Even the most vehement Nintendo fan in the world can't possibly have access to one of many Nintendo's storage rooms, where an expansive array of nostalgic paraphernalia sits. Boxes upon boxes of classic consoles and games fill up the storage room, the mere presence of which is a surefire trigger for Nintendo loyalists to untether themselves away from their current lives and instead bask in their turmoil at the sight of Nintendo products tucked away in secret.
Today, Nintendo of Japan has given us all access to one of the company's secret storage rooms as part of Zelda's 30th anniversary. It dug through the array, trying to locate the original Famicom and the Famicom Disk System expansion. In Japan, both systems were needed to play Zelda. This wasn't the case in America, where the cartridges shipped with an internal battery. This was the Disk System's function on Japanese Famicom releases.
Nintendo even unboxed the Famicom, incredibly still in mint condition after 30 years, with the individual parts still wrapped in plastic. To add a nostalgic insult to the nostalgic injury, an old CRT television hovered close, allowing for some test runs of the newly opened Famicom.
More notably, the storage room housed a functioning Famicom Disk System Disk Writer, a bulky monolithic kiosk that wrote games on blank disks. Think of it as a vending machine, only this time you get games. In Famicom's heyday, about 3,000 of these nested in game shops across Japan, amazing how Nintendo still has one, and a fully functional one at that.
Unfortunately, the sojourn inside the storage room only gave us a brief and very limited look at the precious stockpile housed under Nintendo's HQ in Japan. It would have been just as nice to uncover unreleased editions of consoles or unsightly prototypes of Nintendo's hardware or maybe even the Virtual Boy. Still, this inside look casts more than enough nostalgia even for the average Zelda and Nintendo fan.
Nintendo's currently celebrating The Legend of Zelda's 30th anniversary, released back in 1986. Mario mastermind Shigeru Miyamoto designed the game with Takashi Tezuka, and it's one of the most beloved Nintendo masterstrokes of all time. The latest game in the series is the forthcoming Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the Wii U and the upcoming flagship gaming console codenamed NX, which has enjoyed a ton of rumors.
In other news, Nintendo will release a classic edition of the Nintendo Entertainment System on Nov. 11, and it will ship with 30 classic games. It will look exactly like the original, with buttons, casing and color scheme carried over faithfully. The only difference is it'll be a tad bit smaller since it's a miniature version.
Do you have fond memories of the original Legend of Zelda? Feel free to sound off in the comments section below!
