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:
Cheesemeister (@cheesemeister.bsky.social)
Here's my translation of the #64DD devkit documentation. Disclaimer: this is provided for informational purposes only, not for actual usage. I am not responsible for any damage to anyone's hardware. Consider independent verification and proceed at your own risk. [contains quote post or other...
bsky.app
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.
