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[DonFerrari]

d21lewis said:

DonFerrari said:

Your list is fairly accurate, yes it wasn't loyalty to Sony, but several of them were already tired of Nintendo. And if MS could moneyhat most of them to make multiplats even during Xbox original years I don't see why Sony wouldn't have done it to secure those titles.

It isn't really a case of just the CD made everything change, Saturn had CD and was a bomb worse than N64, so what is there to assure that Nintendo couldn't do even worse if they had gone with CD. Like a system that ended up worse and the Mario 64 and Zelda ended up being much worse game. It would be possible that their first year that was great became bad.

I agree with you. And, until somebody invents time travel, all we can do is speculate on what could have been instead of appreciating what actually did happen.  Hell, a CD based N64 may have resulted in countless house fires. It's fun to imagine what if, though!

And I'll give credit where it's due. Sony created a really well rounded machine. The best machine. That didn't happen by accident. It didn't have the glaring issues that other consoles that tried to break into the market had (overpriced, terrible controllers, etc.). They deserve the success they had and have...even if I am a Nintendo Fanboy at heart.

Well I'll admit I'm a little to attached to reality for what if scenarios.

But as people said one of the premises OP didn't put was that most likely without Nintendo leaving Sony, the N64-CD would likely not see a rival in Saturn that blundered by themselves. But not sure how would fold the deal Nintendo and Sega had over the CD.

danasider said:

DonFerrari said:
I just think it is funny that most seem to be taking a very rose glassed alternative reality option. One where Nintendo having CD would make everything right.

Where we could alternatively have a CD on N64, but the rest of the HW because of this decision end up being a Saturn equivalent... See Sega had established brand power, CD, but still couldn't outsell even N64.

So Sony wouldn't just drop all those sales just because CD was available on N64. As put before, GC had DVD and failed even harder than N64 (and at that point Nintendo should bee humbler right?), Wii didn't even try to compete anymore.

GC didn't have DVD. A special edition that was tons of money and only in Japan (through a partnership with Panasonic) brought DVD to GC, but the ones in America and in 95% of GC had proprietary mini discs. Again, a huge mistake on Nintendo's part, because to get the type of media in games like FF10, they'd likely need 4 or 5 mini discs. Resident Evil 4 required 2 and that doesn't have nearly the amount of video and sound in something like FF10.

But the GC also was a marketing failure because of its toylike appearance compared to PS2's media center friendly image (that and PS2 was up there with the best DVD players out).

In contrast, N64 was actually a huge hit on release. It failed because it had a drought of games after launch, and it lost a lot of its big partnerships...much of which was due their use of cartridges.

FF IX had 4 discs, fantasmagoria 20+, even X360 had multiple discs. It didn't prevent games to happening, even more in the case of FF that you progress one CD at a time and don't have to put back. So having 5 discs for FF wouldn't be to much of a problem anyway.

Not sure how much the toylike image and marketing influenced, but yes I would agree it may have been considerable.

Err I'll repeat myself that a lot of it had to do with Nintendo relationship issues just as well. Sony would have been stronger on it than Nintendo. Sure I agree that N64-CD could/would do better with CD than cartridges, but not enough to tip the scale. Something more like 70-50 win to PS1. I don't see N64 overdoing SNES sales by much.