One infamous part of the Nintendo 64 era was that Nintendo decided to stick with cartridges, even though both the SEGA Saturn and the PlayStation 1 were using CDs. Some third-party companies were not happy about this, with the most notable one being Squaresoft. Squaresoft would eventually merge with Enix to form Square Enix in the 2000s, but even before they were known as Square Enix, they were a very big third-party company and one of Nintendo’s most reliable ones.
Squaresoft loved releasing games on Nintendo’s consoles, especially Final Fantasy. That changed when the PlayStation 1 released, and one of the reasons for this is due to the limitations that the Nintendo 64 cartridges had in comparison to the CDs of the SEGA Saturn and PlayStation 1. In fact, in a recently published VentureBeat interview with former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida, he revealed that Squaresoft had even tried to convince Nintendo to switch to using CDs.
Yoshida said that “Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, loved the potential of CDs. His dream was to create a movie-like Final Fantasy game. He was disappointed when he learned that the Nintendo 64 still used cartridges. His movies couldn’t fit there. Squaresoft tried to convince Nintendo to change that plan, but they wouldn’t. They didn’t believe in CD-ROM at all. That’s why they licensed the Super Nintendo add-on project to Sony in the first place, because they believed CD-ROM was just too slow to ever make for a good game system”.
There were some good PS games but I feel like the argument, “use CDs so I can make movies for my games,” was probably not super compelling to Nintendo back then. Or maybe even now.
If that was part of his pitch to get Ninty to switch to CDs, that was a bad idea.
They heard ya, the issue here is that it was far too late to go back.
I wished the 64DD got out of Japan sooner than Nintendo financially feared
64DD disks had a capacity of 64MB
By the time it finally launched in Japan after many delays, 32MB cartridges were already a thing, with many devs shifting development to them. By the end of the N64, 64MB carts were in use and noone cared about the 64DD anymore besides a few niche use cases for the large re-writable storage.
CD were slow as hell. True, they were cheaper and allowed long videos but cartridges were fast and allowed saves without the necessity of buying memory cards. I still prefer cartridges and Switch cards over slow plastic discs.
Probably could have made the n64 a bit more popular but I don’t care, the n64 still remains one of the most iconic consoles to this date and I wouldn’t change a thing about it. Just an overall amazing console that only Nintendo could have done
Typical Nintendrone.
Buddy…this is a Nintendo related forum…what…
Get a f… out if here, dude, this is a Nintendo page
If you play Nintendo 64 and PS1 now you can certainly see some sense in Nintendo’s decision making. I do think the N64 has held up better as a console, both in the quality of its most iconic games and in the overall experience of using the console.
However, at the time it felt like Sony were showing the future and Nintendo were stuck in the past. And Sony were able to attract many more developers to their console as the CDs were cheaper.
Also Nintendo is scared of piracy like no other, so much that they had the horrible decision to make those smaller discs on the GameCube that completely destroyed the chances of ever competing with the other consoles.
Nintendo has never competed with others.
There is always competition in the market buddy
You’re showing your age if you think that’s true
Nintendo 64 still was better than PS1. Sorry this still holds true for me. The PS1 had a good li try but the N64 had more replay-able games I felt like. I have 10xs more time in playing my N64 with half the games than I did my PS1. It was the same with my GameCube as well u til later in its lifespan when it stopped really getting released.
I have the old Nintendo 64 and a lot of games so plzzzz don’t switch CDs for the Nintendo 64
Nintendo famously had a disk drive planned even before the launch of the N64. It wasn’t fantastic, but it was a great compromise for many features including being able to save into the diskette. If only they’d actually released it on time and not charged so much per diskette and the base itself. Even the Sega Saturn outsold the N64 in its home country, a region where Nintendo routinely trounced Sega badly.
Part for part, given the N64s raw power (and excusing its lackluster memory bus), the only thing others had on it was the disc drive. It was the age of long form RPGs and interactive stories dominating domestic sales charts, and Nintendo had Paper Mario. In hindsight, Squaresoft was right.
This has been known since 64 was out, this ain’t news
I just today pulled out my childhood Nintendo 64 so I can play Banjo Kazooie again on original hardware. If it had been on a disk I 100% know it would have been scratched to heck and probably lost withing the thousands of cds floating around the house. Yes I absolutely mean thousands not hundreds. My dad put everything onto cds so he could store crap that noone ever would want or need. Either way we were rough with cds and they easily got lost. The only reason I have an original selection of n64 games is because they were not on disk. I still have star fox, mario 64, Donkey Kong 64, Both Banjo Games. And at least 25 others. If those had been on cd then I wouldn’t have anything. There was alot of things posotive about Nintendo not going to cd and although much easier to lose a reason they went back to cartridges, albeit small one that could very easily be lost. Still I love the durability of the small cartridges over the fragility of the larger disks.
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I do always wonder what gaming history would look like if the Nintendo 64 was a CD-based console. However, in a full circle moment, the Switch uses cartridges that are significantly better than CDs/DVDs/Blu-Rays.
When I look at modern gaming where many games barely allow you to take 5 steps between cut scenes I feel like Nintendo had the right idea back then.
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