Pretty interesting off-topic conversation you had there.
First: The disc media in GC is physically DVD (as windbane said) and is customized by Matsushita. The customisation is, that the disc is read outside-in, while the disc rotates in standard direction. The reason for this is faster startup time (actually PSX did read its discs too in the same direction, but the disc rotated in non-standard direction) and games harder to pirate.
Second, NES had a disc drive too, but not optical and disc drives were used a long time before it.
And how Nintendo fucked Sony up in the first place was, that Nintendo and Sony had a contract about a SNES, that could play SNES games and disc based games. The contract granted Sony 25% of all the consoles and its softwares profits (which apparently wasn't clear for Nintendo, since Yamauchi got really mad about the contract) and Yamauchi signed out from the contract when he found out about the profit split and teamed up with Philips. Sony continued the developement, and came up with Play Station, which could play SNES and disc games. Nintendo tried to prevent the launch of the console, but based on the contract made in 80's, court gave a permission for Sony to launch the Play Station.
If i'm not mistaken, Play Station was sold a couple of units before Sony pulled it out from the market to team up (again) with Nintendo for SNES CD-ROM.
Ei Kiinasti.
Eikä Japanisti.
Vaan pannaan jalalla koreasti.
Nintendo games sell only on Nintendo system.
