Fun as it might be to trawl thrift stores and flea markets for a mint condition Famicon and Disk System, it turns out there’s a perfect place to look: Nintendo’s storage rooms.
The company has just dug out a pile of both the consoles and disk systems in their original boxes which appear to have never been opened. It detailed the find in a post whose title Google charmingly translates as “Was sleeping in the back of the warehouse.”
In a testament to either great build quality or the importance of suitable storage conditions, it even turned out an unboxed console worked perfectly, playing Legend of Zelda without any problems – at least once staff had found a cathode-ray TV.
Even better, the search of the storage rooms also found a machine labelled as a disk writer. Whereas the US version of the console only worked with pre-made cartridges, it seems the idea of the machine was to allow stores to make game discs to order rather than have to rely on keeping the right level of stock for each title.