27 Years Ago, Nintendo Almost Revolutionized Digital Games with Nintendo Power
Nintendo Power, a unique service by Nintendo, allowed SNES and Game Boy users to download games onto a reusable flash memory cartridge at specific stores. Despite its innovative concept, it was only available in Japan and ceased in 2007.
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Nintendo Power was a service introduced by Nintendo 27 years ago for SNES and Game Boy users, allowing them to add new games to a reusable flash memory cartridge at specific stores. This service, not to be confused with the magazine of the same name, aimed to revolutionize gaming by offering an all-in-one flash memory cartridge where users could download and remove games at special terminals. Despite being an innovative concept for its time, Nintendo Power was only released in Japan and eventually discontinued in 2007 after a decade on the market. The service provided a cost-effective alternative to physical game purchases and offered the potential to reduce manufacturing and distribution costs for future titles. While it remains a collector's item today, Nintendo Power stands as a footnote in Nintendo's history, leaving behind the question of what could have been if it had been distributed globally.
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8 commentsI hadn't heard of this before, but it's clearly a successor to the Famicom Disk System, which worked exactly the same way but with rewritable floppies.
That could summarize a huge chunk of tech ideas in the 90's.
The key technologies here was cheap storage and widely available broadband, which both arrived by the mid 2000's. Thus Steam, and the entire online catalog of the Xbox 360/Ps3 and beyond.
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