Yep. 32X becoming an industry punchline and infighting between Tom Kalinksy and his bosses in Japan over their refusal to listen to him on what worked helped doom the Saturn. It didn’t help that the Saturn was geared towards Japanese arcade-goers at a time when the market was shifting away from arcades. The Sega CD did at least give us cool games like Lunar and Vay. I have Vay on Steam, and I’m excited about Lunar Remastered. 

The 360 got a huge boost from Kinect, and Microsoft decided to go all in on it with the X1. The X1 was designed around Kinect. Once people rejected the concept of a Kinect-based console, it’s like Microsoft didn’t know what to do after their silver bullet missed. 

In both cases, they completely misread the market and mistook lucky flukes for long term success. 

Tell you what tho. SEGA CD at least has Android Assault. Robo Aleste. Popful Mail. Lunar. Snatcher. Sol Feace. The fuck did Kinect have?

Ummm… Kinectimals?

Plus, every X1 game was going to be a Kinect game under Microsoft’s original plan.

All four of the console makers did have leadership with foot in mouth disease at the time of their third entries.

Hiroshi Yamauchi basically calling the RPG fans who jumped ship to PS1 hikkikomori.

Bernie Stolar refusing to localize Saturn games and capping it all off with “the Saturn is not our future.”

Ken Kutaragi claiming that people would work extra hours for “599 US dollars.”

The multiple meme-worthy statements from Adam Orth and Don Mattrick. 

Sometimes I wonder if the N64 would've done better if it was disc-based instead of using cartridges, and had a regular two handgrip controller instead of that weird m-shaped one.

It depends. Had they used reg CD Roms. FF7 is on N64 and it gets better 3rd party support. Had Nintendo gone with CD Rom BUT customized with a smaller capacity like they did with Gamecube. The story might not have changed too much. Still, better 3rd party support is likely as even custom discs cheaper than cartridges but most devs opt for Sony still including Square.

In that case I'd rather they used reg CD Roms. I still find it silly how small the GameCube's discs were.

Smaller CDs would've worked well even with the N64, that would've amount to about 233MB of data per disc for like 5 cents a disc, that would've been a massive increase over the largest cartridge (64MB). 

Angel Studios (now part of Rockstar) compressed a 2 CD game in Resident Evil 2 down onto only a 64MB cart, 233MB (x2 discs) and Angel could've ported that easily or basically any other game on the Playstation. 

This is also back in the day when devs didn't really actually use all the space on CDs for anything that vital. Even Final Fantasy 7 the main game data is like only 250MB or something like that. 

But likely Nintendo would have used caddy (covered) CDs, that was the design layout for the Super NES CD-ROM (the Nintendo version, not the Sony one). You can see the discs come in a protective plastic caddy but are otherwise a full size disc. 

The plastic caddy around the disc I believe also contained a lock out chip to prevent piracy and a small amount of storage for game saves. 

That was a Sony thing for a while. Mini discs used the caddy. UMDs and the earliest versions of Blu Ray used a caddy.