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Nintendo’s bigger mistake: sticking to carts for the N64 vs betraying Sony?
- Thread starter AztecComplex
- Start date
It was infuriating. N64 at least had some help with the RCP (of course, having your GPU do audio is not the greatest, but it was setup to handle audio too) but the GBA was truly "uh, just CPU it away". I remember the great 3rd party sound engines out there and basically seeing the CPU cost of every additional channel we used, and then the CPU cost of every time we bumped the frequency closer to 44khz (almost nothing shipped like that, even 22 was expensive, so one tended to go much lower and endure scratchy audio to save on CPU). Of course, you could use samples - great! - but the cost was in storing those samples on the cart, uncompressed (not so great). So you end up hurting on both sides...
Well, I don't think they betrayed Sony, but Sony wouldn't have been so dominant if Nintendo used CD's instead of cartridges. It was cartridges that cost Nintendo their third party support. The other problem is that Sony got over a year head start in some regions and close to a 2 year head start in Japan. In the end, I think Nintendo came out okay, but it was a bumpy road at times. Of course, some of that bumpiness had little to do with Sony like the mistakes they made with the Wii U. And Sony had some rough times too with their handhelds and the PS3.
yeah. it's a nonsense question with two completely unrelated options. neither really matters and anyone who cares enough about either thing to have a strong opinion is in too deep. so of course it's a coin flip.
but hey, I'll take this kind of embarrassing gamer bullshit over gamergate.
Had Nintendo gone with CD format, they would have kept all their 3rd party support and remained #1--so in that regard they made a mistake. However, the downside would have been that revolutionary games like Super Mario 64 and OOT would not have been the same. They would have been plagued with horrible load times which would take away from the magical experience. I'm a firm believer that everything happens for a reason.
Also, I strongly disagree with the OP's reference to a 'betrayal' on Nintendo's part. You need to consider the context of the situation. In retrospect, it was a masterful counterpunch move orchestrated to create maximum humiliation to Sony. Nintendo is a very proud company. When Sony (a complete newbie to console gaming at the time) proposed that Nintendo turn over all their intellectual property as part of the deal, Nintendo no doubt saw that as the greatest sign of disrespect and insult. It's abundantly clear that Sony was looking to kick Nintendo out of their own house with such a ridiculous move. So I don't blame Nintendo one bit for handling it the way they did.
Also, I strongly disagree with the OP's reference to a 'betrayal' on Nintendo's part. You need to consider the context of the situation. In retrospect, it was a masterful counterpunch move orchestrated to create maximum humiliation to Sony. Nintendo is a very proud company. When Sony (a complete newbie to console gaming at the time) proposed that Nintendo turn over all their intellectual property as part of the deal, Nintendo no doubt saw that as the greatest sign of disrespect and insult. It's abundantly clear that Sony was looking to kick Nintendo out of their own house with such a ridiculous move. So I don't blame Nintendo one bit for handling it the way they did.
As far as I know those are legit. Also the protocol used on the controller is a modified version of the NES controller's protocol. A & B of the NES protocol map to B & Y of the SNES protocol.
ABXY are great button namings, but even Nintendo knew that Jump should be at the bottom and Dash should be on the left. A should be jump, and B should be Dash. Simple as that.
I'm not so sure. The 64DD version of Mario64 was quickly slapped together by a single programmer for demo purposes and it's load times are almost nonexistent, usually max 1 sec now and then when an audio sample loads. It also has richer audio than the cart version.
I think had N64 been disk (64DD) or disc (CD-ROM) based Nintendo could've worked around the limitations and made something equally, or even more, magical. Plus they'd have had nearly all 3rd parties on board and games could've been $10-30 cheaper across the board too.
I can't believe "betraying Sony" is winning the poll. Not only is it based on a myth, but you guys are fools if you think Sony wasn't gonna create their own console eventually. Sticking with carts for the N64 is by far the bigger mistake.
Those contain a ROM?Is this a cartridge?
Maybe this is also a cartridge!
If I copy a rom to a flashdrive and I set it to read-only, it becomes a cartridge?
Nintendo sticking with cartridges is what caused the huge Nintendo fanboy in me to relegate Nintendo systems to just decent secondary systems.
Being a Nintendo fan in the N64/Gamecube era was a really bittersweet time. I remember all the talk of "this compressed cartridge size" is actually equal to "this much in regular(CD) space" and eating it up.......all the while watching Sony get all these awesome looking third party titles. Then I learned to love actual games over console developers and have been happy every since. Now I'm the biggest fair weather fan there is......lol
Being a Nintendo fan in the N64/Gamecube era was a really bittersweet time. I remember all the talk of "this compressed cartridge size" is actually equal to "this much in regular(CD) space" and eating it up.......all the while watching Sony get all these awesome looking third party titles. Then I learned to love actual games over console developers and have been happy every since. Now I'm the biggest fair weather fan there is......lol
Jesus. That's being overly pedantic and still wrong. But no, because it can be easily set to be written over, it's not designed to hold software reliably for a long period of time. A game cartridge is printed circuits and memory in a... uhhh... cartridge, that carries software for consoles. What you get on the Switch is a smaller version of what you got in previous consoles. I don't understand the need to dispute this.
For the purposes of this discussion it's certainly a cartridge. It's not an optical disc, and not a download. It's a solid state medium.
The "betrayal" of Sony is probably the best thing to happen to both Nintendo and Sony. Sony is surviving because of the success of the playstation right now. Nintendo is once again climbing to peak heights. I don't think that the partnership would've gone too well in the long run because Nintendo has very different business philosophies than Sony and they may have brought each other down if this hadn't happened. I know they may have still split ways and gone the same route, but what I'm trying to say is, it's very likely that things would have turned out significantly different... in a bad way.
For sure. :P I'll agree with that. This is just a highly specific pet peeve that I have. I just have a hard time considering flash cards (as custom-made as they might be) to be the same as the cartridges I've known all my life, when they're not actually interfacing with the hardware the way actual cartridges do, which is what allowed NES and SNES games to have special mappers and chips inside to provide new capabilities to their respective consoles. I guess I'll leave it alone from now on since I'm about the only person in the world that feels this way.
Switch does not use a traditional EEPROM cartridge. The last system to do so was the GBA.
Even Nintendo no longer refer to them as cartridges/Game-Paks; they now call them Game Cards because they are based on the same kind of Flash Card tech as SD cards.
Most people still call them cartridges though. It doesn't really matter in the end, even though modern Game Cards don't have the instantaneous loading that EEPROM does (nor the ridiculously insane pricing :p )
Even Nintendo no longer refer to them as cartridges/Game-Paks; they now call them Game Cards because they are based on the same kind of Flash Card tech as SD cards.
Most people still call them cartridges though. It doesn't really matter in the end, even though modern Game Cards don't have the instantaneous loading that EEPROM does (nor the ridiculously insane pricing :p )
To me, though the decisions were unrelated as I understand it (and I think Sony and Nintendo both have blame for the partnership not panning out), they still go kind of hand in hand in that the cumulative effect of the two really hurt Nintendo for a long while.
If they had partnered with Sony they'd have moved to CD-Rom as that was the plan. Thus they'd have both avoided creating a new rival that's out sold them every generation except for the Wii vs PS3/360 (and a lot of that was the PS3 and 360 splitting the core base so evenly by the end of the generation) and avoided pissing off third parties by sticking with expensive carts and high licensing fees.
If they had partnered with Sony they'd have moved to CD-Rom as that was the plan. Thus they'd have both avoided creating a new rival that's out sold them every generation except for the Wii vs PS3/360 (and a lot of that was the PS3 and 360 splitting the core base so evenly by the end of the generation) and avoided pissing off third parties by sticking with expensive carts and high licensing fees.
Switch 'cartridges' are basically SD cards. They have their own file system that needs to be accessed, and as a result there are load times similar to other types of media, such as hard drives, usb sticks, and optical discs.
Old-school cartridges act like RAM chips. When they are plugged into the console, they are seen as an extension of the console's memory, with the game loaded in. It's like having a game stored in RAM already. That's why there are almost no load times.
Switch cartridge is inserted -> read file system -> load files into ram -> play
Old-school cartridge is inserted -> play
They are fundamentally different approaches.
It's funny to see people in the FFVII thread saying "HA THEY SAID FF7 WOULD NEVER BE ON A CARTRIDGE" don't understand that the old PS1 ad is actually still correct, since the ad refers to traditional cartridges.
Old-school cartridges act like RAM chips. When they are plugged into the console, they are seen as an extension of the console's memory, with the game loaded in. It's like having a game stored in RAM already. That's why there are almost no load times.
Switch cartridge is inserted -> read file system -> load files into ram -> play
Old-school cartridge is inserted -> play
They are fundamentally different approaches.
It's funny to see people in the FFVII thread saying "HA THEY SAID FF7 WOULD NEVER BE ON A CARTRIDGE" don't understand that the old PS1 ad is actually still correct, since the ad refers to traditional cartridges.
Which makes the use of the term "betrayal" even sillier. Really, Nintendo's biggest mistake was trusting Sony when they said they had no interest in developing games...
Yeah in all honesty, people rip on Nintendo for this like it was a open/shut case, but really if Sony was trying to assert that they should have licensing fee control over SNES CD game software ... that's outrageous. There's no way Nintendo could accept that, especially if Sony was disingenuous when they signed the contract in 1988 and made it seem like they were only interested in non-gaming features.
A quote from Howard Lincoln at the time stated that from Nintendo's POV Sony was trying to use vague wording to get control of licensing fees. No console hardware maker could possibly accept such a situation and even if Sony backed off, would you really want to be in business with a company that tried to pull something like that? It would certainly taint the relationship from that point on I would think.
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Ohhh how could I've forgotten!!! 21 years after the market spoke and cartridges lost Nintendo made these and made me eat crow right, what a sick burn!
Don't be ridiculous. Like I said, the market did speak and cartridges lost. There's a reason why no console other than the N64 used cartridges from 1996 to 2016. And 2017 yes the Switch use flash cardswhich are most definitely not the same type of cartridge that past consoles used... if they were then we'd have no loading times whatsoever (BotW on a WiiU disco loads similarly to BotW on a card).
Those cards also come with many of the trappings that 90s cartridges had which are them being exponentially more expensive than discs for considerably less storage space. There's a reason why no Switch game has ever come out on a 50 or more GB card because they're expensive as fuck. Hell, 32 GB cards are rare even! Meanwhile 50GB Blu-ray PS4 discs are the standard.
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Well thank you for coming and offering your very insightful knowledge into this topic you just somehow compared with gamergate. You've made this a better thread because of your thread whining. Please never change!
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OP here: flash cards are not cartridges. Just because they're not optical media doesn't make them cartridges. If they were we would've at least gotten 0 loading times on BotW right? Instead we got load times that were almost as bad as they were on the WiiU versión running on a disc.
I've been on Era enough to know you're definitely not the only one who thinks that. I also happen to agree. Switch flash cards are definitely not cartridges.
Carts were not the problem.
The problem was an intentionally obtuse development kit with limited access. Nintendo wanted the N64 to have the appearance of becoming more powerful over time like the NES and SNES but the N64 didn't use special chips in cart so this would not be possible naturally.
So they limited what features were available to developers with the plan of unlocking them over time so games appeared to get better.
This left developers confused and looking at a system they didn't think could run anything.
Yamauchi also had the idea that if the system were hard to make games for, only really good companies would make games and there would not be shovelware.
The funny thing is both of these strategies had their intended effects more or less, but to such a degree it was very bad for the console.
The problem was an intentionally obtuse development kit with limited access. Nintendo wanted the N64 to have the appearance of becoming more powerful over time like the NES and SNES but the N64 didn't use special chips in cart so this would not be possible naturally.
So they limited what features were available to developers with the plan of unlocking them over time so games appeared to get better.
This left developers confused and looking at a system they didn't think could run anything.
Yamauchi also had the idea that if the system were hard to make games for, only really good companies would make games and there would not be shovelware.
The funny thing is both of these strategies had their intended effects more or less, but to such a degree it was very bad for the console.
You could have any dev kit on the planet, it wasn't going to magically take a 300-600MB game and fit it into an 8MB cartridge.
Yeah to be honest, Nintendo should've nixed any partnership with Sony from the word go. It was clearly an unreasonable contract. Maybe part of the contract was they had to allow Sony to release a CD system at some point.
They basically showed Sony how to make a video game console.
There's no real special secret to making a game console, everyone was making one in the 90s (PC Engine/Turbo Grafx, 3DO, Atari Jaguar, 20 different Sega machines, etc.).
The contract though was one that Nintendo had to get out of.
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What L? That thing ain't a cart and even if it was it doesn't erase that from 1996 to 2017 we saw zero new home consoles using anything other than optical media. Cartridges as we knew them lost and that's not an opinion.
I'm not surprised, really. People nowadays believe whatever crap thrown into their faces without checking tha actual veracity of that information, or simply ignore the facts just because that is the "common sense". Not secret why scumbags like Trump and Bolsonaro got elected, their team knew about this and used to their own benefit.
Betrayal? Give me a fucking break with the fanboyism.
When the Playstation/SNES CD-ROM Add-On was proposed to Nintendo, it was after the two had developed a sort of working partnership with Sony supplying audio chips for the SNES. It was due to Ken Kutaragi's curiosity in the market that Sony even began to consider the gaming industry as a viable business plan for them. Keep in mind, Sony at the time thought gaming was only going to be a fad, as opposed to what we have now. For Sony to change their mind, you'd have to prove that the industry is sustainable yet lucrative. Additionally, what Ken Kutaragi was working on, wasn't a defacto game console, it was an additional sound/CD system due to Kutaragi saw his daughter playing the NES and finding out how horrible its sound design was. Furthermore, Kutaragi reportedly intended to use Nintendo as leverage to allow Sony to produce their own console down the road. This especially makes sense when you consider that Sony included a clause in the contract that said any software that was part of the Playstation/SNES CD-ROM would not only be under Sony's control, but also allow Sony to collect licensing fees from publishers. The framework was there.
In that regard, it's hard to see this as a move that was Nintendo's sole mistake. They didn't even realize the potential was there until they had their lawyers take a look at the contract and its stipulations. If anything, you can argue that Nintendo's biggest mistake is that they didn't do their due diligence to prevent something like this. But in reality, it was a no-win situation from the start: either Sony was going to leverage its new IP ownership and licensing collection, or, they would have left Nintendo behind and started on their own project anyway. It's really just a matter of risk. In this case, Kutaragi was driven and stubborn enough to convince Sony to put two feet inside the gaming industry, and created a success with the Playstation brand.
Having said that, this is why I see the refusal to move to CD as the true mistake. It was the first step in many that resulted in Nintendo being even less developer-friendly as they already were. And that impact was clearly visible in the amount of developers that were willing to work with them and the number of games released for the system. In fact, the legacy of the move is still felt today when you see how developers are apprehensive to work with Nintendo unless they have a surefire success on their hands. Obviously the Playstation brand still exists but at the time, it was a question mark compared to now. No one could have predicted that Sony would evolve into one of the biggest video gaming brands.
When the Playstation/SNES CD-ROM Add-On was proposed to Nintendo, it was after the two had developed a sort of working partnership with Sony supplying audio chips for the SNES. It was due to Ken Kutaragi's curiosity in the market that Sony even began to consider the gaming industry as a viable business plan for them. Keep in mind, Sony at the time thought gaming was only going to be a fad, as opposed to what we have now. For Sony to change their mind, you'd have to prove that the industry is sustainable yet lucrative. Additionally, what Ken Kutaragi was working on, wasn't a defacto game console, it was an additional sound/CD system due to Kutaragi saw his daughter playing the NES and finding out how horrible its sound design was. Furthermore, Kutaragi reportedly intended to use Nintendo as leverage to allow Sony to produce their own console down the road. This especially makes sense when you consider that Sony included a clause in the contract that said any software that was part of the Playstation/SNES CD-ROM would not only be under Sony's control, but also allow Sony to collect licensing fees from publishers. The framework was there.
In that regard, it's hard to see this as a move that was Nintendo's sole mistake. They didn't even realize the potential was there until they had their lawyers take a look at the contract and its stipulations. If anything, you can argue that Nintendo's biggest mistake is that they didn't do their due diligence to prevent something like this. But in reality, it was a no-win situation from the start: either Sony was going to leverage its new IP ownership and licensing collection, or, they would have left Nintendo behind and started on their own project anyway. It's really just a matter of risk. In this case, Kutaragi was driven and stubborn enough to convince Sony to put two feet inside the gaming industry, and created a success with the Playstation brand.
Having said that, this is why I see the refusal to move to CD as the true mistake. It was the first step in many that resulted in Nintendo being even less developer-friendly as they already were. And that impact was clearly visible in the amount of developers that were willing to work with them and the number of games released for the system. In fact, the legacy of the move is still felt today when you see how developers are apprehensive to work with Nintendo unless they have a surefire success on their hands. Obviously the Playstation brand still exists but at the time, it was a question mark compared to now. No one could have predicted that Sony would evolve into one of the biggest video gaming brands.
Nintendo Mistakes (in my twisted mind):
Placement of the A & B buttons on the SNES controller.
Doing business with Sony past the inclusion of a Sony manufactured audio chip in the SNES.
Not switching their business model (and console design) to support an optical drive with the N64.
C-buttons instead of a C-stick with the N64 - I feel like this was to do with the anticipation of having Street Fighter 3 or something on the console.
Smaller capacity optical disks with the Gamecube.
Missing controller buttons with the Gamecube (ZL, Select, and L2/R2)
No mid-generation update to the Wii (Should have had a HDMI port and a scaler)
Wii U should have been a move to the Unified Shader Model and an ARM chip. Even if delayed a year.
In the long run, Sony entering the market was very beneficial for Nintendo. Expanded the potential consumer base that Nintendo didn't have the ability to at the time and since then, they've capitalised on that.
Yeah, of the poll options the cartridge issue is the only one that can be argued as an actual mistake since the Sony contract would have fucked them, but it was more of a gamble that didn't pay off. For their actual biggest mistakes, there's the poor conceptualization of the Virtual Boy and resulting alienation of Gunpei Yokoi and his exit from the company, the total mismanagement of the Wii U's marketing, and the mishandling of the Super Mario Bros. Movie in the 90s.
Handheld mistakes:
The Virtual Boy should have never made it to market
The GBC (and everything after it) should have had either back or front lighting.
The GBA should have had a 224 pixel high screen instead of 160 pixel high. By extension that should have carried to the DS
The GBA should have had 4 face buttons.
The DS should have had an analog stick or nub.
The 3DS should have started with 2 analog sticks or nubs.
The Virtual Boy should have never made it to market
The GBC (and everything after it) should have had either back or front lighting.
The GBA should have had a 224 pixel high screen instead of 160 pixel high. By extension that should have carried to the DS
The GBA should have had 4 face buttons.
The DS should have had an analog stick or nub.
The 3DS should have started with 2 analog sticks or nubs.
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The Virtual Boy and 3DS ones are the only mistakes there. The others were smash hits, in some cases because of those decisions (which kept costs down or kept things simpler for casual players).
The DS sold 154 million bro.
The only system under Iwata that was speced reasonably to what the majority of the dev community was working on was the GameCube.
And the GameCube quite honestly had some pretty impressive 3rd party deals. Got Resident Evil series exclusivity (this is like getting a top 5 3rd party IP today exclusive), several other exclusives from Capcom, got an exclusive Final Fantasy game from Square, got the Sonic series from Sega, got a Metal Gear Solid remake in a deal with Konami, Sega/Namco on board to make F-Zero and Star Fox titles, Link in Soul Calibur, etc. etc. etc. Mario characters in NBA Street, SSX, etc. EA even agreed to use the GameCube logo in their TV marketing.
The GameCube just sold like crap mostly because it was labelled a kids system thanks to some unfortunate design decisions.
By the time Wii U launched most devs were already transitioning over to PS4/XB1 development. If the Wii U was comparably specced to the XBox One at least I think most third parties would've made versions of their top IP for it without much fuss.