I've enjoyed Norman Caruso's Gaming Historian videos for years now. He always has some intriguing insights and trivia about a particular piece of gaming hardware or software from ages past, be it the Sega Dreamcast or the NES model 2.
This time he explores the Japan-only Famicom Disk System, a curious add-on that played games written to proprietary floppy diskettes. Because of the beefier size of these cards--64 kilobytes on a side--some of Nintendo's most iconic franchises made their debut on the Disk System, including Metroid and The Legend of Zelda.
It's also interesting to note that Nintendo's practice of snubbing an ally, only for them to return as a rival, began here. Hudsonsoft initially approached Nintendo with a floppy disk technology, but Nintendo passed (for royalties reasons, what else?) and went with Mitsumi's quickdisk format instead. This led Hudson to eventually partner with NEC for the PC Engine/Turbografx-16. That said, Hudson was never as formidable a rival as the jilted Sony, who returned to positively flatten Nintendo with the Playstation after Nintendo snubbed them during development of the SNES CD add-on.
I highly recommend checking out the full video. Caruso knows his stuff and he always puts a humorous spin on these happenings of a few decades ago.
