The other thing is the N64 era really is the strongest 1st party Nintendo era and they kinda squandered it.
You have to understand having Rareware at that time was like having EAD x2 and Nintendo never really had that for any other generation.
So the Nintendo that Sony was actually up against had they retained their developer support would've been much harder to compete against than any other version of Nintendo quite frankly.
It's hard enough to keep pace with things like Mario 64 and Zelda: OoT and Mario Kart 64, but now throw in GoldenEye, which is an industry shaking blockbuster that basically starts the console-side FPS genre (which is huge to this day), and support titles like Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, Jet Force Gemini, Blast Corps, etc.
I think Nintendo knows they should have compromised on the CD-ROM issue specifically with Squaresoft who was basically a Nintendo 2nd party to that point and was just coming off making Super Mario RPG for Nintendo. Sony simply would not have been able to compete with Nintendo AND Rare AND Squaresoft and that would've created a snowball effect where other devs prioritized
the N64 platform more.
You can also see here the N64 running basically a "Playstation speciality" type game in Resident Evil 2 (which Angel Studios performed a miracle on to compress down onto a 64MB cartridge, massive for the time):
Aside from FMV cutscenes obviously being better on Playstation due to the simple factor of storage space, the N64 version looks notably better. That gap would be even larger if the N64 had CD-ROM, the video bits would look the same but for in-game the textures would've had more space to look even better.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 06 September 2020
