and that, you know, now I get it. Thank you. I'm learning so much from retronauts. Um, yeah, and I mean, you know, typically you, it's very, very often, you'll find Super Mario Bros. 2 and then Mario 1 will be on the other side of that. Now, of course, what, um, it's very, very difficult to find a lot of these, these games, you know, like, um, not Mario 1, Mario 1 was not Disc Writer only. You could buy that in a package, but, uh, you know, some of those games like Donkey Kong and stuff like that that were never sold in packages.

that were disc writer exclusives, they would give you an instruction sheet with it, you know, when you bought it. And so it is very, very hard to find a lot of these, especially to find it written on a disc with the sticker that they would put on because, of course, the guy behind the counter would write your disc and then take a sticker off a roll and pop that sticker on it and then give you the instruction sheet. And it can be very, very difficult to find a lot of those.

Of course, there were some games that were difficult to find that, you know, in recent years, suddenly became very, very easy to find. And that's probably because, you know, somebody, you know, collectors in Japan have got the ability to write to these discs, and they've gotten new old stock rolls of stickers. And so, yeah, I mean, that's like, you know, the Square game, Square's last two games were disc writer exclusives. One was Moonball Magic, which was a pinball game. And there was Akku Senki Raijin, which was a shun.

shooter and those were like you never ever ever ever ever saw them and now you can just get one every day um not the instruction sheets but the disc with the sticker on it and i bet you that that's somebody's just cranking them out basically but then the question becomes oh you know from a collector's standpoint is that is that the same thing as something that somebody made in 1988 if it's the same stickers and the same discs and yeah it's a whole thing yeah this is like the the ship of theseus paradox in a totally new way yep yeah it's all also an issue with secondhand stuff is that the label of the disc you purchase may not have the game that's actually written on the disc.

Of course. There is always that, yes. I have one of those, and I can't remember what it was, but I popped it in and I was like, okay, cool, I want to play this. And whatever came up was definitely not what I wanted to play. One of the games I did get off, one of the more reputable sellers on eBay, was supposed to be Moira Twinby, which is Stinger in the U.S. And when I put it in, it was something completely different, I think one of the Super Robot Wars games.

And I thought it was going to be legitimate because it had like the manual and it had the official cover with it. But somebody just overwrote it and never put a sticker on it. But the seller was a good guy. He just sent me a replacement that actually had the real game on it. Oh, props to him. The award-winning Go-Nintendo podcast is the best place to get the latest news on the world of Nintendo. We cover the biggest stories, share impressions of the latest games, and answer your burning questions. There's also some general pop culture talk, game music trivia, a heaping helping of silly

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a weekly podcast where myself and two of my very best gaming chums are counting down our top 100 favorite video games of all time. For all the episodes and information, check out our website, www.org.com. Hey guys, you know what's better than video games and beer? Chat videos? B. Arthur? Incorrect? Nothing! The answer is absolutely nothing!

All right, all right. You know, actually? I do think you're right. Agreed. We're here of the dogcast. We podcast about video games and beer. And beer and video games! Available weekly on the Greenlit Podcast Network. Be Arthur. Yes. So going back to February 1986 It's worth mentioning that when Nintendo launched the Famicom Disc system,

that was pretty much what they saw as the future of the platform, to the point that, I don't know, Kurt, did you add this or maybe Chris to the notes? Oh, this was me to the notes, yeah. Yeah, it's a great point. They, they basically committed completely and wholly to the disk system. Not only did they, you know, republish their sort of early sports and so on games, you know, those old Enron games, in ROM games, not Enron, you know, for a lower price. But, you know, that was where the Legend of Zelda made its debut at launch. And that was kind of Nintendo saying, this is it. This is our way forward. And yeah, just about everything they published for the next two and a half years was in fact on the

disc system. Yeah, I mean, as far as I can tell, it's not even like just about. It's like for a two-year period, they did not release any cartridge games on the Famicom. And everything that they had done was those N-ROM games, was very early games that didn't have any sort of extra stuff on the boards. and then they stopped that and then because they'd always talked about Super Mario Brothers one as being like the the ultimate Enrom game like you know we squeezed that's much out of this tiny little

chip as we possibly could but yeah when we talk about the Famicom Disc system I think being such a successful or such a content rich environment for a for an add on to a game console this is the imagine if Sega brought out the Sega CD and then

stopped making Genesis games just stopped everything was on Sega CD after the Sega CD came out I'm actually that with the 32X you know it's that's that's essentially what that is exactly what happened here they were like that cartridge is done disc is the future and we are totally fully committing to this they released mock writer in November 85 did not put out another cartridge game as far as I can tell until Mike Tyson's punch out in November 87 everything everything was discs. And even Mike Tyson's punchout was a weird that almost doesn't count because Mike Tyson's punchout on the Famicom was a port back

of the US NES game. And so it had to be cartridge. Yeah, well, actually didn't they release the gold disc version of that? So there was a disc version of Mike Tyson's punchout or just punch out. No, you're thinking of the gold cartridge version of that. Oh, it's a gold cartridge. So punch out, yeah, so punch out originally. And it does tie back to the game system. So we're in this system, we were talking about the contests. So if you

were one of the high scorers in golf for the, one of the golf games for the Famicom DeSystems, what you could win was the gold cartridge punchout, which was not Mike Tyson's punchout, it was just punchout, and it ended with super macho man. And then

that came out in Japan, only as a contest prize. Then they did Mike Tyson's punch out in the U.S. adding in Mike Tyson, then they ported it back to the Famicom. But it was weird that that game came out on cartridge because at that point, but then again, it did come out very late in 87, And at that point, I think they realized that, in fact,

Famicom this system was not the future. Because what had happened very, very quickly, I mean, certainly what happened was 128K cartridges started coming out and started, the price started going down. And of course, they ran into this problem that we now understand is a big problem. But at the time, nobody would have known this because it would have required a lot of foresight, that you split your user base when you do something like this. So now you have the people who own a Famicom, but only some of them own a disc system,

so only some of them can play your games. And so it makes much more sense to actually simply address the cartridge owning market, especially when, oops, you can add more ROM chips to a cartridge to make them bigger, but you can't add more magnetic material to the disc to make it fit more stuff on it. Right. You can do multiple disks, but that's not... You can do multiple disks, and they did, and they did. But that's a pain in the ass. Right. And then you end up with like insert disk 21 or disk 27, whichever it is.

But yeah, yeah. So, you know, I think to me kind of there were a couple of death blows for the disk system. And the first really big one was the debut of the MMC1 memory mapper, which as far as I can tell, launched in April 1987 in Japan. And then would, you know, a few months later, that would be the device that hosted Metroid and Kid Icarus. and the legend of Zelda in the U.S. And, you know, all of those games debuted on the disk system, but here was a cartridge that could more or less replicate their features. You know, Metroid and Kidacarus both had passwords instead of battery back saves

or, you know, instead of being able to write to the disc. But Zelda came with a battery. It had a lithium battery and volatile RAM built into it, which is a feature that I recently read that World Series Baseball and Intellivision had that back in 1982. as an option for saving stats and stuff. I don't know. I can't seem to find a lot of firm info for that beyond Wikipedia.

So it's kind of like, do I trust this? But in any case, the idea was still not very common at the time. And it was a pretty big innovation to say, hey, there's this big plastic shell that we've stuck our game into. And you could put anything in there. It could be whatever you want. Why not a battery? And so all of a sudden, you know,

know, the memory capacity and storage ability of the disk system became redundant. Like, you could do that with the NES, with a cartridge. And, of course, the NES cartridges were more expensive than disc system games, but, you know, there was really no reason for them to bring the disc system over to the U.S. when they could do that with cartridges. And, you know, you tended to see battery backup the most in Nintendo first party games because they had the kind of home field advantage. they were making their own cartridges.

There was no licensing fee paid to Nintendo by Nintendo. So, you know, you did see some third-party games with batteries, but they tended to be really expensive. But, you know, Nintendo didn't really care so much about what was happening to third parties as long as they were paying their licensing fees, whatever. Right. And, you know, not only, like, was it not really necessary to bring Famicom disk system over to the U.S. or Europe or other countries, it would have been a nightmare. I mean, in Japan, if you think about it, right? I mean, everybody, you know, so many people in Japan are sort of located next to, you know, everybody's like geographically packed together, lots of pedestrian foot traffic, whatever, very easy to, like, go buy a disc and take it to your local store and get it written. You can service all of Japan with disc writers very, very easily, you know, you just get a bunch of, I mean, and it was a big expense, right?

I mean, they had to, it was like 10,000 disc writers or something, but, I mean, you could do that, and you could pretty much make it so that anybody in Japan was close-ish enough to a disc writer that they could go and get new games written, you know, people took really good care of their stuff and things like that. You know, in the U.S., I mean, first of all, how could you possibly, you know, put disc writers all over the United States? These things, I mean, the disks are going to get left by magnets, you know, they're going to get soda port all over them, the drive belt. I mean, it would have been a huge logistical nightmare to try to roll that out anywhere, I think, but Japan. And so I think the success of the NES around the world, which, of course, started having. happening. I mean, everything was happening all at once. You know, Super Mario Brothers comes out in September 85 makes the Famicom a lot more successful. Disc system comes out early 86. NES is getting

test marketed late 85, early 86, 86, 87, 88, the NES becomes hugely popular worldwide. And so why would you even, it's like, okay, yes, well, we were able to take our disc system games and port them to cartridge to sell them worldwide, but like, why wouldn't we just go back to cartridges all over the world? Why don't we just make one version of the game instead of having to do these regional variants? And then, of course, they're investing in all of this technology because the cartridges, since it's all they have in the U.S. and Europe, those have got to get better. So they're doing stuff like the MMC1. Then they start doing even more stuff. You're going to want to import that back. And it just very quickly, in the span of two years, I think,

the huge success of the base model cartridge-based NES everywhere in the world except for Japan pretty much meant that they were going to have to give up on the idea of doing floppy disks and they were pretty much going to have to retreat back to doing everything on cartridges. Look, that's another reason, I think. Yeah, it's funny. The experience of having a cartridge with volatile memory is actually a better experience, you know, saving to Zelda on NES is, more seamless. It's, it's less time consuming than on disk system. Because on disk system,

you have to like flip the disc, you have to, wait for the belt to circle and rotate. And then it finally is done and you flip it back to the A side. It's just, you know, it's, it's a pain of the ass compared to on NES where you have to remember to hold in the reset button on your console when you turn it off. That's it. That's, that's the overhead. Um, right. But yeah, I interviewed Masayuki Uremura like five years ago about the NES, and he said, you know, from the very start, he designed the console to be extensible through software. You know, the idea of memory mappers and cartridges was something that was already, you know, it was baked into the concept of the console from the beginning. And it just seems like the disk system kind of just was Nintendo getting ahead of themselves. Like, there is this potential here, but instead of waiting just a few months more, they jumped

the gun and created this entire other ecosystem. And I realized there were reasons for that that we kind of discussed at the beginning. But still, like, you know, I think it was inevitable that the NES would eventually, you know, the Famicom, the cartridges would eventually outstrip the capabilities of the disc system. And you had that when they finally launched the EMC 3 chip. and to me the real death blow for the disc system was Super Mario Brothers 3 in October of 1988 in Japan because that was an MMC 3 based chip and it could just do so much more than the disc system.

And you had, you know, Mario and Super Mario Brothers or Super Mario Brothers and Super Mario Brothers 2 both present on the disc system, but there was no way the disc system was going to be able to handle Mario 3. So at that point, it was really kind of obvious that even Nintendo had kind of had kind have had to leave the disk system behind. They did continue to make disk system games. But, you know, after Super Mario Brothers 3, if you look at the list of games Nintendo published on disk system, they tend to be more like, hey, we're going back to the

Black Box Well, we're going to make some really simple games, some really easy things. Like, you know, the Mario Brothers remake, it's classic Mario Brothers in Europe, and I can never remember the Japanese word for it, but it's Mario Brothers Returns. Yes, Kayetak. I can't even say it. That is like, that word alludes me. Anyway. Well, yeah.

So, I mean, you see essentially two things happen. Yes. One, the retreat back to cartridges for all the major games. And then two, multi-disc adventure games, which, you know, which required, A, required saving and B, just, you know, I mean, it was, it was like the graphical text adventure games. They just kept those up on the disc system. Probably, again, because the disc. the disc system sort of turned the Famicom into a sort of Ersatz computer, personal computer games.

And so the medium sort of becomes the message. And so you have these adult-oriented, you know, adventure games. And so those sort of fit with the Famicom DeS system. Also, they didn't have to worry about porting those to cartridges because there was no way they were ever going to localize any of them. So it didn't matter. And then also, and so you had those high-end multi-disc, multi-part. I mean, these were like games that came on, I think they came on two discs or they came on two discs, but in two parts that were released a month after each other kind of thing.

And then, and the other side of that was 500 yen disc writer exclusives. We're going to upgrade Mario Brothers. We're going to upgrade, you know, CluCluLand and stuff like that. Excite bike. And that was it. An excite bike versus excite bike. Yeah. Yeah.

And that is a really big factor in the success of the disk system was that it was much cheaper than cartridges, especially as cartridges grew in complexity. And that really appealed to a few third parties. And we definitely will talk about Konami and definitely talk about Square because both of them, you know, Konami was kind of all over the place, but they supported the MSX a lot. And I've, you know, had Kurt on the podcast before talking about that. And I think, you know, one of the things we kind of agree on is that Square, are that Konami really liked not having to pay license fees on MSX.

They just got to publish whatever they wanted. So they published like 100 games for MSX. But, you know, they were clearly budget-minded. And the disk system was a great opportunity for them to release games at a lower price point that still, you know, exceeded the base capabilities of the console. So they went hard on the disk system. And a lot of their kind of big games for 1987, 88, 89, actually got their start on disk system. I appreciate the Konami seemed to really like sound hardware a lot,

because they were always building in, like, extra stuff for the MSX chips and later to the Famicom chips. So a lot of the games that ended up on there, like Amla and Okiseki and Mikuji and Bababa, they really made use of the extra sound channel, which I think was, it sounds really cool, but I think really went underutilized. Yeah, and then there's Castlevania, too, which in Japanese, the Japanese version makes use of the sound hardware and sounds terrible, much worse than the American version

It's kind of weird It does But for the most part they got it right Most of the time It was just like an extra thing Like a lot of games Even Nintendo Me games They kind of just use it for sound effects

So you play Metro or to K digress And like the sound effects They're familiar on the Nintendo version Sound much different and much richer But it also made it easier to convert Because they didn't sound that much different But Casvaney 2 is really like an outlier Because when they had to reprogram it

you just tried to throw at everything, and it sounds much better. go to the store and get this from the disc kiosk release for the disc system was in April 1992, so that's more than six years after the launch of the system. That's two, that's two fad life cycles right there, six years. And that was CluClue Land D, which many people became familiar with through the original Animal Crossing when that was one of the easiest games to get as kind of like the in-game virtual console. And people were like, what is this game? What the hell is this? Yeah.

And the answer is it was basically versus CluClu land, right? But ported back to the NES hardware? I believe so, yeah. And as far as I can tell, the final licensed release in any capacity was Janken disk Joe in Famimaga Disc Volume 6, which was a print magazine that would be published, I think, quarterly. and every issue came with a free Famicom Disc System, a disc on it that had a unique game and like other stuff. It had like image galleries and articles and things like that.

That's actually where Puyo Puyo comes from. That was on Volume 5, I believe, and it debuted right around the same time within weeks of the MSX version of the game. So that is a long-running franchise that got its start in an extremely esoteric corner of the disk system's life. It's strange that they ended up on the disc system, because Compile had their own magazine called Distation,

and a lot of their games actually came from there. Like, Maddo Modugatari was the dungeon-crawling RPG, which Poipo takes its characters from. And that started as one of these small little distation games that they eventually expanded and created a standalone game. But why it ended up in the Famicom this system is very bizarre. Yeah, I mean, I couldn't explain it, but it's just one of those weird things that happened. And, you know, I'm sure at that point, publishing on disk system was so inexpensive and just like this throwaway thing.

They were like, hey, why not? Let's just do it. They had this game ready for MSX and maybe they decided it wasn't worth a retail release on Famicom NES. I really don't know. But that is one of the quirky little bits of history for the disc system. And then the final unlicensed release, I have no idea. The disc system became kind of a popular destination once people figured out how to crack the extremely complex, you know, security measures for the disc system, which consisted of basically the word Nintendo was imprinted physically on every disc and had special little holes in it.

and there was a device that when you insert the disc, it would clamp into those holes, and if it couldn't clamp down properly, then it wouldn't play. But you didn't actually have to write Nintendo on your disk. You just had to make sure the holes were in the right place. So once they defeated that extremely high-tech lockout system, the disc system became a kind of popular destination for a lot of kind of skeevy, sketchy games. Like my favorite, not that I've ever played it, but just based on the name, is Body Conquest

just because it's such a great visual pun on Dragon Quest and it is apparently like some sort of semi-pornographic RPG in the Dragon Quest mold but you know like there was there was a little bit of that kind of like Flesh Gordon kind of cleverness happening

within the the more salacious corners of bootleg Famicom Disc System software and you have to respect that. That's a very well put together package. Like I've never seen it but it has it's come to like a VHS type shell the packaging

is all based off of Dragon Quest 4 basically because it's a, even the subtitle is a parody of it. It comes on two discs, which is the only game of its type that does that. Because all the other two disc games were adventure games. And for a quasi-poor in a graphic game,

it's actually like a solid effort. And there was a whole series. That company was Hacker International was one of the names that did. They also went under other names like Super Pig as much as people can understand. People seem to think that they're the same company. Nobody knows really who they were.

But that was a series. They put out a couple other ones in the PC engine, and they were really into it for a while. Yeah, I've seen a physical copy, complete inbox of Body Conquest at, I want to say, Mandarake in Akihabara. And it was like $2,000. So, of course, who's going to buy that?

It was one of their showcase games like, oh, we have this. You're not going to actually buy it, but we have this. But, you know, just the fact that it is this, like weird little bit of Nintendo history, even if Nintendo doesn't want to take ownership of it. It is one of the more interesting, I think, kind of side notes to the to the Famicom Disc system. But, you know, what we really want to talk about is the actual library of the

disc system because, yes, the porn games are funny. The magazine free distribution games, those are interesting. But just look at all the legendary franchises that debuted on the system. I mean, obviously, day one, you had the Legend of Zelda. Never heard of it. Talking about the, compared to the Nintendo games that had gone immediately before, Super Mario Brothers mock writer, the Legend of Zelda was much bigger, much more expansive. It was designed with the idea of a continuous adventure, a game that you could save and return to and take your time with, like, you know, that was that was the concept behind it. And it's such a great realization of that.

It set the tone for action RPGs through probably at least the next two generations because it wasn't the first action RPGs. There's stuff like Hydeleid and Draga before it, but so many games took from Zelda, they were a whole bunch of Famicom to System. They were clones of Zelda, kind of. Some of them are probably a little bit closer to Hydeiad and design, but there are quite a number of them, and I don't think any of them got localized. Yeah, I don't think I've played any of these, but you put a list on here.

here's Silvani, Silviana? Yeah, Silviana. That was, I can't remember if the Famicom game came first, or there was an MSX-2 version of it. Dandy was, this is sort of a weird story behind that, and that's another tangent we can get off to in Strange Famicom DeSystem games, but there was this old Atari 8-bit game called Dandy Dungeon, which people believe to be the game that inspired Gauntlet. So there's this game that's just called Dandy, which is a completely different.

different game, and it's so much more like a Zelda-type action RPG. It's just very strange. There's a game called Markenvale. Marken, which is another port of an older game, which, you know, not necessarily Zelda inspired, but was obviously sort of inspired by the same sort of action RPG stuff. There's a company called Crystal Soft, which was big in the 80s for RPGs, and they didn't, they weren't around long enough to really dabble much with the Famicom, but one of the games they put out was called Cala No Tsirugi.

And one of the, the games that they were known for in the PC world was Mugan No Shinso, which was generally turned to be like the inspiration behind Dragon Quest. And this was Crystal Soft kind of paying Enix back by ripping off Dragon Quest. Okay. So you look at the game and it basically looks like Enix's game. It plays a little closer to Hyde, but, is an interesting sort of rip-off. And there was another old port of theirs, but I think it's called Lizard.

But I think that was put out by Bothtech, who also did relics. They did, unfortunately. Yeah, I'm a big fan of the Zelda-style action RPG, so thank you for putting this list together because I want to check out these games next time I'm able to go shopping for Famicom Disc System games. None of them are really very good, of course. Like Sylvia, I think, is kind of neat just because I like the sort of, like the main character kind of looks like Legend of Valky from Namco. And it's not as bad as some of the other ones. There's kind of a reason my most of these didn't end up being localized.

Yeah, but sometimes, you know, just scratching that itch is enough. It doesn't have to be a satisfactory scratch. Just like, I scratched it a little bit, I'm good. Yeah, that wasn't a good metaphor. So also on the disc system, and of course, and, of course, there was also on the disc system, we had Castlevania and Castlevania 2. And of course, there was also Zelda 2. And you can kind of see the jump in complexity and ambition between Zelda and Zelda 2 and Castlevania and Castlevania 2 is they try to integrate more RPG elements, try to bring things sort of that Mario action style, but also with RPG components and exploration and open world design, really, you know, kind of shows the direction game design was trending at the time. And, of course, in the same vein you have Metroid and Kid Icarus, both of which debuted on the disk system. Yeah, everybody was clearly trying to evolve game design based on the new capability of, you know, your game doesn't go away when you hit the power button, right?

Yeah, and at the same time, you also had, you know, some classic game styles being explored in new directions, new, more ambitious designs, such as Yumei Kojo doki-doki Panic, which everyone knows. is the original name for Pac-Man. No, wait, that's not right. The original name for Supermory Brothers 2 in the kind of weird variant version. We've talked about this, no need to belabor the point, but also Famicom Tante Club,

which was Nintendo jumping on the sort of adventure game style that was really big at the time, you know, thanks to Portopia. The idea of murder mysteries, detective adventure games were really, really big. So that was their take on it.

They put out a couple of other ones. It's Famicom Mukashi Banashi series, which... Yeah, yeah. It's a cutesy version of old Japanese, well, Japanese folktales for one was Shin Onigashima, and the next one was more Chinese folktales for Yuuki. And then later down, the line was the infamous time twist. How is that infamous? Because it's the game where it has Hitler, it has baby Jesus, it has the Ku Klux Klan,

It just sends you on a wild trip through time. Slavery, I think. Yeah, yeah. Do you get to choose which of these historic personages you kill? No, you do get to witness Joan of Arc. They're very straightforward adventure games. Like, you know, you think of something like even more linear than Shadowgate and things like that. That's kind of just, you know, wander around and pick the right options until you can move on.

They were quite a number of these for the Famicom because Portopia was so popular. But they still pretty quickly shifted to the cartridge. Yeah. Yeah, and that was the first, I actually went back and played this very recently because I had played, I had played some of the Square PC games, and then I also wanted to play the Crystal Dragons, Suishono Dragon, which was the Square's first Famicom Disc System game, which was actually done. Actually, we know the music is by Uwematsu and assuming some of the Final Fantasy crew were involved in this, but it seems like it's not actually specifically credited, but it is an adventure game, you know, very very much in the style of their PC games. And again, you know, that's, we see like the computer style games coming to the Famicom based on this. So it was a, it was a graphic adventure game. And actually, interestingly enough, it's a point-and-click adventure game. Because on the PC, of course, everything they did was parser-based.

But for the Famicom, it was, so what games like Portopia and other adventure games did was it sort of maniac-manioned it where you click on verbs. or you select verbs from a menu. But the Crystal Dragon actually did it with icons. And this was early 80 or late 86, I think. And yeah, so it actually had a point-and-click icon-based graphical adventure game. It's not great. I wouldn't recommend. There's a fan translation you can go play it.

I would recommend you just sort of, you know, take it for what it is. It's not fantastic, but it is very interesting in that. It sounds like they put some effort into it, which doesn't... It's not always the case for Square stuff on a disk system, because this is probably with a sidebar of its own. They really went hard on the disc system with the disc original group, named Dog. And the idea was that they would actually publish people's disc games that were not actually created by them.

So Square itself only did a couple. They did the Crystal Dragon, and they did famously... Tobitasei, Adai Saxen, which became the Adventures of 3D World Runner in the U.S. And that was, so that was a square internal thing. But then a lot of the other ones, like Deep Dungeon, and there was a game called MetMag, and there was all this other stuff that they published on this system that was just third parties or outside software developers. But they, I mean, Square had the license. They had the Nintendo license so they could publish these games.

And so I think they made a go of it. tried to drum up a business in doing Famicom Disc System stuff and being essentially a publishing house for people. But that, you know, famously that didn't work and they were kind of on the skids. And then like everybody else, they went back to cartridges and they had a big hit with cartridge-based Final Fantasy with a save battery. And then after that, that was pretty much it for them and the disc system. My favorite bit of lore is about Saken Densat, too, which is one of, like, the great lost Famicom games. Yep. Because they were hyping up that game for a while.

And then at a certain point, you know, it's going to be this multi-disc epic. And then something, it just collapsed. And they were like, we're sorry, please go ahead and pre-order our next game, Final Fantasy, which worked out quite a bit better. Yep. Yeah. And then, of course, the game was called Sake and Densetsu, and they only, they reused it, you know, for Saken Densetsu, right, Final Fantasy, Adventure. on the Game Boy, but it had no connection to it whatsoever, and I think it was just because they already had the trademark for Saken Densetsu, that they just sort of took that and, oh, well,

we'll just use this as the title for this, this project. Yeah, the subtitle was the emergence of Excalibur, the reemergence of Excalibur. Yeah, that doesn't really factor into the, to the Game Boy game at all. Nope. But nobody knows much about it. Like, they published some character art and basic concept and a couple of, you know, screenshots that they took pictures of, but it's never, like, surfaced anywhere. And they placed ads, right?

I mean, they actually took out full-page ads with mock screenshots and stuff like that. And, but, like, it probably didn't exist, you know, it probably only existed and, like, mocked up screenshots and ideas and design documents. And they, because, you know, I mean, the video game development cycle at this point was, you know, a year if you wanted to take the maximum amount of time to make a video game. you take a whole year to do it. And so it was entirely feasible that they could have knocked this game together in six months, but they just didn't.

Square was working on a port of their MSX game, Aliens. Yes, yeah. That did leak out on the Internet a couple years ago, so you could try to play it. And it's, I mean, it's a janky part of a game, which wasn't very good to begin with. But there's an interview with Takashi Tokita. I think that's his name, right? He's a, you know, the Final Pepsi Ford director, yeah. it was one of his early graphic stuff and he was just like the programmer just didn't know what he was doing and just had to cancel it yeah pretty much and it's probably for the best yeah yeah that's probably what happened to take in the set suit but that is that is another weird thing where you've got a lot of final fantasy because again oomatsu did the music on that so you've got like a lot of the final fantasy team the early final fantasy team making a licensed aliens game one game of theirs i kind of like is what's the

follow-up to Crystal Dragon, the Cleopatra No Maho, which is It's like an adventure game slash RPG hybrid, and neither element is all that well done, but I like the effort. I still have to play that one, so I will. Okay, so we've kind of moved beyond the greats to the weird and notable games.

I think, you know, kind of topping the list there is Super Mario Brothers 2. I guess that might be fighting words because some people really love Super Mario Brothers 2, the Japanese one. but to me it's a it's an interesting effort that doesn't quite pan out it's it is interesting and it's it's fun to really kind of grapple with it but i don't think it's quite up there in the the upper echelons of mario you think of how many weird sequels that they had to games back then like uh you look at dig dug too and it's like nothing like dig dug oh yeah yeah but i mean but i mean just like they didn't really know what they were doing so like well

let's just make it make a level pack for they assume everybody yeah Myr Brothers back and forth. It was actually really unusual to see sequels that were like what we think of sequels today. You know, either sequels were basically just the same game, but, you know, with maybe some new graphics or maybe like a little harder or a lot harder, or else just something totally different. And it was, it was actually, you know, kind of toward the end, middle and end of the NES's life that we started to see people just take a more calm, rational approach to sequels. Like, let's do more or less what we've been doing, but just better and bigger. Well, I think the idea was if you're, because you're right, at this point, you know, there was, there were very few, like, video game sequels. And the idea of, well, what is a sequel was still very up in the air.

Like, nowadays, if you take the name of a video game and you put two or three at the end of it, people assume that means that the gameplay style has fundamentally not changed. from the first one. But in this era, you're right, it could be anything from, you could put a two at the end of what is essentially a level pack, or you could put a two at the end of what is essentially a game

in a completely different genre. And with Mario, you know, even with Super Mario Brothers 3, originally, you know, when they started developing that, they were developing it as a three-quarters-view overhead Mario game. And probably really good

that they just went, you know, went back to that. Yeah. But there was this level, of, well, what is a video game sequel? What does it mean when we do something, something, too? And, yeah, I mean, as you saw, there were many, many different answers to that. There was no one answer.

But Nintendo also put together some pretty solid original games for the disc system, even if they weren't necessarily on the level of Zelda or Metroid. You have Nazo no Morosame Joe, the mystery of Morosame Castle, which... I'm actually surprised that never got localized. Like, I guess maybe it is too Japanese, maybe too weird, but there's nothing to translate to the game, and it's still like a decent action title. Yeah, that was one of the first games Nintendo brought over on virtual console

when they were like, hey, we should put imports out in the U.S. That would be fine in Europe. Right. It's been a long time since I've played that game, and I don't remember how it plays. Chris, I feel like this is more your area. Oh, yeah. Now I never really got into it.

Oh, so unfortunately we may have... It's making so many assumptions here. Okay, what about you, Kurt? Don't list down. Basically, the Legend of Zelda as an action game. So it plays a lot like that, except everything's broken up into levels. The levels are not entirely linear, so you can explore around them a little bit. But it's a little awkward because you can only move in the four directions and the enemies are much more versatile.

It's a very tough game. So maybe that's why they decide to skip localizing it at the time. But I can't really say, like, it's not as good as like Metro or anything like that because it's much more action-focused. But I think it would have been pretty well liked it had been brought out. it has a good music too yeah yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna go ahead and say at that time if something was that drenched in uh japanese uh culture you know and that was so fundamental um to its story um it would have been considered that you would have needed to reskin that uh somehow um in in to make it a mainstream hit in the u s i mean certainly there were there were publishers on the nes that did

not feel that way you know just release it um you know exactly as it was but i don't think that Nintendo would have done that because Nintendo would have been looking at the game saying, okay, what is going to be a mainstream hit if we release it over here and what is going to be a cultural fit for the U.S. and, you know, as good as that game was, I don't think they would have done it. I think they kind of missed the boat because it's not technically about ninjas, but ninjas were about to get very big at the time. Yeah, they could have, you know, tied it in with James Clavel's Shogun or something. Yeah, I mean, they also just had a wealth of riches at that time as far as games to choose from.

I'm sure Howard Phillips sat down with it. I'm sure he filled out a little sheet rating every element of the game. Fun factor from one to five and, you know, filled out what he thought. And then it just didn't come out. He got a black bow tie stamp for no-go. Yep, yep. I will say Nintendo put together its best classic style sports games for disk system. all the ones that people still really love to play

are, you know, they have their origins in the disc system. That's pro wrestling and ice hockey. Well, that's it. Those are the only ones people still like to play. But both of those that got their start on disk system, there were a couple of others volleyball, but the ones that are like, wow, these are still great fun in the year 2021.

That is, we owe that to the disc system. There was also a couple of racing games that never came over. Most notably, Famicom Grand Prix. 3D Hot Rally, which is notable for being a 3D game that made use of the 3D glasses that were released for Famicom. And also being a racing game ostensibly starring Mario, although not really. But in theory, theory is on the packaging. Look, it's Mario.

You are Mario. It's first person. So you become Mario and you're looking through Mario's eyes. Let's see, some other third-party stuff that came out, you know, Section Z got it start on, or, you know, it was an arcade game, but the port first was converted to disk system along with Gunsmoke. Section Z is notable because it actually had a save system in Japan that was not brought over for the U.S., not even a password system.

And the game is so much harder and so much more punishing as a result because it is a game where you spend just so much time trying to figure out your way through that maze. And, you know, you go to the end of a level and you have two paths you can go along. Sometimes it'll take you to, you know,

you'll make progress. But most of the time, especially once you get to the second area of the game, it either sends you back or it sends you on some weird tangent that will eventually loop back. And I had a friend who could, like, play through the American version from start to finish, no problem.

But I did not ever have that patience. And having a safe feature in there would have made a world of difference. They were thought, Taito did a couple of games like that, too. Like, they did one for Kiki Kai Kai, which is known as Pocky and Rocky. And it's a, like that,

it's a totally different game, but they made it really big and open-ended. But Section Z is still, like, a reasonably well-put-together game. And the Kiki Kikai-Kai game is kind of crap. Hal made, I think they released their first console, what's it called Lolo game, yes, as Eggerland.

And there's a whole complicated relationship between the Eggerland games and the Lolo games. They're kind of the same thing, but then in terms of actual content, they're totally different. Right, all the Lolo games are like, we took half the levels from this Eggerland game and the other half from this one and remixed them. It's a mess.

Uh, there's stuff like Kieta Princess, which I mentioned as part of the wavejack series, which is notable because it was made by the guy who went on to direct or basically create, you know, with one other person, the Battle of Olympus. Uh, there's Otoki, which was a, uh, a really quirky and interesting little music game. It's a shooter, but it's also about creating music. I don't really get it, but I enjoy playing it. It's, it's, you know, like I don't think I'm doing the right things, but I am having a good time. playing it. There's Falsian, which I've never played, but it's a Konami shooter, so I feel like it's probably

good. Kurt, this seems like something you could speak to. Yeah, it's one of those kind of space-hair, like 3D shooter games, but it's exciting to play because the music is really good and it's fast-placed, but it's really difficult to play. Like, I did end up picking up some of those 3-D goggles, and I don't know if they either didn't work or just the game wasn't very well-programmed, but it never felt like I was getting the intended experience. Like, you just sort of rock it along, and then you blow up a whole bunch.

That sounds like a Konami shooter, yeah. There was a Galaxy Force for the Sega Master System, which is, you know, Galaxy Force was an extremely impressive arcade game, and trying to downscale that to the master system was quite an effort, but they're pretty similar in that way. Okay. That makes sense. Then finally, I want to mention Nakayama Miho no Tokimiki High School, which that was, obviously never played it because it is a basically a dating sim but i feel like it was one of the

very first dating sims was it not oh i believe it was yeah and on top of that it was tied to an actual person like uh miho nakayama was a real woman like an idol i think at the time right i swear heard somebody compared her once to like at the time japan's alissa milano okay she's the one i'm thinking that would that would scan yeah sure but she's not the only one that was like that But there was, like, yeah, it was, it's kind of more an adventure game. But yeah, it does have vague dating sim. It's not like the first dating sim game. But as far as like on consoles, that's probably correct.

Yeah. Yeah. It's an adventure game with dating elements. Yeah. It's regularly through the game, like the, they flash these telephone numbers, which you were supposed to call up and get a pre-recorded message, presumably from Mihon Nakayama, which, of course, they're long, long outdated. There was some article when I was working on it

that went through people who tried to call those numbers now and like what was like a car dealership or something like that and the guy asked him like, has anybody called asking about this game? And they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. Yeah, but of course, then the really truly wild thing about Nakayama Miho and Otokimiki High School is that it was actually created as co-developed by Nintendo and Square.

And so, like, Sakaguchi worked on that, and then so did Sakamoto of Metroid fame. So the two of them actually got together and were co, I think, leads on that project. And it was a deep, deep collaboration between Nintendo and Square, which is just wild. I'd like seeing the intersections of this era between idols,

because that was a big one. Canami did one called Risa Tachibana Yosei Densatsu I think which is like a fairy tale adventure game but it's also starring this J-pop star Yeah I mean it was just this kind of little period of

Japanese pop culture history like the bubbliest part of the bubble where you know like just throw it at the wall see what sticks and there were a whole bunch of things based around idol singers and you know and actresses yeah I mean that's that's the entirety of

Macross right there. You got Lynn Minmay, singing her heart out to destroy the Zentradi. And so much easier to do that when you don't have cartridge manufacturing costs to pay, where you don't have to buy an initial order of 50,000 ROM cartridges and spend tons of money on something that could be a flop when you could literally just write it out to a floppy disk and see. And at the same time, it also gave them an opportunity to kind of create these deluxe packages. like I mentioned with the Wavejack games where you have this kind of nicely boxed package

where you have, yes, the tiny disk system game but in addition to that there is this nice big manual and there is a music cassette with actual taped music on it ranging from pop hits to this kind of there's a galaxy heroes kind of game where it's like this big

bombastic orchestra type music so yeah it was just a chance for I think publishers to kind of set themselves apart and stand out in the market, which, you know, at this point, there were probably a thousand Famicom games on the market. So, yeah, they definitely needed to stand out. They needed to do something to give themselves a little bit of sparkle. And then also you had kind of some weird stuff like ports of Western PC games that did not necessarily. I mean, you know, in the early days of the Famicom, you did see ports of games like Doe Boy and Bungling Bay. and so forth. But then, you know, all of those kind of shifted over to the disk system. And there's some really weird choices, a lot of stuff from European microcomputers, such as Monty on the Run and NightLore, which was an early game by the company that became rare.

They kind of made their fortunes in the UK. Monty on the Run was just a completely different game on the Famicomeda system. Like the whole premise of Monty is that he was a mole. Well, in this version, he's an escaped prisoner. Is there some sort of linguistic pun there? I don't think so. I don't know how these sort of deals happened. For my understanding, the magazines and the press, they were familiar with these American games.

And so the Japanese companies would license them. But you know how it would work. The person who was in charge of developing the game didn't necessarily talk to the people who licensed the game or even knew what it was. So they just kind of did their own thing. Yeah, well, that was the thing with aliens is that, you know, that was actually. Activision owned the rights to make Alien games and then they sub-licensed that

to Square for the rights to do the Japanese versions, but it wasn't that Square just ported the Activision's aliens game. They just got the rights to do it and then just did whatever the heck they wanted, which was probably the case with a lot of these games as well. They just sort of got the sub-license to make the Japanese version of the game.

Okay, well, what are we going to make? What do you want to make? And then just ended up how it did. Yeah. Nobody's checking on it. Nobody cares. I mean, it's like, it's, you know, it's the same thing. It's like, you know, American, huge American movie celebrities doing coffee commercials on TV in Japan. Like, nobody in the 80s. It's like, well, nobody's going to see this. It doesn't matter. Some of these were neat, though, like, because it's the Activision game hacker, which is a weird choice to put it to the Famicom. Because it, like, that game was entirely keyboard-based. Like, you started off with a prompt and you would need to defeat, like, a password. Right. So they completely re-engineered the game. so that you were a robot and they introduced to like RPG style exploration sequences and

like battle scenes so it's it's more like a like we took the basic concept of it and tried to rework it to the Famicom and it was it's neat in that way but at the same time it's you kind have to wonder why they didn't just make their own game not pay with the license you know the the connections were so tenuous that I don't think Activision would have come after them and said hey hang on a sec guys i don't know about this yeah no i think that um i think that the the name itself was probably well known enough that it was worth um slapping it on the box even if uh what was inside was different than the thing that people had heard of well then All right. And finally, to kind of wrap this up, the sort of confluence of all these things, where you have celebrities, and you have Nintendo First Party games. And that's the beloved All-Night Nippon Super Mario Brothers. And I feel like we've talked briefly about this, but I feel like it's always worth a recap. And Chris, I feel like this one has got to be one that you can wax eloquent on.

Um, yeah, to an extent. I mean, a lot of it is sort of like knowing about a Japanese radio personalities and stuff like that. But yes, yeah, all night Nepal and Super Mario Brothers was a, it was a giveaway game where they took Super Mario Brothers one. Uh, they remixed some of the levels. So when you start the game, for example, World One One takes place at night. Uh, when you start playing it, the Super Mushroom is like, it's not in one of the blocks that's lower to the ground, it's in the question mark block that's like higher up and they've remixed the levels in that way. And then they replaced a lot of the enemies with like the heads of various

celebrities from this All Night Neapone was the name of a very popular radio show. And so the DJs and things like that end up there. And then the, but it was the other weird thing it was like, it was like Super Mario One, but with the graphics from Super Mario Brothers 2, because of course they had redesigned some of the things like the mushroom. and the clouds, and like Super Mario Brothers 2, that's where the clouds got smiley faces and the mushrooms got eyeballs and things like that. So it was just, it was strange. And then, yeah, instead of rescuing Toad, you would rescue, I think, a different radio personality

culminating in God knows what at the end of the game, which again used the Mario 2 ending, which I think was the thing where Princess Peach tells you a poem and there's a little bit more animation to the ending there. and then of course they released this or they did it as a giveaway and now it costs like a thousand dollars if you want to try to buy one i don't know how's that some weird tie-ins like there's some sort of ramen special edition for the legend of zelda and i can't remember the name of it like charimella i think it was called yes yes yes but for a long time nobody knew what it was on it kaytikita mario i think was tied in with um nagatanian uh ramen i believe i think i'm getting that right it's yeah it's some ramen brand but yeah that it's basically just like uh there would be screens that would advertise the ramen i think it was actually ramen topping not not even

ramen uh just like the the furikake you put on top and then um it would also advertise hey super my brother's three is coming soon you should play it what i'm thinking of who's uh gradius for the famicom had a special edition where like all the little power up capsules were replaced with ramen stuff but there was also a tie in for the legend of zes Zelda, but nobody knew if this special version of the game actually had anything different about it because it was so rare and had never been dumped. But it was a couple of years. Yeah, I think I remember seeing this.

Okay. I just looked this up and I'm reading it on Gaming Alexandria right now just for just to be clear. I believe what was found that nothing was different. They found a copy. Yeah, the label was different. It was, yes, it was probably a giveaway based on a brand of instant noodles that had the logo on the label.

but they did not they were not able to find anything different about the ROM itself so pretty much identical to the retail release but the but the Kayetikita Mario like there is a Nagatan Raman mode in that

where they yes where they advertise ramen to you pay to play so yeah that's that's the VAMICOM disk system interestingly Nintendo does not treat this as a separate platform historically from the NES.

Like when they put together collections and things like that, you get Famicom and Disc System games just kind of mixed in, like with the Famicom Mini that became NES classics on Game Boy Advance. You know, the packaging was different to reflect the original packaging of the games, but it wasn't like they had the Famicom Mini and the Famicom Disc System Mini. On virtual console, it was pretty much just like, here's our A-Bit games, you know, on the NES Mini, the NES Classic, There were a bunch of Famicom Disc System games on the Japanese version.

I think the tissue holder that looks like the disc system was a third-party add-on, right? There was like... Yeah, I think so. Yes. Yeah, they didn't... There was a great add-on, though. They didn't do the... The Tower of Power for the Genesis Mini was an official Sega product, but not the tissue holder.

But, yes, you know, officially Nintendo is just like, yeah, it's all the same thing. It's all part of the Famicom legacy. It's probably, you know, just for ease and convenience. But it also does speak to how closely intertwined that platform, that, you know, that add-on, that peripheral is with the history of the NES and the Famicom. Like, they are kind of inextricable, even though they are technologically distinct, as the Borg would say. I thought it was interesting. There was very few of the games that they ever ported back to cartridge. Like, there was a cartridge version of Zelda, the first one.

They did Super Mario USA, which is just, you know, Super Mario. Our Brothers 2, our version. Canami had put out Castlevania and Twin B2 and Biomerico, Upa, which is kind of a weird choice. But so many of those other games are just, like, stuck on the diss system. Like, for us going back and sticking out the library, like picking up a new copy of Metroid or Kid Icarus is relatively easy, but at this, you need to go through a whole separate platform and all the rigmarole involved with the Famicom disc system.

Right, right, right. I wonder why they never went back and did that. Like, that's just very strange. Yeah, and the games that came out, I think a lot of this happened when, like, the AV Famicom was out. And so, like, you could still, you could go buy the AV Famicom, but you couldn't really go buy a Famicom disk system at that point, new. And so I think there was a little bit of thought, like, oh, maybe we should release games that were on the disc system on the cartridge because, you know, people will be able to play them because there's demand for them. So, yeah, you get Zelda one and Castlevania one. And then those, but those were a really limited release because they're, they're, uh, actually.

considerably more difficult to find now and more expensive to buy now than the disc system release. And Biomirical Boko de Yupa, too, was this the same way. The cartridge version is very, very expensive, whereas the disc system release isn't. But yeah, you know, you're right. I mean, they only did a few port back sort of things. And probably because, you know, they probably did the ones that they did and then discovered that there actually really wasn't a whole lot of demand for them.

Yeah. And, you know, by that point, those games were. pretty long in the tooth. You know, we were already on... In America, we were on the MMC-5. In Japan, they were using that and also all kinds of bespoke chips. So, you know, like those earlier Famicom disc-system-friendly games were just smaller, more primitive, more limited.

Yeah, I can see that they would have been a tough sell. I mean, you know, obviously, Super Mario USA had appeal just because it was like, hey, here's a Mario game that you've kind of... have played before, but you haven't played it, and they had it in the U.S., so you should play it. And then, you know, that got dinged in reviews. If you look back at Fomitsu's reviews back from when that came out, they were like, this is just the same as dokey dokey panic from like five years ago. Who cares about this? Anyway, a pretty solid legacy, nevertheless, despite its flaws, despite its quirks, and despite its, you know, kind of relatively short life compared to the

NES itself, there's still a lot to like about the disc system, and it is still, you know, a personal favorite add-on to a piece of hardware, just because of one, the legacy of the games attached to it, and also because there is that physical element, there is something tactile about the disc system that I really, really love. And, you know, that does come hand in hand with some very palpable failures, very visceral failures, points of stress. But, you know, you know, You know, that's just kind of part and parcel of working with old hardware at this point. It was a stopgap solution in the end. You know, it let them jump ahead very quickly to having more space and the ability to write data to the disk.

And then within a couple of years, that wasn't really something that was necessary anymore. Kurt, any final thoughts? It's pretty much what I would say. I mean, I like to collect it for it, even though there's a, kind of limited to what I'd actually be willing to spend money for. Like, if you get all the Nintendo and the Canami games, and I guess a couple of oddball ones, like Kiki Kai, which again isn't very good.

It's just kind of neat to have. A couple of the early square stuff is, you know, neat. Atoki. I can't think it's fun else. One of the last games I got was the Dirty Pair games. There's a couple of licensed games, which, as with all licensed games, are pretty bad. I can't think of much else that I actually bought for it beyond those.

Yeah, I mean, you can definitely play most of the best games in their U.S. incarnations, but occasionally some of them are better. You know, there is Section Z, and there is something really fun and different about playing dokey, dokey panic, because it is so familiar, but it's also kind of worse, but also kind of more interesting, and that, you know, the game wants you to play all the levels as all the characters, which is kind of fun. So, yeah, I feel like the disk system is a fun sort of archaeological project for someone who doesn't mind doing a little extra labor, doesn't mind having to send their system off every once in a while to have it repaired by someone. You know, it works with, obviously, with the original NES hardware, but also with clone devices like the analog in T and the USB, the retro USB AVS, both of those support it. So there are ways to play it, you know, kind of in a more modern context. And it could be really fun that way. So if you haven't played a disk system, it's worth looking into. They're not crazy expensive, even if they've been refurbished.

So, you know, something that hasn't been too heavily impacted by the retro bubble. And most of the really good games for the disc system are reasonably priced on the aftermarket. If you find reputable sellers. So it's, you know, it's not like going after PC. engine CD-ROM-ROM or something where, you know, it's going to be expensive on the face of it, and then also the good games are like $1,000. It's nothing like that. So it's a pretty good way to kind of dip your toe into this Japan-only aspect of something

that is familiar yet different at the same time, and also, you know, has a pretty significant tie to video game history. So that wraps it up for Retronauts this week. Thanks, guys, for being on. Let's go through our usual beats. and promos. Retronauts, of course, is a podcast that you can put into your ears every week on your favorite podcatchers at the Greenlit Podcast Network at Retronauts.com and so on and so forth. You can also listen to Retronauts six times a month instead of four, maybe even seven, depending on the month, by subscribing to us at patreon.com slash Retronauts. There is a patron tier where you get exclusive episodes and other, exclusive content every week sometimes.

So that's patreon.com slash retronauts. That is what keeps this podcast going and allows us to make it happen. So your subscription is appreciated. But of course, if you don't want to do that, we do release an episode every Monday for free right here on the internet

that you can enjoy. Let's see. Chris, where can we find you in your projects? Well, you know, I'm on Twitter, as always, is at Coboon Heat, K-O-B-U-N-H-E-A-T. You can, currently all the stuff that I'm working on is super top secret, and I'll never tell you about it, ever.

But maybe that will be different one day. I hope it will be different one day. We'll figure we'll announce a video game at some point. So just stay tuned for more from Digital Eclipse, because they're not paying me to do nothing. I can certainly tell you that. Kurt? I've run hardcore gaming 101.net.

on Twitter as HG underscore 101. We also have a Patreon, which not only funds all of our books, also funds a podcast, which we put out twice a week for free and then a special third bonus episode a week. We have all the books that are available either on Amazon or digital copies through Itchio, including the Famicom to System book. And right now we're finishing up the exasperatingly long process of editing the 650-page book devoted to Japanese RPGs. which will be out someday. That's really long. All right. And finally, you can find me, Jeremy Parrish, on the internet.

I'm on Twitter's GameSpite. That's mostly where I'm on social media. You can also find me doing stuff at Limited Run Games, of course, here at Retronauts, and on my YouTube channel, which is just Look for Jeremy Parrish, where I'm covering the history of the NES and Game Boy and other systems, including some Sega stuff. It's amazing and fun and cool, and you should check it out. Anyway, thanks again, gentlemen, for helping us to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Famicom Disc System. Let's all go play some Zelda, but on a cartridge, because it's more fun that way. Thank you.

Thank you.