Item — HN Reader

I 'member scouring flea markets for one of these back in the 2000s by bringing a non-adapter copy of Gyromite with me and weighing them by hand until I found one that was ~25% heavier: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/23/how-t...

> NES and Famicom cartridges

They are Game Paks and cassettes, respectively. Of course it's obvious what the author is referring to, but I really enjoy seeing the term “cassette” used for something that doesn't contain magnetic tape, so please pardon my pedantry :)

Peep the Famicom system manual where the cartridge connector is straight-up labeled in English as 「ＣＡＳＳＥＴＴＥＣＯＮＮＥＣＴＯＲ」with katakana furigana (カセット / kasetto): https://ia601903.us.archive.org/17/items/Family_Computer_198...

1 comments

TBH even as a native English speaker who grew up with them, I never realized that "cassettes" were (only) supposed to contain magnetic tape; I just internalized that audio and video tapes were "cassettes" and games came on "cartridges" (regardless of what Nintendo wanted us to call them). A Japanese audience was probably even less inclined to learn yet another loanword to preserve that technical distinction.

> A Japanese audience was probably even less inclined to learn yet another loanword to preserve that technical distinction.

That's what I mean, though, is that my internalized idea of cassette == tape was the one that was wrong. It was one of those words I learned incorrectly as a child based on the observation that everything adults called “cassettes” had magnetic tape in common, not realizing that “cassette” is describing the enclosure instead of the contents and literally means “little box” (case-ette). Nintendo were using it correctly and taught me something in the process and that's why I think it's cool and wanted to share.

Japanese is full of loanwords precisely because those good folks on the other side of the world find so many things about Western culture fascinating.

My Japanese father-in-law even played QB and Safety for his university's American-style football team in the 80s and grew up as a fan of Jack Lambert and Mean Joe Greene.

Many people in Japan are just as much "Americanophiles" as some of us are "Japanophiles".

Their word for (part time) job (as opposed to career position) is literally the German word for "work": arbeit. Of course transliterated with some minor phonetic loss, but that's expected.

For a counterexample in the other direction, the 8-track system uses "cartridge" for its enclosure-with-audio-on-magnetic-tape object.

Early home console players in my country (USA) sometimes referred to game cartridges as "tapes" because of their resemblance to audiocassettes or 8-track cassettes (e.g., "Atari tapes"). In the Homestar Runner canon, Strong Bad has been known to make reference to "Sega tapes".

And then there's the generation of UK gamers who got their games for Commodore or the Speccy, on actual audiocassette for 10 quid apiece at the chemist's. Games on cassette were available on American micros as well, but didn't attract nearly as much interest.

I think the cassette is the thing that holds the media, as opposed to a reel-to-reel tape, which is just on a spool, for example. To this reading, it makes sense to call the game cartridge a cassette, but I haven’t ever heard of carts called cassettes in English.