[Leo656]

So much of that is Monday Morning Quarterbacking, though. Like it's easy to say NOW "Oh, the system that ended up being the N64 should've just been a CD system, they cut their own throat,", but that oversimplifies some things while ignoring a ton of others.

For starters, at that specific moment in time the technology for a CD-based console had never proven itself advantageous, not in the home console market. Sure, computers were already CD-based but PC gaming and console gaming even then had very little to do with each other, so what was going on in one industry had no real effect on the other. When Nintendo had to decide whether or not to jump into the CD gaming realm in the mid-90s, it was looking at the Sega CD, the Turbo CD add-on for the Turbografx-16, the Jaguar CD, and even their one-time partner Philips and the CDi... all spectacular failures for various reasons, all of which divided their respective companies' fans and screwed up the market. There's "looking to the future" and then there's taking Big Risks when your current model seems to be working just fine without such risks. One can hardly blame mid-90s Nintendo for not chasing the - snicker - "success" of the Sega CD.

To their credit, Nintendo recognized even very early on that part of the problem was they simply had no expertise with that type of technology, which is why they partnered first with Sony and then Philips, to develop the actual CD consoles they planned on doing. The fact is, early-90s CD consoles had a notorious failure rate, to the point where part of why they're such expensive "collector's items" if you can find one in working condition nowadays is because a lot of them bricked very quickly back then. So for Nintendo to chase that dragon, they knew they couldn't do it alone since they'd never manufactured a CD console before, thus the short-lived Sony partnership, sort of like what 3DO Company did by partnering with Panasonic and other experienced manufacturers in developing the 3DO console. So at least they had a mind on getting around the then-faulty technology in hopes of providing a better product than their competitors.

Problem with THAT was, now you've got a company like Nintendo, which for a decade has done just fine not sharing credit (or profit) with anyone, and they're "forced" to partner up with someone else, in turn giving them a backdoor into an industry where Nintendo owned at least half of the market share. It's not hard to see at all why Nintendo didn't see much upside, on their end, to the Sony partnership; in all likelihood, Sony would have eventually broken ties with Nintendo and started developing their own video game consoles anyway, and Nintendo saw no advantage to creating their own competition. YES, that's what eventually did happen, but there was no way at all of knowing that would happen at that time. As it was, one of the most prominent factors in switching gears to partner with Philips was because Philips had no designs on competing with Nintendo in the home console space, and putting Nintendo characters onto the CDi was little more than cheap advertising for Nintendo than anything else. It was a low-risk partnership for Nintendo, who basically saw the prospective Sony partnership as "Helping Sony get into the games business". Like, honestly why would they have done that? Yes, Sony later developed the Playstation on their own and ended up taking over the market, but at least Nintendo can say "Well, we may have left the back door open but at least we didn't just up and give them the keys."

Games themselves are another factor Nintendo was likely looking at. If you look at most of the CD games of the early-90s, they're not great. FMV trash was everywhere, and Nintendo clearly didn't have any interest in making those types of games, and those types of games were synonymous with "CD-based video games" at that point in time. The actual GOOD games on stuff like the Sega CD, usually only "needed" the CD enhancements for the music, or if it was a movie-based game they could have short clips. But if you're Nintendo, and you're looking at things objectively, and you see that "Hmmm... the game based on the movie 'Hook' sold a lot better on cartridge than CD, despite the Sega CD version having movie clips and CD sound", you can forgive them for thinking that it just wasn't an area they needed to dump a lot of money into for such negligible returns. And as silly as it seems now when we've all become used to such things, back then a lot of gamers just plain didn't want to deal with load times, skipping, etc., and thus to many gamers a cartridge-based system was for them the better choice.

Obviously, people talk about how sticking with cartridges cost them Square, who jumped in bed with Sony, how Final Fantasy VII set the whole world on fire, all of that. But the thing we're forced to look at is, at that time, such a loss was probably considered a giant "Who cares?" RPGs in America were never anything but a super-niche genre UNTIL FF7 came out, and nobody but huge nerds ever played them. Sure, FFII and III for SNES did okay numbers, and there's a ton of great RPGs on the SNES, but those weren't the games that sold the system nor were they ever the biggest-selling games. Therefore, losing Square and FF7 was most likely something Nintendo entirely shrugged off at first. And it makes sense; anyone who tells you that "Everybody knew FF7 would be a world-changing event" is lying; nobody knew it would be a hit until it was. And without that game and Metal Gear Solid, Sony's PS-era dominance is immediately up for grabs regardless of format.

Then, of course, you have Nintendo's own history with switching formats and pursuing "newer, better technology" when they'd introduced the Famicom Disk System. It was the same thing, nearly 10 years earlier - "Floppy disks are better, there's more memory, you can make bigger games, they're cheaper to make and sell, etc. etc." And then it came out, worked okay for a little bit, but in the end was a gigantic bullsh*t hassle for Nintendo. The technology wasn't as dependable, piracy was rampant, the audience was now split between people who Had and Didn't Have the add-on so they were forced to choose which system to develop games for... ALL of this weighed heavily on their minds when they had to choose whether or not to make the N64 a CD-based console, because they'd already gone down similar roads not too long before. So NOW, they're looking at all the same problems (which nobody had yet gotten around), and figured "Yeah, what we're already doing is working Just Fine."

And of course, the biggest issue was always piracy, and it's honestly not hard to fault them there, either. Obviously now in the digital era it's a lost cause, but at the time it was a very real thing and it makes sense they'd want to protect themselves by making it as difficult as possible for their games to be pirated.

I mean, I get it. In hindsight, it seems like a huge "What were they thinking?!" moment for them to have stayed with cartridges when it seemed like everyone else was going CD. But they had plenty of valid reasons, based on the market and their own experience, for staying the course. When the Saturn came out and developers complained that it was a total mess to develop for, Nintendo looked at that situation and were like "See? We told you, it's just a hassle we don't need."

Other than technophiles, pretty much nobody in 1994-1995 gave Sony a fighting chance no matter what they say now. Other than, "They make CD stereos so obviously their CD game consoles should be more functional than those of Sega or others," everyone was more or less thinking "Who are these jokers thinking they can just swoop in and take over this business they have no experience in?" Sony in 1994 was spoken of the same way Microsoft was in 1999 or thereabout when they announced they were doing the Xbox - "They don't know the business, they don't have the connections, they might have good hardware but it will ultimately fail because of those other things." That was the overwhelming expectation. Nobody could've predicted that Sega would implode, that the Saturn would self-destruct on the launch pad, thus eliminating one huge competitor altogether and leaving a clear path for Sony to swoop in and pick up the pieces. We look back on things like that and say, "Man, should've seen THAT coming!" But nobody did, and nobody could've.

It makes for nice, bite-sized bits of "history" to say, "Nintendo stayed with cartridges when everyone else went CD, they were dumb and that's what cost them everything." And in hindsight, that might technically be true, but anyone who was there and following the situation closely at the time can say that it's a HUGE oversimplification which ignores that for every "dumb" decision Nintendo made at the time, they had a perfectly valid reason for making it, and a lot of people thought they were playing it smart by playing it safe.

I mean, at the end of the day the games Nintendo was banking on didn't necessitate the CD format, anyway. Can anyone say that Ocarina of Time or Super Mario 64 would've been "better" on a CD? Doubtful. Music-wise, maybe, but that's about it. When all was said and done, I think the only two games that came out on the PS1 that made Nintendo regret their decision at all were FF7 and Metal Gear Solid, two games which definitely needed to be on CD but also two games which nobody could ever have predicted would be as huge as they ended up being.

Remove FF7 and MGS - two games a LOT of people bought a PS1 just to play those games on - the whole thing gets a lot murkier, and remove the sales those games pulled in and Sony's dominance of that generation isn't so clear-cut anymore.