Nintendo 64DD: the disk drive announced before the N64, dead with 15,000 owners

The 64DD was Nintendo's disk-drive expansion for the Nintendo 64, developed with Alps Electric. Nintendo announced it at the Shoshinkai trade show in 1995 — before the N64 itself launched a year later — as a way to get rewritable 64-megabyte magnetic disks into players' hands. It was meant to give developers room for games too big for cartridges, and its flagship title was to be Zelda 64, the game that became The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

The schedule collapsed. The 64DD was first delayed to March 1998, then to June 1998, then to 'within the year,' and it shipped only on December 11, 1999, in Japan alone, for the equivalent of roughly US$90. The killer app had moved to cartridge, Space World 1998 was cancelled for lack of 64DD software, and only ten disks were ever released. Its online service, Randnet, relied on a 28.8kbps dial-up connection and a mail-order model that added friction on top of a niche product.

Nintendo finally discontinued the 64DD on February 28, 2001. Wikipedia's figure for units sold is over 15,000, and the commercial-failures list puts the unsold inventory at 85,000 units. It never came out anywhere but Japan. The story is a timing failure: a peripheral announced four years before it shipped, whose reason to exist — capacity — had quietly been solved and then abandoned by the software that was supposed to sell it.