Nintendo has patented a home console concept that does not include an optical disc drive. It may or may not be for the company's mysterious upcoming game console, codenamed NX.

Look, ladies and gentlemen, there's no disc drive anywhere...

As seen in a Nintendo US patent discovered by astute NeoGAF readers, this upcoming hardware's early version version didn't include such a drive.

"The example system is not provided with an optical disc drive for reading out a program and/or data from an optical disc," the patent stated. "An example system includes an internal hard disc drive storing a program and/or data, a communication unit transmitting/receiving a program and/or data via a network, and a processor executing a program stored in the hard disc drive to perform game processing."

Furthermore, it appears that the console's controller will include its own "display unit", ala the screen on the Wii U GamePad.

If it is for NX then there's still always a chance things will change before launch. After all, the Xbox One nearly didn't have a disc drive, we discovered after the fact.

Nintendo teased the NX back in March, but didn't reveal anything about it other than it's a "dedicated game platform with a brand-new concept" and more details will be revealed next year.

We've reached out to Nintendo for comment on this one, but it seems unlikely that we'll receive any confirmation one way or another this early. In the meantime, try to take this with a grain of salt.