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Nintendo - Nintendo What-If? - View Post

Soundwave on 07 August 2016
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bdbdbd said:
Soundwave said:

It's actually somewhat hillarious that going into the N64/PS/Saturn era, Nintendo effectively had DMA Design/Rockstar (future makers of Grand Theft Auto), Squaresoft (Final Fantasy, Super Mario RPG), and Enix (Dragon Quest) basically as 2nd party developers. 

Talk about squandering an incredibly favorable position. Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and GTA could indeed all have been Nintendo exclusive (two of the three already were basically at that point). 

This was Nintendo's "dream team" -strategy; having only selected developers that Nintendo would publish their games. 2nd party was essentially how Nintendo it with NES. The reason for the dream team was because Nintendo believed 3D game development would be so expensive, that most of the industry would go bankrupt. This would ensure the best developers would survive. Of course, the strategy would fail - not because of cartridges or costs associated, but because of the obvious lack of developers, i.e games, on the system. The time Nintendo woke up to the situation, it was already too late. Gamecube, on the other hand, was designed developers in mind (ended up being even worse).

Soundwave said:

Cartridge decision had nothing to do with piracy. 

CD-ROM piracy was pretty much unheard of in the early/mid-90s that was never the issue. I remember seeing a CD burner for the first time in like 1996, they were still rare until the later part of the 90s. 

There were various factors, I believe Nintendo had made in the early 90s a large investment in a cartridge factory, and they were reluctant to lose money on that investement. Beyond that developers like Miyamoto didn't like CD-ROM because of loading times. 

Mostly it was likely just arrogance and a lack of vision at the heart of it. Also Miyamoto should've known his place, he's a developer, it should not be his place to dictate company policy and direction. Nintendo could have easily released a N64 with both CD and cartridges, a cartridge slot costs next to nothing if Mario 64 wasn't possible on CD. Never should've been an either/or decision. 

Actually, they did have a lot to do with piracy - though it certainly wasn't the only reason - I don't think it was home piracy Nintendo was worried about, but the mass producers, it really wasn't a stretch to find a store selling pirated NES games circa 1990.

In 1995 CD-burners were already widely available, but the reason you did not see a lot of piracy was because of the cost of a CD-R disc. 1996 or 1997 prices of the discs had already dropped to a level where it made sense to actually pirate a game. Keep in mind that at this time you actually had to have the physical copy of the game in order to have the image.

By 1998 or 1999 it already made sense to pirate only the blockbuster games, because everything else would be sold at the price of a CD-R shortly after launch - leading to a situation where only "dreamteam" would make money off their games.

N64 had the disc drive (in Japan), that would cost only a fraction compared to cartridges  to release games to, but it never took off with 3rd parties.

The decision to use cartridges for the N64 was made in 1993 or early 1994. This was like 4-5 years before CD-ROM piracy actively became a thing and CD-burners weren't available at that time. 

I doubt it had a significant impact on Nintendo's decisions at that time. In 1993, having a computer with just a regular CD-ROM drive was considered all fancy schmancy, lol.

I remember following the N64's development like crazy, in those days I would go to the book store the first day they got a new issue of EGM or GameFan looking for new N64 info. I still remember reading the N64 wouldn't support CD-ROM in that book store all those years ago in early 1994 and this big sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach like "uh oh ... this feels like a massive mistake". I followed every bit of the N64's development. 

Sure enough I don't think Nintendo has ever really recovered from that mistake in the console business. That decision is where everything went wrong for Nintendo, if they had chosen to compromise instead and included CD for third parties and let Miyamoto and his EAD team use cartridges, hell they could have done CD + cartridge combo games too to save on expensive cartridge sizes (game data could be on the cart, orchestral music and FMVs could've been on the CD disc).