Well, my teenage self would have loved to see an indie dev tool like this around in the 90s. The N64 was famously starved for RPGs after the SNES had been one of the genre's most prolific platforms.
My sense is that the N64 cartridge just couldn’t compete with the optical disc formats for content storage as RPGs just exploded in size and complexity at the time. (And way too many rendered cutscenes!)
Absolutely; Square considered targeting the 64DD; but those were like 10% the size of a CD, so it was still a lot more expensive than targeting a CD.
Nintendo considered the load-times of a 2X or 4X CD drive to be far too slow, and 8X drives to be too expensive. PSX load times did really suck; games did things to mask them. For an existing RPG it was still worth it, and with the prerendered cut-scenes that were planned for FFVII it was a no-brainer.
To add to your point, here’s the producer of FFVII, Hironobu Sakaguchi:
“It was starting to become clear to us what the memory capacity for the different next-gen consoles would be. Our games were going to need a huge amount of memory. The Final Fantasy VI CG demo we made for the Siggraph exhibition took 20 megs all by itself. We thought that demo had a lot of visual impact, so there really wasn’t much question about which hardware we would use; if we were going to realize the promise of the demo we had shown at Siggraph, nothing but the CD-ROM format would suffice.
Another reason for choosing the CD-ROM was related to price. I think one of the big reasons the first Final Fantasy was favorably received by players, and the later games in the series gained so many fans, was that you could buy those games for around 5000 to 6000 yen. We tried to have the same pricing for Bahamut Lagoon, Gun Hazard, and our other later Super Famicom games, but using cartridge ROM meant those games had to be sold for over 10000 yen. New players did not flock to those games like they had before. If we used CD-ROM for Final Fantasy VII, we’d be able to have a 2-disc game at a price of 5800 yen. I was hoping it would be possible to make a game that could sell several hundred thousand copies.“
Part of the issue with these sorts of console add ons is that they just split the addressable market further. ISV's either have to address only console owners with the add on, or they can address everybody with the console if they can manage without the extra hardware. Commercially, this can be a hard sell, which makes it difficult to sell the add on, making it even more difficult to write software requiring the add on.
You're being too positive. Only two add-ons in the history of console games have been successful: the Famicom Disk System and the PC Engine CD. All other add-ons have failed to sell enough to warrant vibrant development. Note that both add-ons were japanese successes.
No add-on has been able to survive more than one year outside Japan. Not even PS VR, whose sales are too low.
Despite its success, it still had a lower attach rate than the Famicom Disk System. In terms of software, after the first year no one could make any good money selling Kinect titles.
> Kinect for Xbox 360 continued its momentum in 2011 reaching 10 million Kinect sensors sold worldwide to date. Not only were sensor sales an overwhelming success, but Kinect drove significant game sales with more than 10 million standalone Kinect games sold worldwide to date
From 2011. At any rate, it obviously satisfies the grandparent’s comment on success. (Also, you may be thinking of the Xbox One, which they received flak for bundling with a Kinect)
Microsoft knew add-ons simply do not work long-term. That's why they put a Kinect in every Xbox One's box. Didn't solve the problem of everybody was over with the concept though.
The Genesis had a peripheral like this in the Sega CD; it didn't sell well— mid gen console hardware changes of any kind are risky, but none more so than changing the distribution medium, where you risk bifurcating the audience and alienating those who only have the base system.
I really loved my Sega CD though. Shining Force CD and Corpse Killer (a FMV shooter) seemed revolutionary at the time.
I also had some turn based Dracula adventure game where you chose how to spend your time that was terrifying to me so I once hit the “rest” button in my Victorian era London apartment until it was 1994, which I thought was pretty hilarious ( Dracula would just immediately kill you when you ventured outside but 10 year old me didn’t quite realize how video games worked).
The PS1 didn’t really have those weird experimental FMV games but wow demo disks were my bread and butter for a poor kid.
I had tried the Sega CD, model 2 I think that attached on the side instead of under. They always failed and we ended up returning them. I don't think it was the optical parts if I remember right, something about a poor connection between the two hardware devices.
Sega 32X worked at least, sadly it wasn't very popular either.
If I recall correctly, one of the first iterations of the prototype Playstation was exactly this. The original Playstation started as a collaboration between Nintendo and Sony.
There was the Famicom disk-system released in Japan which (I assume) used the lower port: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famicom_Disk_System - although that was based on floppy disks rather than CDs.
Not to be to nerdy about it but Famicom is the NES, not the SNES. The only thing released that used the bottom slot on the SNES is a Japan only satellite modem.
Was it the first Resident Evil that had the little staircase and door opening animations between rooms? I remember not realizing they were masking disk reads. One of the best subtle UX of all time IMO.
Nowadays it takes regular websites like a full minute to load all the javascript so I've always made it partially into the article when ads start moving content around or I get inexplicably jumped back to the top. A pretty stark contrast.
Yeah Resident Evil would play thematic music and creepy sound effects with a door loading animation. The way they did it almost added to the suspense of the game, so it worked fairly well. You would definitely hear the PSX grinding the CD motor overtime in loading screens though.
It's not JS taking a minute to load, it's just that ads are typically loaded async and from many different origins than the server hosting the site itself. Def worth using an ad blocker or something like Brave which does it by default.
> PSX load times did really suck; games did things to mask them.
It's really highlighted with some of the NES/SNES RPGs that were ported to PS1 - Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 1-6 come to mind. As one particularly egregious example, there's a significantly long pause when entering combat in Chrono Trigger.
At least some of that is down to the port. Chrono Trigger fit on a 4MB ROM and the SNES had 128k of main RAM (256k total), while the Playstation had 2MB of main RAM, so there could have been smarter usage of resources. You could hear the massive seeking going on when it was delayed and this happened at different points in basically all the games in the Final Fantasy Chronicles release.
The CD-ROM is slow though; in an alternative world where there was sufficient RAM to load the entire original Chrono Trigger into RAM, it would take about 12 seconds to read all 4MB of it.
The N64 cartridge format was the biggest mistake Nintendo made with a mainline console. It was like building a formula one car with a gas tank the size of a thimble. The PS1 absolutely ate Nintendo’s lunch in that round of the console wars. Nintendo went from the undisputed champion of 3rd party libraries (with the SNES) to an also-ran.
Sure, Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are classics. But what’s a must-have 3rd party N64 exclusive? I can’t even think of one.
Funny how 'cartridges' beat out discs in the long term in the since that flash memory has eaten everything.
There was this short time in the 1990s when everybody and his brother were inventing some kind of 'disc', for instance there were the magneto-optical discs like the audio Minidisc (love 'em but my Net MD recorder just died) and the MO disc used by the NeXT cube and then there were the "floptical" discs like the ZIP disks and the N64 DD disc.
Writable and rewritable optical discs dropped in price more quickly than anyone thought possible and not long after that, USB flash drives and SD cards where everywhere.
Most portable game consoles since 2010 have been flash-based, often with some kind of modified SD card (e.g. Vita, Nintendo Switch.) I just bought a 256 GB SD card for $20 which is bigger than any commercialized disc even if it is a little pricey for software distribution.
And of course stationary consoles are going towards digital distribution, you can buy a digital PS5 now and a digital XBOX is coming soon and ultimately the storage is... Flash.
The must-have 3rd party N64 exclusives were the AKI wrestling games (The 2 WCW/NWO games, WrestleMania 2000, No Mercy and the 2 Japan-exclusive Virtual Pro Wrestling games). Pro wrestling fans still consider them among the best video game representations of the sport (along with certain PS2 era WWE games and the Fire Pro Wrestling/King of Colosseum series). This was also meaningful at the time the N64 was current because that was also the last time period when pro wrestling was genuinely mainstream popular in the US.
Other than that, pretty much all of the games you'd actually want to play on N64 are Nintendo or Rare games.
You’re absolutely correct, but I’d love to hear more about why Rare is an exception. Is it just because they mostly made games for SNES before N64? If so my recollection was that SquareSoft and Enix (separate at the time, IIRC) were similar until PlayStation enticed them, and in our 20/20 hindsight (FFVII and all) we wouldn’t bundle those Nintendo companies like we might consider Rare.
Again though, you aren’t wrong! Rare covers many of the non-Nintendo greats on N64 (GoldenEye! Banjo Kazooie! Donkey Kong 64! Conker, if you were in a fairly narrow range of maturity!), but they did some Sega before N64 and a lot of Xbox afterward, so I just expect there’s probably some interesting details left to expand here :)
If there’s not much to it other than that they were a shining star with a ton of Nintendo investment, all good.
Rare worked closely with Nintendo on their titles. Nintendo provided top-level support for Rare. They had done fantastic with the Donkey Kong Country series on Super Nintendo, so Nintendo had a lot of trust in them and a great working relationship at a time when the company held their cards a little too closely to their chest. I think Nintendo's dev tooling for the N64 was pretty weak and devs were struggling as it was with the transition from 2D to 3D in the crucial early years of the platform. That coupled with the capital intensity made it prohibitive for smaller studios to develop on. But Nintendo trusted Rare and fronted the capital to publish. Later Rare was acquired by Microsoft.
I remember when my parents brought home Donkey Kong Country around Thanksgiving 1994 when Incredible Universe had it displayed in giant stacks in the video game area. That was such a great game!
Rare during the Nintendo 64 era was a second party developer (developed by an external party, published by an external party), not a third party developer (developed by an external party, published internally by the console manufacturer). Prior to making Donkey Kong Country, the majority of Rare's games on Nintendo were third party games. The Battletoads games were published by Tradewest for example, but they had games published by other publishers as well. I'm not exactly sure of the details how Rare got access to the Donkey Kong IP to make Donkey Kong Country, but I think it was Rare's excellent use of the pre-N64 release SGI dev hardware to model the characters that garnered them favor with Nintendo. Given the landmark success of the series, a strong partnership followed.
Nintendo has always been fond of favoring second party relationships and working tightly with them to create either new IPs themselves, or expand on their existing IPs. HAL Laboratories is famous for Kirby, Super Smash Bros, working closely with Creatures, Inc. and Game Freak on Pokémon titles, and the Mother / Earthbound series, and was so close that their darling programmer and later manager Satoru Iwata became the first president of Nintendo outside of the Yamauchi family. Other strong second party development studios that Nintendo has hitched their horse include but aren't limited to Intelligent Systems (Fire Emblem), Retro Studios (Metroid Prime, though now a first party studio), and Argonaut Software (Star Fox).
Rare was just trying to make games before their eventual partnership with Nintendo grew. I believe I read somewhere though that the relationship started to wane, so when Microsoft started wining and dining studios to build their own second party studio, when they came to Rare, the company saw the dollar signs and promises of more creative agency and decided to hitch to another cart. Since then, the company has released some successful titles since then, but arguably none are as notable as during the heyday of their partnership with Nintendo.
Yeah WCW vs. NWO: World Tour was pretty groundbreaking at the time with the grappling system. It was a sequel to a PS1 game, but the gameplay on World Tour was just so much better. I remember it being a fun multiplayer gaming experience too.
I disagree. I loved that there were no loading times. I always thought PS1 games felt cheap and slow compared to N64 games. Nobody really used the CD space for game content, they just filled it up with ugly prerendered cutscenes, which I didnt care about.
It was a generation later but I remember going to my Cousin Tony's place where I'd play Metroid Prime on the GameCube (disc-based but short stroked) which did a great job of minimizing and hiding loading times and also Mafia on the PS2 where it would seem to take 10 minutes to load a level, then I'd take a long and boring drive across town to some Italian restaurant where I was supposed to shoot the people up but I'd get shot up myself and have to wait through the loading screen and repeat the drive. Maybe if I wasn't an adult with a driver's license it would have been more cool but the difference in loading time was striking.
I agree 100% on the loading times. This is an issue I still have and find myself often just playing something from an old cartridge (N64 or Gameboy) rather than waiting for a modern game to load up.
Developers filled the CD space with tons of textures and cd quality audio. This pushed the visual and audio fidelity beyond what developers were capable of on the N64.
This is why despite having lower polygon counts, Playstation games often look better than N64 games. The former having a variety of detailed textures, while the latter have one low res texture smeared over everywhere.
The texture issue was due to the severely constrained texture cache on the N64, which was limited to 4KB, rather than storage space. Cost was another limiting factor that severely limited storage space. A lot of games released on the N64 were well below the console's maximum game cart limit.
Interestingly the same holds true for the Nintendo Switch: Sakurai mentions how closely he had to work with the development team to compress Smash Bros Ultimate's massive soundtrack. IIRC Smash is on a 16GB game cart despite the console supporting 64GB. Presumably this was done for cost reasons.
I’m not sure if you were around but, at the time, there wasn’t really the concept of being “console exclusive,” it was just the default. PlayStation, PC and N64 were all so different that making a game cross-platform was a real challenge that only really happened after its success was proven on one platform.
Or if it was a movie franchise or something. For instance Batman was released on Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum 48k, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, MSX and PC.
But the games were often developed by completely different teams, sometimes the gameplay was extremely different between platforms.
Haha yes I remember being very confused as a kid that The Addams Family for the NES was a sophisticated game and the SNES game felt like an arcade game. They were developed by totally different teams and were different games that sort of rhymed but the SNES one wasn’t nearly as cohesive or fun.
Even then, cross platform generally meant the same game concept implemented differently. Sometimes the differences were minor enough that it could be hard to tell there were any if just viewing ads for the game. Other times the differences were massive, potentially even shifting the genre of the game.
N64 is a different generation to both GBA and XB360, so you’re not counteracting my core point which is “platform exclusivity wasn’t a thing so much as it was the default position.” The consoles were all too different from each other to start from a cross-platform position. Ports took a lot of additional work, thus the reason they usually happened after success.
GBA was released during that generation, you might as well say XBox wasn't in the same generation because its release date was different than the Playstations.
You can say it and I'll defend your right to say whatever nonsense you want. But it doesn't refute jack.
But if you're really fussed about it, pick one of the other myriad examples. Tony Hawk, SC64, etc.
To be fair, Banjo-Kazooie on the GBA is effectively a completely different game. It bears only a passing resemblance to the N64 games, and is 2-D. The 360 port came ten years later, and the significant effort needed to do so was justified by the game's proven appeal.
Yeah ports existed but they were far more rare then, because as OP said, it required devs to build an entire game engine from scratch for each platform. After the early 2000s, projects like Unreal engine and Unity engine started to take over game development and allow for lightweight porting efforts across all game consoles and PC.
N64 had very few ports and vice versa with the PS1. PS1 had a catalog of over 1000 games but N64 had somewhere around 300, with Nintendo franchises probably forming about 20-25% of the total catalog.
This was also partly because games engineered and designed for the N64's strengths were not suitable for PS1 and vice versa. Porting Resident Evil 2 to the N64 took heroic efforts by Capcom to compress the game into a size suitable for cartridge, for example, and even then they had to create a custom cartridge design for it. StarCraft 64 was clearly quite different gameplay-wise from its PC counterpart as a result of a lack of mouse and keyboard, which are especially important for RTS. It also required a 4MB (RAM) expansion pack to be installed onto the N64 in order to play the full game. Other differences included a lack of voice acting in campaigns as a result of cartridge size limitations.
Ports existed in the SNES and Genesis era (NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Earthworm Jim, etc come to mind). I would argue they were far more common then as the two consoles were not far off in specs and 2D game engines were already mature by then.
I say exclusive because a lot of the non-exclusive games (ports) had severe compromises which meant they were way better on other systems (PS1 or PC). Compare any of the sports games on the N64 to their PS1 counterparts and the difference is stark.
At the time the hardware differences were more significant than they are in modern systems (we're also in an era of diminishing returns on graphical improvements). Playstation 1 had larger storage space and could take advantage of prerendered graphics and full motion pre-recorded video, but the actual real-time graphics were more limited on the PS1 than the N64. The N64 had also created the analog thumbstick, and although Sony would later copy and improve the design with the Dual Shock controller, initially N64 was a far superior platform for games with twitchy 3D gameplay like platformers and even first person shooters. Another factor was multiplayer. For party games, N64 was a superior experience, as up to 4 players could play at once vs. PS1's two controller ports.
At any rate due to these factors you'd have to make various trade-offs when porting a game from PS1 to N64 or vice versa (cut back on multiplayer, reduce textures, adjust controls, compress audio, etc). There was also no such thing as a universal game engine like Unity or Unreal that could cross-compile for both platforms. On each system you'd have to bake an engine from scratch.
Yes. So I'm saying that concentrating on exclusives for comparison might not be a good idea. A game that's available on both PSX and N64 might be better on the former or on the latter. You'd have to look at the specific game.
StarCraft 64 came very late in the N64's lifespan.
It was pretty awful as a console game (as most RTSes would be). It also lacked significant features like online gameplay, voice over cinematics, and significant changes were introduced to make it easier to play with a controller, although none of it worked well enough to make up for the clunkiness of the port itself.
The exception does not disprove the rule. The PS1 had almost 4x more games than N64. If it was trivial to port games then, it would have happened. But of all the generations of consoles past the 16 bit era, that generation in particular probably has the smallest venn diagram overlap of ports available on multiple systems.
Nowadays even indie devs creating experimental games can cheaply port their games to all consoles using a cross-platform engine like Unity or Unreal. Those tools weren't around for that console generation
How does StarCraft 64, a game almost no one plays (despite the original PC version being an absolute classic), refute my claim that ports to the N64 were hobbled by severe compromises? Seems to me that it provides overwhelming support for my claim. The game is absolute trash and not worth playing whereas the PC version holds up extremely well.
The original claim is that exclusives somehow decided the quality of the console rather than the overall quality of the games available for the console.
The conversation then derailed into whether or not multi-platform was a thing back then. The answer is that it was, SC64 is a counter-example to the claim that it wasn't a thing.
There are lots of other games that can be brought up as well, such as Tony Hawks pro skater, as another counter-example.
That generation was the first generation where multi-platform started becoming common. It happened in the earlier generation as well (Street Fighter and Kirby are two easy examples), but that generation is where it started becoming common. It only got more common as time went on.
The mistake people are making is confusing "not as common as it is today" with "not common at all". You can literally find listicles of cross platform games for that generation.
I was there, I was born in 1987, so I lived thru it. And most of the time the "ports" were just new games up to the point of shifthing the genre because of some really limited platforms.
>> At any rate due to these factors you'd have to make various trade-offs when porting a game from PS1 to N64 or vice versa (cut back on multiplayer, reduce textures, adjust controls, compress audio, etc). There was also no such thing as a universal game engine like Unity or Unreal that could cross-compile for both platforms. On each system you'd have to bake an engine from scratch.
> starcraft made it onto that console, that in and of itself negates most of what is being talked about here
Your statement does not in any way negate the statement you're responding to. Or much of anything in the thread for that matter.
The core of what people are responding to is that you state "console exclusives are a scam," which, at the point in time in history we're talking about, is verifiably not the case. You can point to agreements between companies (Final Fantasy VII being the most famous example) but these are not console exclusives in the modern sense. They were agreements, which had a mixture of commercial and technical factors, to make a game on that console. Once that decision was made, it wasn't really necessary to contractually enforce exclusivity because, until the PS4/XB1 era, porting to a different console was really, really hard.
Did companies do it? Yes. Was it planned in as part of the regular flow of developing a video game? At this point in time? No. It was a decision taken later.
Today there are a lot of games that come out for PS4, PS5, XBOX One, XBOX Series One and the Switch. The Switch is quite capable but it is a a much less capable platform than the others so games get "dumbed down" for it or sometimes use radical methods. For instance Control has hardware requirements way too high so it is streamed to the Switch
As for the Sony-Microsoft duopoly though there really is no major difference between XBOX and PS today or between those platforms and the PC platform. I have mixed feelings about that because a lot of games on the XBOX (say Numantia) come across more like a PC game than a console game these days with font sizes that make them not at all cozy from my couch.
Because games back in the 90s weren't developed the same way they are today. The consoles were so different that you had to make significant changes to the games to fit within the limitations of different consoles. This usually meant the game was better on the original than the port (since they'd deliberately designed around that console).
There's plenty of stuff on YouTube showing the differences for different games. Avalanche Reviews did a good video of Resident Evil 2 ports across different consoles and generations.
No, most AAA studios had their own engine which was designed to port to the different consoles.
The only real difference between something like Unreal Engine and what they used back then is that UE won and is the de factor standard whereas back then most were rolling their own still.
I've flagged two MAJOR games studios that were the exact opposite of what you claim: Capcom and Squaresoft. One ported games (PORTED, not designed cross-platform) with some major issues doing so. The other outright didn't.
All you've posted in response is a small number of games that were obviously ported AFTER released (in one case 10 years after).
Unreal Engine has nothing to do with this. It was first released in 1998 as a PC engine, not appearing on consoles until the Playstation 2 era in the 2000s. The 2000s happened after the 1990s.
as stated in another response to you, stop being dishonest in your replies. This distinction of ported vs planned is one that doesn't exist when discussing exclusivity to a console.
It's also not relevant when discussing studio's adding support for multiple consoles to their in-house game engines.
> exclusives are generally a _lock-in scam_ for the companies and say absolutely nothing about the games on a system.
stop being dishonest.
But even if you weren't mischaracterizing my statement, console exclusivity means only that console has the game. Whether it was planned ahead of time or done after the fact is irrelevant, the game is not exclusive when it becomes available for multiple platforms. It's a distinction that does not matter.
You’re obsessed with deceit and dishonesty. First you accuse game developers of a scam (deceit), which I’ve demonstrated it’s not. When I do, you accuse me of dishonesty. Nothing you provided is substantiated with any evidence. On the contrary, everything you did provide brought your argument crashing down.
> Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments, most of which are fallacious. Typically this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.
This is what was actually said
--------
stop being dishonest.
But even if you weren't mischaracterizing my statement ...
--------
Look closer at the definition of ad hominem, I'll emphasize it for you.
__rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself__
It is not an ad hominem to point out that someone is cherry-picking, and it is, in fact, a form of dishonesty.
This is a far cry from your response, emphasis mine
> __You’re__ obsessed with deceit and dishonesty.
Let look back at the definition of ad hominem
> where the speaker attacks the __character, motive,__ ...
N64 had some good games. It's still not even a contest compared to the PS1 which is almost unbelievable as it is a first gen console. Imagine Dell releasing a game console now and that it's game offering would be much better then ps5 and Xbox. It just truly insane to even think about it.
Exclusives drives sales. I like the Xbox more than the playstation but in the PS4/5 era the playstation got the games i want to play so that's what I got.
You are correct, but your statement doesn't conflict with the parent comment. Exclusives are bullshit, and in any case, measuring a console success by exclusives is a poor method.
The method is measuring good games. Which, now, often are exclusives.
N64 primarily shined with four player gameplay. Third parties that focused on that tended to do well. However, besides Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie, Blast Corps, Super Smash Bros (made by HAL Labs), Mario Party (made by Hudson Soft), Diddy Kong Racing (Rare), MLB feat Ken Griffey Jr, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, WCW vs NWO: World Tour, Wipeout 64, Excitebike 64 (Left Field), and NBA Courtside.
Not a ton of stand outs, admittedly. In the first two years of N64's existence, there were only a few dozen titles even released on the console.
Well I recently learned that Goldeneye was ported to the Xbox Live Arcade but then never released, and a few years ago the ported program leaked. It's widescreen and higher resolution than the original, but otherwise the same I believe. I am still dreaming of the day I can get the Xenia emulator properly running that game on linux, which so far has been problematic for me.
Update: the latest version of Xenia for Windows runs nicely for me in proton (installed as a non-steam game in steam as that's the easiest way for me to run it with proton) and the Goldeneye XBLA remaster ran just fine! I plugged in an xbox controller over USB and it ran wonderfully. That was fun! I played through a few levels and it all went smoothly. It seems theres a couple different versions of the goldeneye leaked remaster out there so make sure to try a couple different ones if you have any issue.
It's not the same as the XBLA remaster. The current Xbox and Switch versions are basically emulated ROMs. The XBLA remaster had a lot more changes and improvements like the Perfect Dark XBLA remaster that was released.
I think your point still stands but I think Goldeneye is obviously an example of a great third party exclusive. Controls dont hold up well but that’s irrelevant.
Aside from the PS2, Nintendo owns the top 2 to 4 best selling consoles of all time. All three of them are cartridge based, included their most recent console.
They may have been outsold in the fifth generation of consoles, but first party software gave them longevity that their competitors wish they could replicate. Where is Master Chief and who, Crash Bandicoot, now?
The switch and DS aren't cartridge-based in the same sense at all that the SNES and N64 were though. The progression was generally:
ROM - VERY fast but small
Optical disks - slower but much larger
Flash carts - best of both worlds by the time we started using flash for game consoles
Nintendo f'd up by staying on ROM carts for the N64 because it limited your storage space so much. And the benefit - faster load times - was probably lost on many people. (Notice how no N64 game has loading screens of any notable length). OOT just uses brief fades to black.
If you can consider a Mascot something non-exclusive to the brand, introduced fourteen years after the release of the Xbox, and brought on through an acquisition, then sure.
To a lesser extent they repeated it with the GameCube. Those little mini-DVDs are only 1.8GB.
The GameCube was easily capable of playing the likes of Grand Theft Auto—it was significantly more powerful than the PS2—but those games came on 9GB dual-layer DVDs, so it was just never gonna happen.
The reputation Nintendo had picked up for being the “kiddy console” probably didn’t help either.
> Nintendo went from the undisputed champion of 3rd party libraries (with the SNES) to an also-ran.
And Nintendo hasn't recovered since. The Gamecube had a great library, but very little of it was third party, especially compared to the PS2. The Wii was used as a dumping ground by third parties and just got garbage while the 360 and PS3 got major releases. Wii U was completely ignored, and now the Switch's third party content is either last gen ports or heavily downgraded versions of PC games.
Handhelds, of course, were different. The GBA, DS, and 3DS all had pretty large third party support and high quality support at that.
But that one mistake has hurt them for 30 years. They've had huge waves in hardware sales, but software sales by third parties will probably never reach what the SNES and NES had. People sometimes complain about there being yet another Zelda and yet another Mario, but Nintendo's core series are the only thing carrying their platforms.
The Nintendo Switch is the second best selling console of all time, with over 132 million unit sales. It outsold the PlayStation 4 by a long shot (117 million), and is only superceded by the PlayStation 2 (155 million units). The Wii was the 5th best selling console of all time.
Of all the console makers I would argue it's Microsoft that is currently struggling the most. The Xbox X has sold less than 20 million units and sales have been dwindling. Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft has no strong differentiator from the Playstation.
Xbox is a really odd one, they only have significant market share in North America - it's something like 20% in Europe, and insignificant in Asia.
Personally, I don't know anyone who has an Xbox. It's either PlayStation for high-end or Switch for more casual gamers (or a 2nd console for PS owners).
It seems that most of the games you can't play on those two systems are available on PC (e.g. Starfield), which anecdotally in my experience is where people tend to play it.
The Wii, Wii U, and Switch are all consciously a different platform from the corresponding Playstation/Xbox. Of course they're not gonna have the same games as them or PC.
If you want to play Call of Duty 27 or GTA V, buy one of those instead.
I have no clue why you're angry and arguing against a point I didn't make. Settle down.
The Sega Genesis and SNES had completely different libraries, but both had massive third party support. The N64 and onward has had basically limited third party support in comparison to other platforms. This isn't limited to the genres you mock because you can't play them--it's all genres.
The DS was far weaker than the PSP but had absolutely colossal third party support. The point is, when it comes to consoles you plop down in front of a TV, Nintendo basically burned their bridges 30 years ago. GTA and Call of Duty weren't even around then.
Mistake has more than 1 meaning. Saying the Wii, Wii U, and Switch were consciously different argues against 1. And Wii and Switch sales argue against another.
But Nintendo is in the enviable position of consistently releasing some of the best and most popular games in the world as first party exclusives every generation like clockwork.
It’s not to say that things might not have been better if they’d gone with a CD-ROM format for the 64. But the brand differentiation with Sony that emerged in that generation has been the cornerstone of their (extremely successful) strategy going forward.
I was trying to make a comparison with the SNES, which had a huge list of amazing 3rd party exclusives, in addition to the first party must-haves.
It would not be difficult to build a library of several hundred great games for the SNES. Compared to that, the N64 was a huge step back! After picking up the first party games, can you even make a decent top 20 third party games? It’s brutal!
"second party developer" is kind of a loose term. Rare had close relationship with Nintendo at the time, and were allowed to produce games for some of Nintendo's IP, but they ultimately ended up being acquired by Microsoft, so they weren't so exclusive that Nintendo could prevent that outcome.
I find the history of the N64 interesting but, I guess, it is because it is part of my teen years.
I was sooooo onboard with the N64 when first announced (or project reality at it was named at the time) and early screens.
Dont get me wrong - I understand why they stayed with cartridges. Load times really were faster than CD and one argument Mayamoto used was music changing on-the-fly (like mario creeping up on a sleeping enemy, which changed up-beat music to a lulaby) but is it really all that important?
My friend had a playstation. It was a great system but the load times for some games were absolutely terrible! For me it killed the mood. The 'experience' for some games made me prefer the inferior snes version at times, especially when looking at beat-em-ups.
How different would Mario 64 be if the N64 was CD-based from the beginning? Honestly, I think it would have changed the quality of the game -but not for the better. Of course, in N64 was CD system, then we wouldn't have anything to compare it to... therefore this comment wouldn't exist. lol.
The CD version might have included some full motion video and crisper quality music, but I think all other areas would have been the same as the cartridge version, except for load times. I think Ocarina of Time would have been painful to play on CD but then the design of the game would have gone a different route if N64 was CD.
From memory, the two biggest problems the N64 had (from my perspective, at time of writing) were using Cartridges, and being released much later than the Playstation and Saturn.
CD's were 'the thing' at that time. To have a games console which allowed for much more space for games.. and be a music player, was a big deal for your 90's kids in their bedroom!
Going by memory, in Europe/UK, the Saturn came out mid-95. Playstation came out not long after. I think the playstation was £100 cheaper on release compared to the saturn. I think the Saturn was about £400. The N64 did not come out until March '97.
-- over 1 year later! --
N64 was cheaper than Playstation and Saturn on launch (compared to their launch price) but I wouldn't be surprised if playstaion had already dropped it's price so was comparable. I think Nintendo slashed the price of the N64 from £250 to £150 within 4 weeks!
Dont get me started on the 64DD. I thought it was great at the time but, in reality, the idea of adding components to games consoles was already getting annoying (Sega proved that with their Genesis/MegaDrive.. CD, 32X, etc)
Maybe N64 could have done better if being a DD right at the start, having 'decent' space and maintaining load times speeds.
Smash Bros was HAL Labs, not Mario 64. That being said, HAL Labs worked closely with Nintendo on the title, and Nintendo owns a significant stake in the company.
That's not true at all. Games like Zelda were absolutely possible on the N64 and close to traditional RPGs. The only thing that wasn't really realistic was to make extensive use of pre-rendered background stills like in Final Fantasy (due to relatively large file sizes), or pre-rendered FMV (due to massive file sizes).
But neither of those things were in any way required to make an RPG. In fact, heavily relying in pre-rendered stuff has mostly been abandoned since.
That was a major component, but a few of the big names would still have published with Nintendo if they didn't spit in their faces by giving first-party dev teams such a heavy focus at the expense of second and (especially) third party devs.
Prerendered cutscenes ate up the lion's share of the disc. If you sacrificed on those and used lots of compression, you absolutely could build an RPG on the N64 that would stand up to whatever you could do on PlayStation.
However, nobody wanted to do that. The only RPGs we got on the N64 were Quest 64 and Paper Mario. The reason why requires diving into the development history of what would have been a third RPG for the system: MOTHER 3. To put it bluntly, they ran out of storage space, and pivoted to the N64 DD to get more. The custom floppy disks the N64 DD took could hold 64MB[0]. Even then, this wasn't enough, so the game was then broken up into two parts: an N64 cartridge plus a DD expansion pack, which would give them 96MB in total to play with. MOTHER 3 would then continue in development hell before being canned and reborn as a Game Boy Advance title[1].
Fire Emblem was also supposed to release on the N64. However, unlike Itoi biting off more than he could chew with the N64, FE64 failed because the head designer, Shouzou Kaga, didn't even want to touch the hardware. He'd stalled for time by working on Satellaview FE games[2] on the SNES, and then left Nintendo entirely right before Thracia 776 came out. He'd then release a totally-not-Fire-Emblem clone on PlayStation and get sued into oblivion for... basically telling all the games press that he was making Fire Emblem on PlayStation.
So that's a 50% success rate for RPGs on the N64 - not a good look. Could homebrewers do better?
On prior Nintendo systems, cartridges executed in-place - that is, the CPU bus and game cartridges were wired up such that the game was effectively the system's boot ROM. This also meant that the CPU address bus width would limit the size of the game without further bankswitching. On the N64, however, cartridges load into memory through the PI bus, which has a separate address space from the main MIPS CPU. PI bus uses 32-bit addressing, and the address range allocated to the cartridge would allow up to 3.75GB ROMs. Data storage devices that large would never exist during the lifespan of the N64, but building an N64 cartridge that large would be practical today. I suspect loading the ROM image into emulators or flashcarts wouldn't be too difficult either.
And, of course, if you did manage to hook your N64 up to ridiculous amounts of storage, you could do crazy dynamic loading tricks like this[3]. If the N64 wasn't limited by storage space, RPGs would have actually looked better than on PlayStation, and render in real time to boot.
[0] Cartridges were later produced at this size, notably for the N64 port of Resident Evil 2
[1] This did not actually fix the problems with MOTHER 3. If anything, it made them worse, because GBA cartridges are limited to 16MB without bankswitching. The game used significant amounts of compression to deal with this, which complicated efforts to make an English translation. MOTHER 3 would also not release until a month after the DS Lite, which meant that an official English release of the game was very much out of the question.
[2] The Satellaview was a SNES hardware addon that allowed downloading games off of satellite radio services operated by St.GIGA. Think of it like Nintendo's equivalent to the SEGA Channel, except Japan-only because satellite radio didn't even exist in the US yet.
Oh, I remember anticipating Earthbound 64 (Mother 3) so hardcore back in the day. The game looked absolutely fantastic and I loved the SNES Earthbound.
However, I think RPGs could have done just fine on ordinary cartridges. Ocarina of Time was an epic 3D game with all the size and scope and themes of an RPG, it just plays like an action adventure game. It relied on text and real-time cutscenes for storytelling, though (more efficient space-wise than audio and pre-rendered cut scenes).
I think it was mainly the capital requirements of developing on the 64. If I recall, the tooling was rough and 3rd parties were largely developing in the dark prior to the release of the 64. I think a lot of hardware details were still being sorted out in the year leading up to the 64's release. There wasn't much lead time for 3rd parties to start on games. Nevermind that most game developers at the time had very little 3D gaming experience and the engines had to be basically built from scratch (you couldn't just boot up Unreal or Unity).
I seem to recall reading that Nintendo forbade 2D games for the N64, because they were desperate to keep up with the 3D hype around the Playstation, and didn't want it to be seen as somehow less capable than the Playstation (which, ironically, had many 2D games)
That's not true. There were several 2D games made for N64, including Yoshi's Story, which was made by Nintendo themselves, as well as Bomberman 64 (Japanese version), Bust-A-Move 2, Worms Armageddon, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, etc. It's just that most developers chose to go with 3D at the time because it was the new hotness. The vast majority of the library of both systems were 3D.
The N64 was an expensive platform to launch on though. It was a lot more capital intensive to do a game on the N64, because the cartridges had wholesale costs of $15-20 to produce, plus licensing fees to Nintendo. Sony on the other hand had a cheaper licensing model and CDs could be mass produced at pennies per copy.
The problem is simply that the RPG genre was dominated by Square and Enix. And Square famously abandoned Nintendo after they abandoned the CD format that was originally planned for the N64. In fact, Nintendo had licensed the CD tech from Sony for early prototypes of the N64, and may have inadvertently created their most formidable competitor by doing so. The CD format was superior for doing large pre-rendered graphics and for higher quality sound tracks and audio files. Since these components were more useful for complex storytelling and cutscenes, Square decided to stick with Sony after the split with Nintendo.
In fact, the PS1's 2d games tend to stand up much better to modern sensibilities than its 3d games.
You can still play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night now and it looks pretty fantastic, whereas something like Tomb Raider has some compromises you'll need to accept...
That's not an issue of modern sensibilities. 2D games look better than 3D games. This has been true continuously since people first started trying to release 3D games.
The fourth Monkey Island game used extremely ugly 3D graphics. There was no good reason. The 5th, much later, was licensed to Telltale and they used ugly 3D graphics. There was an improvement from 4 to 5, but neither game can be compared favorably to 3.
The point of 3D graphics is to make things nicer for the developers, not the players.
One of my other favorite point and click adventure games also suffered from this transition to 3D: King's Quest. King's Quest 7 was a beautifully hand-drawn animated storybook that looked like an old school Disney feature film. King's Quest 8 was hideous 3D garbage that looked bland and worse, they changed the whole premise of the series to focus more on combat than puzzles and storyline.
That being said, I think modern 3D games look fantastic when done correctly. It's just not the best format for some genres.
That was actually Sony. In the USA the marketing was focused on the PlayStation as the cutting-edge 3D successor to old-hat 2D games, so SCEA did not license the development of sprite-based games for PlayStation, which means we missed out on some great sprite games that never got localized.
There were exceptions, of course; big-name publishers could publish sprite games for tentpole franchises, so we still got Street Fighter, SotN, Mega Man 8, etc. Rules only apply when the rulemaker can afford to enforce them. That's still true today, as we found out when it came out that Google waived the app store fees for Spotify.
Yeah, Bernie Stolar made some interesting decisions over the course of his career. I do think he catches too much flak for his SEGA tenure, since it was impossible to save SoJ from itself.
Ironic that now, in hindsight, we see that the N64's 3D hardware is more sophisticated except for the texture size limit. The PS1 doesn't even have a z-buffer. But that would probably be hard to explain to the general public.
In the age of emulation it would be fun to see PS1 RPGs ported to running on N64 hardware with hypothetical 7 cartridge games. We don't need to be limited by the N64 era filesize limitations when running software on those platforms
Why bother with 7 cartridges? They are pretty flexible, you can totally put flash memory in it and have a multiple gigabyte large "rom". Emulators would have to be updated though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FinalFantasy/comments/p317xa/final_...
I was thinking of JRPGS having up to 5 discs on the PlayStation, and a Final Fantasy 7 ad that said if it was put on cartridge it would cost 1200$, proclaiming FF7 would require 20 cartridges at 60$ on the N64. I was holding back
I'm researching licenses best for game development, as I'm not a game developer, just a backend engineer. If you have a suggestion, please feel free to contribute to Issue #1 on GitHub
