Nintendo · 1986 · Famicom
Nintendo put rewritable disks in the Famicom and installed kiosks across Japan where you could have a new game written onto your old one for ¥500 — digital distribution, in 1986, staffed by a human being.
The Famicom Disk System launched in Japan on 21 February 1986. It replaced cartridges with proprietary floppy media called Disk Cards, which were substantially cheaper to manufacture, offered writable storage for saves, and added an extra high-fidelity sound channel that compatible games could use — the reason a handful of Famicom soundtracks sound noticeably richer than anything else on the hardware. The genuinely radical part was the distribution model. Nintendo installed "Disk Writer" kiosks in toy and hobby shops across Japan, and announced in 1986 an intention to place 10,000 of them within a year. A customer could bring in a Disk Card they already owned, choose a game from a rotating roster, and have it written onto the disk for ¥500 — about $3.25 at the time, roughly a sixth of the price of a new game — and keep it indefinitely. Contrary to a persistent belief, these were not self-service vending machines; they sat behind the shop counter and were operated by trained staff. It is, in every meaningful respect, digital distribution: a catalogue, a low unit price, no physical product manufactured per sale, and a customer who supplies their own storage. Nintendo built it in 1986 and then walked away from it as cartridge costs fell and capacities grew.