DonFerrari said:
Soundwave said:
I think we'd be surprised how chaotic and (not sure if this is the right word) unprofessional Nintendo was with hardware design in the 80s/90s. It was very much a fly by the seat enterprise and Yamauchi was often all over the place and Nintendo's own internal teams were at each other's throats. There was a lot of crazy things going on. We'd like to think there was a lot of logic to decision making, but in studying Nintendo (and Sega too) of the 80s/90s you start to realize there was a lot of egos and frankly pig-headed management decisions that were all over the place. For starters, how did Nintendo ever even sign the initial contract with Sony that gave them licensing fees for CD based games on a SNES CD-ROM was insane. Did no one bother to read the document before they signed it? Did they properly vet it? I don't think their legal department at the time (they signed this deal in 1988) really was up to snuff. Someone had to have been fired over that gong show. By the early 90s they realized they had signed a terrible deal and had to weasel out of it, my question is why would you even allow to be put in that bad of a spot in the first place. You would think that might be a one off thing but Nintendo did the exact same thing with the Game Boy, they had an agreement with Citizen to make the screen and they then reneged on the deal after Citizen had been told the deal was theirs and went with Sharp instead, spurring Citizen to go work with Sega on the Game Gear. The SNES I believe had its CPU scaled back almost at the very last minute on Yamauchi's orders. The GBA's display was changed very late in development for a terrible version of the screen too. The decision to go cart-only with the N64 I'm sure was filled with a lot of stupid politics that didn't make sense. There's a lot of egos at Nintendo and Yamauchi encouraged the dev teams to basically be hostile to each other too in vying for his love/attention. We kinda forget, Nintendo wasn't really always a game company, they were a random small Japanese company that got thrust into making video games and home video games in particular due to the unexpected success of the Famicom and really was making up the rules as they went along in many instances. Cartridges had some advantages yes, although Nintendo also demonstrated that Super Mario 64 was able to run on the 64DD with fairly minimal load times ... the 64DD had disc read speeds about roughly in line with a 4x-8x CD-ROM drive. The timing was kind of bad too, CD-ROM prices plummeted in 1996 and especially 1997 and 4x CD drives were all over the place by 1997, if that had happened maybe even a year earlier maybe it would have been more obvious to Nintendo. Because CD-ROM was basically became the epitome of cheap tech, ironically the 64DD was almost certainly more expensive hardware than what a 4x CD drive would've cost by the end of '97. We saw also, Sony had no problem basically cutting the price of the Playstation to match any price cuts Nintendo did because the price of the CD drive became negligible as 1997, 1998 wore on. Every time Nintendo tried to cut the price of the N64 to give them more market traction, Sony would just respond by cutting the Playstation's price too. |
I don't think Nintendo decision had to do with the price of the drive or it not being mainstream. It likely had more to do with the fumble of Sega-CD, CD-i and a plethora of other CD based consoles that came before N64 that they likely used to validate their decision and them became surprised that PS1 found success. |
There were probably a bunch (of stupid) reasons.
I think for one, as much as I like Miyamoto, he should not have been allowed to influence hardware design to the degree that he did. A console has to be made to work for a wide variety of designers including 3rd party partners. Yes, Mario 64 may sell 10 million copies ... but how many games did Capcom, Konami, Squaresoft, Enix, EA, Acclaim, Activision, etc. etc. sell combined on the SNES or Playstation? Probably a shit ton more than 10 million copies, of which Nintendo got a $10 cut of every copy for basically doing nothing. That said as I've stated it never had to be an either/or case scenario anyway, Mario 64 was brilliant and could have ran just fine off a cartridge slot, no one is saying you have to lose the cartridge slot, the Saturn had one and a CD drive no problem.
The Sega CD and CD-i weren't successful but the Sega CD was an add-on after all ... Nintendo's own Famicom Disk System only sold 4.4 million units for example, Nintendo should have known not to judge a tech based on what it sells as an add-on. The Philips cd-i barely had any games one could take seriously.
I believe Nintendo had also at the time made a big investment in a cartridge manufacturing factory and they probably did not want to lose face by going with CD. But you shouldn't be making hardware decisions that impact a company for 5+ years on the basis of one factory investment. It's just not sound business logic.
