Alternate history: N64 goes with CDs instead of cartridges

[Jon-Erich]

The N64 would have won hands down. There's no question about it. Nintendo would have kept the Japanese support, especially from Squaresoft, Enix, Konami and Capcom and the N64 would have murdered PlayStation in Japan. Also, a lot of people were forgetting that even though the Nintendo brand was aimed at a younger demographic, Nintendo did push hard to get mature content on the N64 especially since they were just coming off the Play it Loud campaign for the SNES. That's the reason the N64 got games like Turok and Goldeneye. This meant that the N64 would have gotten Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Now tithe being said, first party games like Super Mario 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time would have been drastically different because back then, both cartridges and CDs had their advantages and disadvantages and this affected how games on both the N64 and PlayStation were designed. For example, we probably would not have seen a very open Hyrule Field in OOT. It probably would have been more like A Link to the Past's over world only in 3D or possibly pre-rendered. They actually would have been worse in my opinion.

With PlayStation, I think everything would have played out similar to the Sega Genesis. PlayStation would have underperformed in Japan just like the Genesis did but probably would have done very well in the west and would have relied a lot on western third party games, much like the Genesis did. The aggressive marketing still would have been there. PlayStation still would have killed Sega Saturn in the west. In the end I think worldwide sales between PlayStation and the N64 would have been similar to the difference between Genesis and SNES. The only major tossup would have been the European market. Nintendo wasn't as popular in Europe as Sega but I'm not sure if PlayStation would have had the software output to take Europe.

Some people also bring up the fact the N64 launched very late. That would not have made difference. The N64 actually sold faster at launch than both the Sega Saturn and PlayStation did when those systems launched. There was a lot of hype for the N64. The problem is the hype died down after the launch because of the lack of software available which wouldn't have been a problem if they went with CDs.