N64 dev spent 2 years making games for the ill-fated 64DD add-on, only to have Nintendo continually say they sucked and to "start again from scratch": "It was just really degrading"

The 64DD is one of those infamous little failures that lives in a special hall of shame among Nintendo fans. This N64 peripheral launched, after many delays, at the tail end of the console's life, received just a handful of games, and was discontinued barely a year after its debut. Still, Nintendo's desire to see the 64DD succeed seemingly had the publisher coming down hard on the studios it had contracted to make games for the device.

Released exclusively in Japan on December 11, 1999, the 64DD was a disk drive for the Nintendo 64, adding support for rewritable storage disks on the console alongside a real-time clock and internet connectivity options. As it suffered years worth of delays, many games planned for the accessory – notably Pokemon Stadium and the Zelda spin-off that would become Majora's Mask – were eventually converted to pure, traditional cartridge releases.

One of the studios making games for the 64DD was Digital Eden, a new company created by former employees of arcade developer Seibu Kaihatsu, best known for the legendary scrolling shooter series Raiden.

Programmer and translator Richard Honeywood tells Time Extension that Nintendo contracted Digital Eden for a 64DD through a "special second-party agreement," where "if we locked it to Nintendo hardware, they would fund us, and it was a great deal." The company would also get tech assistance from HAL Laboratory, another Nintendo second-party, including support from future Satoru Iwata, who was then head of HAL.

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"We got the money, we got the hardware, and we also got technical assistance in the form of the head of Iwata-san coming over once a week to discuss and see how we're going," Honeywood explains. "They also said that we'd meet with Miyamoto-san regularly to see how the game's going and receive his feedback. So, of course, we thought, Well, god, that's too good a deal to resist, and we went with it."

While Iwata treated Digital Eden "as if we were part of his team," Nintendo itself was not so kind. "Eventually, the feedback we were getting for each game idea that we presented to Nintendo was just like, 'That's no good. Start again from scratch,'" Honeywood says.

"It was really blunt, which is something Japanese people usually word around. So, it was a shock. Also, this included Miyamoto-san, and he was a god to us. Sometimes they'd even say, 'We like that idea, we might use it for another title, but the rest, scrap it.' And that was our feedback every month."

Honeywood says Nintendo was interested in a shooter in the vein of Raiden, but the devs at Digital Eden didn't want to do anything so similar to its previous work. The project they wanted to make was a low-violence action game featuring kids fighting with water pistols and water balloons – not too far off, spiritually, from what Splatoon would be many years later.

"Nintendo allowed us to go with that for a while," Honeywood continues, "but because we weren't showing much progress, it was clear that they were coming down on us more, saying things like: 'Soon you're gonna have to have something playable/marketable that we can sign off on, otherwise we'll have to start talking about how much we continue funding you.'"

This uneasy process lasted for "about two years," Honeywood says. "The first 3-6 months were just learning, but the rest of the time was giving them a prototype of a new idea every month with a quick proof of concept, then having it just be ripped apart in the nicest possible way. It was just really degrading."

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