Jason Roach lives in a small town in Northern Illinois about 100 miles west of Chicago. A gamer most of his life, Jason was raised on Nintendo systems, so his love for Mario is undoubted. That dedication has also transferred to his two year old daughter who already LOVES Mario. It wasn’t till August of last year that he took his passion for gaming to another level when he created NES cartridges hard drives and sold them as 8-Bit Memory. The very first drive he sold was a 500 MB Mega Man drive and since then his sales have soared. The internet has taken notice, landing him an article on heavy-weight gaming site Kotaku. We ask Jason about how it all started, what challenges he faces and the future for 8-Bit Memory.
How did you come up with the idea for using 8-bit and 16-bit cartridges as hard drive enclosures?
I was looking for a hobby and had actually seen tutorials on sites like Instructables.com on how to create a NES hard drive. I took a look at their methods and improved on them to create what I sell today. The SNES drives were a result of curiosity and experimentation on my part. I’ve never seen anyone else making drives from SNES carts, so it was really cool to take them apart and play around with the design. I actually like the SNES drives a lot more than the NES drives. They’re more compact and just feel nicer in your hand.
