Nintendo 64, a console well remembered in the fifth generation, when it was released to the mark in 1996 had to impose itself in front of the great SONY Playstation which already had enough won ground in the gamer world, despite this Nintendo continued using the technology of cartridges that already for the time was obsolete, however, they did not want their console to be pirated, issue that happened to the SONY console in a short time.
At first the Nintendo 64 cartridges only had a capacity of 12-24 MB, so the development of games for this console was quite complex if we compare it with its competitor the PlayStation, which supported 700 MB CD, this for the developers were perfect because they allowed for low costs to create great works of art for example the legendary Final Fantasy VII.
Nintendo had to compete against the great avalanche of competition, so they decided to show the public an expansion project to the Nintendo 64 that allowed to place games with more capacity and additionally expand the existing games of the Nintendo 64, this is currently known as a DLC, they also offered an internet connectivity service which supported messages between users, chat rooms and future online games, this great expansion was called Nintendo 64DD.
Many users were with great expectations, wanted to see titles offered by the Nintendo at the time as Mario 64 2, Earthbound 64, an expansion of the Ocarina of Time Zelda among many more, also caught the attention of users who despised Nintendo 64 , the fact of involving a console with the online world sounded quite attractive.
But Nintendo for unknown reasons left interest in this accessory, losing a lot of ground in the gamer area, while the PlayStation with its large CD format had one of the best commercial successes, the years passed and people were already talking about the next generation of consoles, SONY was showing features of the PlayStation 2, while Nintendo decided to release the Nintendo 64DD in 1999 in Japan alone, accompanied by 6 games, the most relevant of which would be considered by many Mario Paint sequel called Mario Artist or The Expansion Kit for the F-ZeroX, fulfilled the dedicated servers for chat rooms, messaging between users and certain updates for its poor catalog.
To be able to acquire a Nintendo 64DD at that time you had to request it via mail, only those people who were interested in the article by that means could request it, it was not available in any video game store, so its sales were only 15.000 units, Many people claim that Nintendo was trying to get rid of all that merchandise from the project that it abandoned.
Finally, in 2001 it stopped giving support to this accessory in Japan, only 1 year hard in the market, perhaps they would have gotten more out of that expansion if they had taken it a little earlier on sale, however, thanks to This Nintendo realized that it should go hand in hand with the technology, although it achieved a great reputation with the Super Nintendo did not achieve the same success with the Nintendo 64, consequently in its next console would be released with Mini Disc technology for more storage capacity (in theory).
Despite all the attempts of Nintendo to get along with its main competitor, it must be emphasized that its Nintendo 64DD was a very innovative product for its time, the fact that it offered you an Internet connection was simply something very impressive, personally I would have liked to expand the story of Zelda Ocarina of Time, is one of my favorite games of this console, but unfortunately this accessory went unnoticed in the history of Nintendo, now being a collector's item, which has a peculiar value of 500$
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