DonFerrari said:
Nintendo burnt bridge with both Sony and Phillips for CD development, so there was little possibility of they going CD back them after that. |
Sony and Philips didn't have a monopoly on CD ROM by the mid-1990s, there were tons of CD-ROM manufacturers at that point that they could have gone with, although I'm pretty sure they fulfilled their contractual obligation to Philips anyway. There was still Hitachi, Matsushita/Panasonic, Toshiba, NEC, JVC, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, that they could've gone with but I don't think Philips would've said no to supplying a CD drive either. I mean from Philips' POV a Super NES CD add-on released late in the system's product cycle realistically was going to sell what? Maybe 5 million units tops? The Sega CD sold 2.24 million life time. An order for N64 CD drives which every system would have to include could net them 40-50+ million orders, that sure beats an add-on, so I think even if Nintendo wanted to work with Philips, Philips would be smart enough to see an N64 CD was a far better deal for them than a SNES CD add-on (add-on's always being limited in user adoption).
Nintendo simply bit way too hard on the CDs aren't suitable for games nonsense. Should have compromised on that but kept the cartridge slot and they could've had cartridge games, which would've allowed Mario 64 to be released no problem, but also benefitted from CD based games. Even cart + CD combo games would've been smart you could keep cart sizes at only 8-16MB and offload extra data like music to a 10 cent CD to save yourself from having to spend on 32/64MB carts. That would've saved Nintendo money that probably would've paid for the CD drive on its own many times over.
Last edited by Soundwave - on 25 October 2022