THE OTHER NINTENDO CD-ROM ATTACHMENT THAT NEVER WAS
Over at the LostLevels forum — a haven for all things both retro and long forgotten (and subsequently re-surfaced) — Frank Cifaldi’s found early record of a CD-ROM attachment for the NES in development from UK outfit Codemasters.
The article says an adapter would have let you connect your NES to any audio CD player to load included games off the disc — much the same as any early computer cassette drive — presumably in an effort to both circumvent and compete against high-cost first-party cartridge manufacturing.
Said the March 1990 magazine:
One CD containing two or three games will be the same price as one traditional cartridge game, and one three-five meg game will cost less than a comparable cartridge game. Camerica currently plans to have six CD’s available in July when the unit is released-three CD’s with two games each on them, and three CD’s, each with a three-five meg game on them.
Camerica distributed a number of similarly unlicensed Codemasters products during the NES’s lifespan, including a number of 4-in-1 game carts, but the CD-ROM attachment, obviously, was an idea shelved for unknown reasons.
The idea would resurface in Nintendo’s willingness to partner with Sony for a CD-ROM attachment for the SNES, which would, of course — as you can hear recounted in exhaustive detail via this excellent recent Edge magazine article — then dissolve into Sony’s branching off to create the PlayStation.
[Credit for the picture above goes to the entirely unrelated but too-appropriate NES PC.]
Codemasters/Samsung developed CD add-on for the NES [LostLevels]
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