Quote Originally Posted by Jorpho View Post
I think the market at the time wouldn't have really supported a disk system, in light of how Nintendo was trying to get away from the perception of the NES as similar to all the video game systems that died in the crash. It would have just led to more segmentation and confusion.
A disk drive would absolutely get it away from the perception of the systems that died in the crash. They weren't disk based. It would have made the NES feel more like computers, which weren't really part of the crash. Of course if they were gonna do that, they might as well have gone with the AVS design instead of using ROB to trick retailers into thinking they were a novelty toy.

The main thing a disk drive could've done would be keep game prices down, and maybe ward off that "chip shortage" fiasco from around the time of SMB 2 and Zelda 2. It would really suck for today's retro gamers, though. Magnetic media is pretty failure prone in the long term.