Gallery: Unboxing A Nintendo 64DD Development Kit

The Nintendo 64 Disk Drive (64DD) is one of the company’s most interesting releases. A long-delayed, quickly discontinued, infamous flop, the 64’s bulky expansion was supposed to provide the console with an additional ‘middle-ground’ between cartridge and CD. Instead, it ended up being a black mark on an otherwise pretty spotless record (hey, we said “pretty“) with only 10 games and a handful of sales to its name.

In short, it’s a pretty rare bit of kit. Even more so is the 64DD Development Kit — the console Nintendo sent to studios before release so design teams could play to its unique features.

As you might imagine, the Development Kit isn’t the kind of thing you see very often these days, so you can only imagine our surprise when Rerez‘ Shane Luis took to BlueSky yesterday to announce that he had been asked to verify and photograph one for a game collector, new in box and everything!

An opportunity like this wasn’t one to be wasted, so Luis documented the unboxing process with a series of sweet snaps in a long BlueSky thread. We imagined that such a niche add-on would be precisely the kind of thing that you lovely lot would like to check out, so we have gathered together a selection of Luis’ images (made publicly available via Internet Archive) and laid them out for you below.

We’ll start off with the box itself:

Next, onto the guts. The box contained two pages of official Nintendo documentation written in Japanese (obviously). Luis shared the original on BlueSky, but user Cheesemeister provided the following translation:

The Dev Kit itself appeared wrapped in plastic under a cardboard lid. Here it is snapped from all angles:

Before we get onto the peripheral all stacked up as it should be, here’s a closer look at the other items included in the shipping box — unused development disks and labels, an N64 cart, and two cart adapters ‘N64JOINT-01’ and ‘NUS DCC-00’:

And when you compile all those pieces together, you get this almighty stack:

It’s quite the looker, eh? If you want to read all about the history behind this infamous Nintendo flop, our sister site, Time Extension, provided a full rundown of the peripheral’s development and launch earlier this year. You’ll find that history lesson in the feature below.

What do you make of this unboxing? Anything in particular that catches your eye? Let us know in the comments.