The cartridge ended up being a huge sore spot too.
Nintendo wanted it because of the instant access time. That’s what gamers were used to and they didn’t want people to have to wait on slow CDs.
Turns out that was the wrong bet. Cartridges just cost too much and if I remember correctly there were supply issues at various points during the N64 era pushing prices up and volumes down.
In comparison CDs were absolutely dirt cheap to manufacture. And people quickly fell in love with all the extra stuff that could fit on a desk compared to a small cartridge. There was simply no way anything like Final Fantasy 7 could have ever been done on the N64. Games with FMV sequences, real recorded music, just large numbers of assets.
Even if everything else about the hardware was the same, Nintendo bet on the wrong horse for the storage medium. It turned out the thing they prioritized (access time) was not nearly as important as the things they opted out of (price, storage space).
Tangentially related, but if you haven't already, you should read DF Retro's writeup of the absolutely incredible effort to port the 2 CD game Resident Evil 2 to a single 64MB N64 cartridge: https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2018-retro-why-resi...
Not just dirt cheap, the turn around time to manufacture was significantly lower. Sony had an existing CD manufacturing business and could produce runs of discs in the span of a week or so, whereas cartridges typically took months. That was already a huge plus to publishers since it meant they could respond more quickly if a game happened to be a runaway success. With cartridges they could end up undershooting, and losing sales, or overshooting and end up with expensive, excess inventory.
Then to top it all off, Sony had much lower licensing fees! So publishers got “free” margin to boot. The Playstation was a sweet deal for publishers.
>There was simply no way anything like Final Fantasy 7 could have ever been done on the N64.
Yes but I don't see how a game like Ocarina of time with its streaming data in at high speed would have been possible without a cartridge. Each format enabled unique gaming experiences that the other typically couldn't replicate exactly.
Naughty Dog found a solution - constantly streaming data from the disk, without regard for the hardware's endurance rating:
> Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”
> Kelly thought some more and said “let’s not mention that to anyone” and went back to get Sony on board with Crash.
Crash Bandicoot is a VERY different game from Ocarina Of Time. They are not comparable at all. They literally had to limit the field of view in order to get anything close to what they were targeting. Have you played the two games? The point still stands, Zelda with its vast open worlds is not feasible on a CD based console that has a max transfer rate of 300KB/s and the latency of an iceberg.
What ND did with Crash Bandicoot was really cool to see in action (page in/out data in 64KB chunks based on location) but you are right - this relied on a very strict control of visuals. OoT didn't have this limitation.
Nintendo wanted it because of the instant access time. That’s what gamers were used to and they didn’t want people to have to wait on slow CDs.
Turns out that was the wrong bet. Cartridges just cost too much and if I remember correctly there were supply issues at various points during the N64 era pushing prices up and volumes down.
In comparison CDs were absolutely dirt cheap to manufacture. And people quickly fell in love with all the extra stuff that could fit on a desk compared to a small cartridge. There was simply no way anything like Final Fantasy 7 could have ever been done on the N64. Games with FMV sequences, real recorded music, just large numbers of assets.
Even if everything else about the hardware was the same, Nintendo bet on the wrong horse for the storage medium. It turned out the thing they prioritized (access time) was not nearly as important as the things they opted out of (price, storage space).