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Where the Nintendo 64 Failed



Delays, Delays, Delays - While it was the plan from the beginning for the Nintendo 64 to arrive well past the PlayStation and Saturn, delays pushed the system's release back even further. The hardware wasn't to blame, however - all indications imply that SGI had the system finished largely on schedule - but rather a lack of software that kept the system off shelves. This caused Nintendo to miss two Christmases - which even the unflappable Yamauchi said was "a big handicap for Nintendo." By the time the N64 had entered the market, it had to immediately drop its price just to keep pace, and it never caught up to Sony in games released.

Controller Experimentation - For all of the new things Nintendo was trying to introduce with its controller, it nevertheless made them quite intimidating. The camera buttons were small, specifically labeled and left room for only two other action buttons on the face of the control - forcing developers to awkwardly use these buttons for other commands when camera movement was unimportant. The three-armed shaped seemed to disregard the fact that people only have two hands, leaving either the d-pad or the analog stick vestigial when developers (who were already starved for buttons) could have used both. It also made the thing look threatening, like a claw.


Cartridge's Last Stand - While Nintendo saw legitimate gameplay concerns regarding the CD-ROM format, the decision to stick with cartridges was based more in business sense - Nintendo didn't own the CD format, and cartridges would give them greater market control while also limiting problems with piracy. The consequences of this decision were disastrous. Cartridges cost nearly triple the price of CDs to make, and publishers balked at the idea of spending that much money - money that, if the game failed, could not be reclaimed. Cartridge memory also maxed out at a tenth of the space of CD, isolating cinema-addicted developers like Square. While some figured out how to work within the constraints (Angel Studio's port of Resident Evil 2 is a nearly perfect conversion from its PlayStation counterpart), most chose instead to throw cursory support behind the risky, limited format, focusing instead on Sony's system.


The 64DD - A critical but often underestimated misstep, the 64DD writable expansion drive may have been just as crippling to the N64's success as the cartridge format. Announced before the Nintendo 64's release in 1995, its early reveal indicates that it was meant to be integral part of the N64 strategy - not a life-extending stopgap, like Sega's 32X. The list of planned software for the add-on further lends credence to the theory - Earthbound 64, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and the ambitious Miyamoto-helmed Creator project were all in the works for it, and it's even been said that a 64DD Mario & Luigi game was in the cards (Miyamoto admits the project's existence, but has said that he couldn't remember what system it was running on). When the 64DD was all but cancelled, all these games were dissolved completely, or ported to cartridge - making them late to the party, creating a vacuum that Sony was more than happy to fill.