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Would Nintendo's Famicom Disk System
have been popular in the United States?
The Disk System is, without a doubt, one of the most
interesting video game accessories/systems I've seen
in all of my years of gaming. Nintendo of Japan
thought it was a smart idea, but slowness and
cartridges being packed with batteries made it
obsolete. Could it, however, have worked in the
United States? Or anywhere else, for that matter? I
believe the answer is no, and here are the reasons
why:
1. We, as Americans, are impatient. Due to
how fast technology had improved in the 80s, we
liked do everything in a hurry, especially when it
came to video games. Would we have been able to
accept the slow loading time of FDS games? We wait
now, because every game these days takes time to
load up; it's a simple fact of video-gaming life.
One of the reasons for the
creation of the Disk System was game saving. It was
one of the bright spots of the system. I mean, why
have to enter a password when instead you could
save? However, it was the ability to save that hurt
the Disk System. While a password is often a pain in
the ass to remember, many would've found changing
from Side A to Side B, back to Side A and then Side
B, just in order to save a game, to be long,
annoying process.
2. The glitches just would not
fly with us, not at all. We Americans don't like
glitches; that's why there's always such an outcry
when a product has to be recalled due to faulty
inner workings. With the FDS, some disks were
unreadable, having de-magnetized, and even scarier
was the disk drive's belt, which had a tendency to
wear out quickly. The wait, to this day, to fix a
Disk System's band, is painfully long.
3. The choice of games was few, even if fun.
The game choices were far from horrible, and many
great FDS games were never released as cartridges,
just disks: Super Mario Bros. 2j, Zelda
II: The Adventure of Link, and Return of the
Mario Bros., to name a few. Maybe it was just
the failure of the FDS in Japan that kept down the
number of released games, but only about 130 were
released. You may not have wanted to make an
investment in a system that had so few games from
which to choose.
Now, what would happen if you
couldn't afford the Disk System? It's not like you
could find some secret hole where someone was
selling pirated FDS games as cartridges, especially
in the United States. What's worse may have been if
FDS games were only available at Disk Writer
machines, as was true for some games in Japan. What
if you don't live near a Disk Writer? Japan, because
it's a small island, tends to be more metropolitan,
while a great chunk of video gaming America is
rural. Is it worth the hour or more drive for a game
that you're not even sure is going to be good? What
are you going to do? Perhaps Nintendo's marketing
strategy would have been much different from its
strategy in Japan.
It should be pretty obvious from these points as to
why the Disk System would never have worked. The
games, the loading, the glitches, and the marketing
would have hurt the poor FDS and sent it to video
game Hell.
This, however, should not stop you
from purchasing one today. It's a very fun little
thing to use, particularly for the hardcore Famicom
gamer.
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