The Disc That Never Was
Nintendo became the last of the major gaming companies to switch to compact discs as a game distribution format — and that is ironic in its own way. After all, Nintendo was at one point poised to become one of the first manufacturers with a CD drive thanks to a partnership with Sony, but, as is well known, that collaboration ended in a scandalous breakup and the birth of the PlayStation. Because of this, Nintendo fans only received optical media with the arrival of the GameCube.
Now, one modder decided to imagine what would have happened if Nintendo had released a CD add-on much earlier than its plans for the SNES. An enthusiast under the handle Throaty Mumbo created a CD expansion specifically for the original NES.
Inspired by an Unused Port
The idea came about thanks to the expansion port on the bottom of the NES, which was officially never utilized. In turn, the project was also inspired by the history of the unrealized Super Nintendo CD and, of course, the most famous example — the SEGA CD.
Creating a working CD add-on for the NES proved to be no easy task, as the console has significant hardware limitations. If video on the SEGA CD seemed low in quality, full-screen video on this custom NES drive looks even more modest. However, despite the console's limitations, the fan-made CD add-on is impressive simply by the fact of its existence, making one wonder what developers could have created had Nintendo taken such a step a generation earlier.
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