A GameCube that plays DVDs and a Famicom with two game formats built into one box are among the Japanese releases highlighted in BGR’s hardware retrospective. Its selection covers both Nintendo systems and machines made by partners, rather than four entirely separate Nintendo console generations.
Sharp’s 1986 Twin Famicom combined a cartridge slot with the Famicom Disk System. Panasonic’s Q paired GameCube gaming with DVD and CD playback. The 1993 AV Famicom, meanwhile, revised the original system with composite video output, BGR explains.
Before interchangeable cartridges
The fourth entry is the Color TV-Game family, whose games were built in. Nintendo’s own history dates its development of TV Game 6 and TV Game 15 with Mitsubishi Electric to 1977, years before the Famicom.
Nintendo’s timeline also records the Famicom Disk Drive System’s Japanese launch in 1986, the same year the NES launched in Europe. By 2001, the standard GameCube was launching in both Japan and America.
That distinction matters to the roundup: the Japan-only label applies to these particular systems or variants, not to the entire Famicom/NES or GameCube families. The Q’s extra media playback and the Twin Famicom’s combined formats were different takes on hardware whose broader families reached overseas.
Photo: Panasonic Q by Evan-Amos, CC BY-SA 3.0. No editorial edits.
