The Famicom: more than just a game console

Ever since the release of the Steam Deck, which allows you to play PC games on a handheld game console, the distinction between a game console and PC has been significantly blurred. But what if I told you that all the way back in the 1980s, the difference between a PC and game console was already becoming indistinguishable, and that the console we got in the West as the NES was supposed to be a general-purpose computer?

The Famicom: a Family Computer

While Nintendo had previously flirted with video games with the Color TV-Game, home consoles that could only play one game each, Nintendo really became a household name with the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), a system originally released in 1983 as the Family Computer, or Famicom in Japan.

The name Family Computer alludes to the fact that it was originally envisioned as a computer masquerading as a toy by Nintendo’s late president, Hiroshi Yamauchi. This would make the Famicom less intimidating than a PC and would be something even kids could have fun with. He appointed Masayuki Uemura as head of Nintendo R&D2, the new hardware division of the company, to design what would become the Famicom.

“It was why the machine would later be called Yamauchi’s Trojan Horse: It slipped into living rooms with nothing but a pair of controllers, innocently toylike, yet it included the capability to do far more than play games.”

― From Game Over, Press Start to Continue: How Nintendo Conquered the World (p. 34)

Famicom addons

Sure enough in 1984, a year after its release, consumers got Family BASIC, which let anyone program the Famicom using its dialect of the BASIC programming language. It included a keyboard that connected to the expansion port in front of the console to make programming easier.

Out of the box, it came included with a few programs: Calculation Board, a calculator, Music Board, a music sequencer, and Message Board, for writing notes. A nearly identical version of Family BASIC, called Playbox BASIC, released for the Sharp C1 TV-plus-Famicom combo system, comes with Biorhythm Board instead of Message Board.

It also had a manual that showed you how to make eight different sample games with BASIC, including Route 66, a top-down driving game, Type Master, a typing game, and Sample Program 8, which the manual insists is just a tech demo, not a game.

Many third-party games and programs made in Family BASIC were distributed in books and magazines like Program Pochette, Micom Basic and many more. Like the examples in the Family BASIC manual, these were lines of source code that you would have to type into your Famicom manually in order to run.

Although most of the examples focused on games, Family BASIC was a complete programming language, so you could make anything you wanted. If you knew how the hardware worked (or were patient enough to figure it out), you could even unlock the Famicom’s full power by calling low-level CPU instructions with the CALL function.

Alongside Family BASIC, you could also buy the Famicom Data Recorder, to save your programs to a cassette tape. This was identical to a normal tape deck, on which you would hook up the microphone and speaker ports to corresponding ports on the Famicom Keyboard.

It wasn’t until the release of the Famicom Disk System that the Famicom could use floppy disks. Rather than normal floppy disks however, Nintendo came out with a proprietary disk format called the Disk Card, which slotted into the disk drive part of the addon.

The main use of a Disk Card was to take it to Disk Writer kiosks at game stores where, for just ¥500 (~US$4.46 in 2025), you could overwrite it with a new game from Nintendo. With disks being cheaper than Famicom cartridge games, and with game cartridge rental becoming functionally illegal with the Japan Copyright Act of 1984, the Famicom Disk System managed to sell 4.4 million units before it sales ended in 1993.

Certain Disk Writer kiosks were also fax enabled. Some Disk Card games would write your scores to the disk, and you would take it to one of these Disk Fax kiosks to fax your scores to Nintendo, allowing you to participate in a nationwide leaderboard. It’s a bit of a stretch, but you could arguably call this Nintendo’s first “online gaming” service.

Famicom Network System

Yamauchi was a staunch believer in Nintendo as more than just a game company― he wanted his company to be a key player in the upcoming Information Age. In a speech given to his employees, he proclaimed:

“From now on, our purpose is not only to develop new exciting entertainment software but to provide information that can be efficiently used in each household.” Translation from Game Over, Press Start to Continue: How Nintendo Conquered the World, p. 77.

The keystone to this vision was the Famicom Network System, developed in cooperation with Nomura Securities, a stock brokering company. Nintendo would build a modem for the Famicom, and Nomura Securities would build a database that could be reached using the modem to access up-to-date stock market data.

According to Uemura Masayuki, Nintendo R&D2 “wasn’t confident that they would be able to make network games entertaining,” but with Nomura Securities handling development of the database, Nintendo figured that the infrastructure would already be in place and they could figure out making online games fun later. Ultimately, this meant that few games were actually released for the Famicom Network System aside from Konami’s Tsuushin Shogi Club.

Instead, the Famicom Network System launched with exciting titles like Nomura no Famicom Trade, which allowed you to trade on the stock market. You would insert the Tsuushin Cartridge (“Communication Cartridge”) into the modem, and with the number pad on the Famicom Network System’s special controller, you could choose which stocks you wanted and in what quantity.

There’s also the Famicom Fitness System, developed jointly with Fukuoka University and a few other companies, that allowed the Famicom to read data from an exercise bike. It was marketed to fitness gyms and medical institutions, and was scheduled to be marketed to the general public in December 1990, but it is unknown if this ever happened.

What eventually killed the Famicom Network System was the onset of the Lost Decades, a period of nationwide economic stagnation, starting in the early 90s. With stock trading comprising much the Famicom Network’s traffic, consumers’ plummeting interest in stocks was the final nail in the coffin for a service that was already difficult to set up and use.

In the West, Nintendo hoped to create a similar network to the Famicom Network System in the United States with partners like AT&T and Fidelity Investments, but the idea came under fire when a program to play the Minnesota State Lottery was announced. Concerns over underage gambling were raised, and the NES modem was killed before making it to market.

Legacy

Despite its demise, some of the ideas behind the Famicom Network System were recycled for the Satellaview, a satellite service for the Super Famicom (known as the Super Nintendo in the West). Satellaview allowed users to receive satellite broadcasts to download games, magazines, and other media.

The horse betting program JRA-PAT, being one of the most popular applications, was re-released for the Super Famicom. As time marched on, internet connectivity became the norm with consoles like the Sega Dreamcast, which had an inbuilt modem and yet another re-release of JRA-PAT that had excellent music.

Nowadays, we often take both our PCs and the internet for granted. Everywhere we go, we are constantly connected to services that let us do everything the Famicom could do and more. But for a time, not every home had a PC. You might just have a TV, a landline telephone, and a Famicom that was more than meets the eye.

Your game consoles are so much more

Even though Nintendo no longer designs game consoles to be general-purpose computers, most game consoles nowadays are essentially PCs with specialized gaming hardware.

The original Xbox (short for DirectX Box), is really just an x86 Intel Pentium PC with a customized version of Windows for gaming.

Linux on the Playstation 2 and 3 were officially supported by Sony with PS2 Linux and OtherOS. This was such a useful feature that researchers built compute clusters using PS3s to speed up black hole simulations, cryptography research, and analyzing satellite imagery. When Sony removed the OtherOS feature in 2010, a class-action lawsuit was brought against them, proving that people really did care about Linux on their game consoles.

The Nintendo Switch is an ARM-based computer capable of dual-booting into Linux and Android with Switchroot. Using Linux on the Switch is great because you can carry it around to do most things you’d do with a PC, and it even comes with a convenient dock so you can connect it with a keyboard, mouse, and monitor when you’re at home.

The catch? Nintendo makes it as hard as humanly possible to do so. Developers had to hack the device by shorting two pins on the Joycon connector to gain access the bootloader and install other OSes. When this was publicized, Nintendo changed the hardware so you now need to install a modchip to do so, requiring incredibly precise microsoldering skills.

In our hands, we hold the ghost of Nintendo’s dream: a Nintendo computer in every home that could be your portal to the world’s information. In a way, Nintendo got that wish― it’s just not profitable for them anymore.