July 15th 2013 marks 30 years since Nintendo released its second (or 6th, depending how you look at it) home console system, the Famicom. Without it, or perhaps more accurately, without its western world sibling – The NES – gaming today could well have ended up looking quite different. Instead of reeling off facts and interesting Famicom tidbits, if you’re interested I highly recommend checking out this feature length article published today on arstechnica. In it they discuss the machine’s history, it’s hardware and the future of gaming that it helped to create.
So to some it may seem sacrilegious, but it kinda fits that I dump a picture and link to this mildly interesting but mostly crappy looking Famicom handheld that cropped up on DX a while ago. The machine looks like it was cobbled together from leftover bits of plastic they found lying around the factory floor, but it does have a Famicom compatible cartridge slot on the back which has got to count for something, right?