Periphery spotlights gaming peripherals and products from the past, present, and immediate future.
Gamesniped.com is one of the more dangerous blogs on the internet for gamers. Their contributors tend to find auctions and sales of gaming’s rarest detritus and, for the right person, just the sight of some of these treasures can cause madness. One of today’s oddities is an eBay auction for a Nintendo 64 Disk Drive development kit, complete with blank disks. For anyone unfamiliar, the 64DD is Nintendo’s biggest failure, eclipsing even the oft-derided Virtual Boy, considering even fewer games were produced for it. The bulky add-on was planned as a way to release add-ons for N64 games, as well as a tool for programmable software. Only nine titles were ever released, four of which are all-but-unknown sequels to Mario Paint.
For any basement programmers out there who want to show off their obscurity chops, better get in on the bidding floor now.