Nintendo Co has finally set a release for the N64 DD disk drive attachment for its best-selling games console. According to reports in the Japanese press, the device will be on sale in June 1999 in Japan – it was originally slated for release in Japan at the end of last year. The drive will allow gamers to update games by downloading revisions over the web or copy data from special terminals to be installed in Japanese stores. However, Nick Gibson, games analyst at Durlacher Research, doubts that the device will ever see the light of day in the US or Europe, and possibly not even Japan. He says that Nintendo has not been courting developers to develop the killer applications necessary for the DD’s success and that developers would be unlikely to create games for what would essentially be a subset of a fragmented N64 user base. He claimed that Nintendo was, in reality, ready to drop the interesting but slightly flawed business model that had birthed the DD concept and move right along to its next generation console, buttressing the N64 against the onslaught from new consoles by Sony Corp and Sega Corp with advances in cartridge technology. Nintendo had not returned our calls by press time.
