HappySqurriel on 25 March 2007
shams said:
The N64 died for various reasons - this was one of them. Technologically, the machine was INFERIOR to the PS1 - and this hurt a lot in the long term. Carts were also too small, and too expensive - CD's stored 10-100x the data, for a fraction of the price.
Remember that the PSX was out BEFORE the N64 - not the other way around. It had lots of momentum, but gradually died as developers got fed up with it (hard development, low margins, inferior games).
There is far more to technology than storage capacity ...
Nintendo saw the move from 2D into 3D and thought that developers would be looking to produce larger seamless worlds and choose the dramatically higher speed memory cartridge as their format. If you go back and play old N64 games you will find that many of them aged better than similar Playstation games largely because of the cartridge format. Where cartridges failed Nintendo was that they could not hold much full motion video and were too expensive for consumers; this meant that developers could not use misleading advertizing campaigns and consumers would have to pay a priemium for N64 games.
Ultimately, the technology wasn't inferior as much as it was the wrong technology for the time.
