Shiny Founder Dave Perry Wasn't Keen On The N64 From The Start

Too bad for Davey!

It may now no longer be the case as carts can store huge chunks of data thanks to the advancement of technology.....still, they are costly in terms of manufacturing.

And so begins the downfall of Nintendo. This was the worst choice in their history. This is what made a lot of 3rd parties never come back or even side with Nintendo. Its never been quite the same again even for the Wii.

PersonallyI don't buy the high cost of cartridges over CDROM format. At least I didn't see it. The PlayStation games were lined up next to the Nintendo 64 cartridges at the same freaking prices. 90% of the games were 49.99 while the supposedly cheaper CDROM games were also sitting there at 49.99. When CDROM first became popular there was an announcement that games were going to be so much cheaper. It never happened. Now we are moving to digital format and the only games getting the break in price are from Indie developers. Retail games cost the exact same as a digital release. Well I'm calling BS on the whole thing! These companies including Nintendo are way out of line. Digital releases should get a price cut with no manufacturing of books or cdroms. I love ya Nintendo but this is making you look bad.

@DarthNocturnal you are right it never did happen. Cartridge games were 49.99 and PlayStation CDROM's were 49.99 at the time. None of this ever happened. Digital has no excuse at all. There should be a price drop but there is not. They aren't passing on their savings to the consumers.

@Spoony_Tech yeah so much trouble all started right there. The GameCube should have dominated the industry but it never took hold. The Wii got lucky out of the gate but then you could see problems a year or so down the road when no software was coming

@Spoony_Tech I think its extremely petty to hold a grudge over something that happened 20 years ago.

@Wolfgabe isn't the article about something that happened 20 years ago? Just sayin

@Windy I was referring to spoony techs statement that this made devs never want to work with Nintendo again

Re: the cost of digital games. While I don't see why a digital game should cost the same as a physical copy, a game costing 49.99 today is much cheaper than a game costing 49.99 10-20 years ago.

Ugh. Dave Perry has always rubbed me the wrong way. He reminds me a lot of Jason Rubin, who is similarly too big for his boots.

@Spoony_Tech What a load of rubbish. Downfall? Worst choice ever? Exaggerate much?

Yes, Nintendo helped hand the videogames market to Sony on a silver platter - but people tend to magnify Nintendo's lack of sense regarding the cartridge format. Physically, they were more stable, and harder to pirate. Also, they lacked the load times present on CDs. Of course, it was small comfort in face of the PlayStation's immense sales.

Nevertheless, I always find it humorous when critics proclaim that Nintendo has been on a downward spiral for years, yet Wii and DS somehow 'don't count'.

I fear for Nintendo if it decides to go all-digital. They'll keep the prices high and people will walk to systems with either lower pricing or physical media (with used market).

@Damo @DarthNocturnal Exactly this! I think people forget that N64 games were extortionate upon release, and games like Ocarina of Time fetched a very high price for a long time. Some did drop to around the £40 mark, but PS1 was pretty much always cheaper. The platinum range was a bargain at £20, too.

Didn't like cartridges... and now, they are far better than discs.

It was because of the defection of Squaresoft that I even purchased a Playstation during that cycle. Otherwise, I was more than happy playing those games you mentioned in the first paragraph. I didn't miss Dave Perry's work.

The single worst decision in the history of gaming.

In fact, most of the Wii U's struggles can ultimately be traced back to one thing: cartridges for the N64.

At the time, I think everybody was surprised by Nintendo sticking with cartridges. Once I got hold of the N64 and actually played it, the experience of cartridges (faster boot times, faster level load times, etc) was clearly superior. At a certain point, I just gave up on the Sony Playstation, and started playing those games on my Mac (using the old Connectix Virtual Game Station), because my Mac had an 8x speed CD-Rom, and it didn't take all afternoon to load something.

Another example of people mistaking technology as superior to gameplay and gaming enjoyment. Nintendo understands this better than any other company out there, at least at this time.

@Kage_88 @Wolfgabe Hey I love my N64 as much as the next guy but the choice to go cartridge was the worst decision the company ever made imo. Even worse then Virtual Boy. It alienated a lot of third parties and they still don't take Nintendo seriously to this day.

I worked in a Funcoland (which is now Gamestop) at the time of the launch. We were pretty popular back then but we also had the market cornered and charged inflated prices. We were selling Star Wars new for 100$ at launch. Many of our games including Mario 64 were 80$. You couldn't find the games anywhere else, you either paid our price or possibly want without. That alone rubbed people the wrong way to the point many haven't come back. Nintendo didn't want to give up a big piece of the gaming pie and now they're paying for it. I can only bet that their arrogance doomed the Sony Nintendo system because they want total control over everything. Sony was obviously smart in breaking that deal.

Cartridges may have been expensive to produce, and couldn't accommodate hours of FMV, but on the other hand, you weren't constantly sitting through loading screens.

@ikki5: Every time I get a disc in the mail and see those scratches (despite seller's representations to the contrary), I get a lump in my throat, and appreciate the "cart technology" even more. The era of the cart is over, but I will always appreciate Big N sticking with them for 3 generations.

I love the N64 console design, its like the muscle car of consoles. Shame they went the Fisher Price route afterwards!

Um, this guy approved and produced the release of Enter The Matrix (also came out on GC) and that was among the worst games ever made. Are you sure you could agree with Dave after a total bombshell like this one?

The last true cartridge console

@Windy Discs are cheaper than cartridges... to manufacture. That means more profit for the publisher switching from carts to discs. The developers were never interested in passing those savings on to consumers. Purely a business management decision.

Dunno why he was so against it—well, I actually do—but the machines was still generally pretty frikin awesome.

@Yorumi I can't disagree with most of what you said. Still even if Nintendo would've broke off and did their own disc drive it wouldn't be this bad but I agree the gaming landscape would look a whole lot different had that deal gone through. I have no doubt Nintendo messed that up.

"...to discuss a lot of what company president Hiroshi Yamauchi had been saying about PlayStation being this blight on the world of video games with its too many titles overcrowding the store shelves..."

LOL!
Sounds like the Wii. The original Playstation had a legendary game library, whereas the N64 had maybe ten genuinely amazing games at the time?

The only interesting part of the interview for me is that Shiny/Perry didn't want to support the N64, but Earthworm Jim 3D still found its way to the console (through other publishers/developers).
So basically, it was nothing but hot air.

where's shiny again... ? ... oh yeah... guess it didn't matter in the end huh... turn your back on Nintendo and you disappear... that's historically how it works anyway...

@Windy I think you'll find profit is the key word.

Nintendo were an incredibly domineering and archaic company throughout the 90s. They controlled cart production, costs, licensing with an iron fist - instigated heavy fines for multiplatform releases, missed deadlines, royalties, censoring, lengthy seal of quality - they treated 3rd parties like scum.

Infact Nintendo were done for high profile price fixing in the 90s.

Carts on the N64 were the last straw for all but a few 3rd parties!

@Yorumi
I actually knew about Mischief Makers, but the terrifying box art put me off from ever renting it.
The biggest mark against the system for me was the almost complete dearth of decent RPGs. Were any even published on the system besides Quest 64?

For me, 95% of the fun I had with the system came from Pokemon Snap, Super Smash Bros., and Pokemon Stadium. I also played Hey You, Pikachu! a good deal, but I'm not sure if it worked well enough to qualify as "fun."

I will admit that I do regret having missed out on amazing games like Star Fox 64 and Majora's Mask, though.

I actually agree with Hiroshi Yamauchi about Playstation being a blight but it's almost completely his fault that Sony got to be the dominant console company.

@Nintenjoe64 To be fair, it was Sony's good third-party policies, aggressive marketing, and intelligent pricing and hardware decisions that allowed the PS1 to shake up the market like it did. Nintendo's actions just gave them an opening.

@shani I was just about to bring up Earthworm Jim 64. I didn't know that it was made by different people, so the part about Shiny not making any games on the N64 in the article got me confused.

Poor cartridges get all the abuse. Like everything, there are cons and pros to them:

• Faster loading times
• Don't get scratched like CDs
• Cost more to produce
• Only hold 4 - 64MB compared to 700MB on CD

Sure cartridges put some developers off and would rather make their game for the PlayStation, but the PlayStation has a lot more terrible games than the Nintendo 64 because of this reason (and is the case today). The PlayStation can keep all those crappy Barbie games.

@NintendoFan64 Yeah it was exactly the same for me. I was about to post something like "But they made Earth Worm Jim on N64", but then I went to Wikipedia and found out that someone else did it.
Still, it doesn't change anything. I didn't even know Shiny, I just knew Earthworm Jim. I doubt that anyone else knew that company. So as far as I'm concerned, that guy David Perry was wrong in saying they won't support the N64. Because it's not like people would conceive it as "Oh no, Shiny doesn't support the N64!". Instead, people would've reacted with something like "Oh no, no Earthworm Jim on N64!".

Essentially, the company that made Earthworm Jim DID support the N64. By letting someone else make that game for the N64.

The funny thing though: I didn't even know Earthworm Jim before the N64 installment. So that Perry guy was even more wrong.

@Ichiban agreed, it was a true 'last of an era' classic!!

@Ralizah don't forget amazing acquisitions and great games

@Technosphile wow, that's some statement!! I'm not going to disagree with you, it's certainly got me racking my brains for the worst ones I remember!
The original x box controller sticks out for me as a massive fail. I don't know who greenlighted that monstrosity......

@Ralizah While Yamauchi was an amazing business man, that statement about Playstation being a blight because of too many games is nothing but hypocrisy at its finest.

The NES, SNES, and Game Boy all had their share of garbage games, and the same argument could be tossed their way.

And he never saw the Shoveware City that was the Wii's libary. For every Mario Galaxy, the Wii probally got 5-10 garbage games that tried to cash in on either Wii Sports or Wii Fit.

The problem with this statement is that every popular system gets it share of garbage games. Every popular system, especially the market leaders got their share of garbage games.

Look at the Game Boy and Game Boy Color. For every good to decent game, there were tons of garbage that came out.

Playstation as never been alone in that regard.

I wonder why Nintendo never considered a CD drive add on for the N64!?! You would have thought a mega CD esque piece of hardware would have been a genuine option at the time???

@ULTRA-64 they made one. It failed terribly and never left Japan.

I remember seeing Turok in Woolworths for £70, and later WWF No Mercy for £80!
The only reason I bought Ocarina of Time was because Electronics Boutique put it on sale for £20 on their website, which was practically giving it away (before that I wasn't interested in Zelda despite it scoring 98% in N64 Magazine as I thought it looked dull; of course I've yet to play a better game since then, so thank you Electronics Boutique and dial-up internet!)

@Caryslan Yamauchi was angry because Playstation only supported the flow of bad games. To prevent the Atari videogame crash originally Nintendo limited the number of games each publisher could release per year on the NES with extra games allowed if they released a title that reached critically acclaimed as originally publishers were better of pushing out as many rushed games as possible than producing good ones.

It didn't stop bad games but it limited them, if you thought the NES had bad games imagine if those limits weren't applied. By the time the Wii was out Nintendo had already taken back those limits because thanks to Sony it was no longer possible to refuse shovelware, take a look at the names of the biggest shovelware producers for the Wii and you'll see why Nintendo couldn't say no:

http://pietriots.com/2010/12/17/the-3rd-party-wall-of-shame/

I'd argue the control Nintendo had over the videogame industry was well worth keeping companies like EA in line as opposed to allowing them free reign to become the company they have today(which is largely on Sony's back).

Give me a cart any day o' the week~

One cannot deny that Nintendo destroyed the support and trust of 3rd parties themselves.

I would like to point to their disgusting abuse of DMA (Rockstar) through the development hell and last minute termination of their Body Harvest contract - all at a cost to DMA!

@Spoony_Tech Interesting, I used to go to Funcoland with my folks to pick out games I wanted for holidays, birthdays, or rewards... Most of the time, at the Funcoland in my area, pricing was around the MSRP, because they did not have the market cornered in my area at all. They had to compete with Babbage's Etc, Electronics Boutique, Circuit City, Toys R' Us, and Sears(!). Those last 3 in particular had far, far more foot traffic. Blockbuster also constituted tons of rentals, which redirected sales away from titles that only appeared in specialist boutique stores like Funcoland.

The rep in the store persuaded my parents to go Playstation over Nintendo for Christmas so my family never did own Nintendo consoles from that point as my folks also went with PS2 some Christmases later lol

@PlywoodStick This is how bad it was at the time and btw all prices across all the stores were the same. This was bad the most right at the launch of the n64. We were buying back used systems at that time for 220$ and selling them for 225$ but any new systems we got were selling for 200$. It was wonderful looking those moms square in the eyes and telling them why the prices were the way they were. Of course once demand went down so did those ridiculous prices but I was long gone by then. Didn't really care for a lot of things they did back then.

@Yorumi Yeah, I imagine so.

There were a few advantages to keeping cartridges, besides having (usually) less loading times.

They were more likely to support Japanese labor at the time, since the specialized circuit boards were manufactured by Japanese workers, instead of being outsourced to China (Like CD's usually were). The processes for developing the PCB's were trade secrets, as well. So, there was far less slave wage Chinese labor going on back in those days.

Let us not forget that the primary audience during the 90s were children, who may be prone to sudden bouts of erratic behavior under certain circumstances... Such as myself at the time. Cartridges were much more difficult to break, damage, or destroy compared to discs. I should know- I threw Mario Party and Pokemon Stadium at the wall and punched my N64 multiple times when luck turned against me at the last second after everything was going well! Despite repeated abuses, they still managed to hold up. I did that ONE time with a single game on the PS1, and the system fell apart like a house of cards. I never did such a thing ever again, as I realized that using force to express my anger on anything, especially fragile electronics, didn't turn out a good result.

Cartridges better retain their value than discs as collector's items. (Especially since Lightscribe or LabelFlash can enable discs to mimic a disc's official disc top, presenting the possible issue of illicit copy sales.) A PS1 disc can easily be copied through disc burning and replaced, but nothing short of a dedicated factory can reproduce those N64 circuit boards. This can be interpreted as a bad thing, since they're more difficult to back up, but this trait has ironically been a crucial point of business for retro game stores today.

Again on the piracy note, there was absolutely nothing stopping PS1 discs from being copied. All you had to do was pop one into a CD-RW drive, use your burning software of choice, and presto! All of your friends now have a copy of the game one person bought. This was impossible for the N64, and it required years of emulation work and legally shady adaptors to bring elsewhere, which happened after the N64 ran it's course.

There were some technical aspects, such as draw-in and particle effects, which were more friendly to pull off on the N64 than the PS1 or Saturn. Many PS1 games' effects look absolutely atrocious now, even compared to many N64 titles, and only a few 1st party titles such as Burning Rangers and Panzer Dragoon Saga ever effectively pulled off such technical feats on the Saturn.

In truth, it was not the technological limitations and cost of the cartridges which hurt Nintendo. It was their own policies, their own attitudes, and their own treatment of others which buried their reputation. Nintendo's bane was their own poor social and ethical behavior. That's why Iwata's tenure was so important to restore some sense of dignity to Nintendo after Yamauchi's tyranny.

@Spoony_Tech Wow, I never knew... I guess I was never exposed to that. The one in my area didn't seem quite so bad. Perhaps I just missed the worst of it...

For anyone actually interested or who wants to have a more scrutinizing understanding of media and visual performance than this turd of a perspective.

Go compare footage from the 3rd party Atlus published Snowboard Kids (N64) and Snowbow Kids Plus (PS), the Japan-only release and equivalent of the game.

You may directly see in footage of the games what kind of advantage Nintendo had by going for the more difficult, more demanding format. There is clearly superior framerate in the same way or a better than similar way, that one might call the framerate of 30FPS smoother, less plastic, than the over-accelerated 60FPS. The motion of the Snowboard Kids gameplay on the N64 is far, far more human-like, far, far less mechanical and robotic than the PS version.

If this doesn't necessarily come down to just format choice (cartridge — and my hunch is that yes, the cartridge did have something to do with it), then it may come down to a great, "generalized" approach Nintendo took to hardware back in the day. Not necessarily nowadays, but that's another story. I just don't necessarily tolerate that the N64 represented the beginning of Nintendo's downfall - I'd rather see it as the beginning of Nintendo's age of sophistication and refinement. I'm sorry but not everything comes down to sales and numbers whether you accept it or not.

Back in the day, Nintendo took a great stance by either using cartridges or simply with the very architecture of the N64. I will lean, once again, to the potential chance that it was the cartridge that made certain games, like Snowboard Kids, perform so much, so infinitely, better than the PS counterpart.

The PS experiences were more angular, more blocky, more mechanical than the N64 experiences ever were. I confidently and tentatively give the credit to the choice of the cartridge.

@Kage_88
Wait, Jason Rubin? As in Jason "Naughty Dog" Rubin?
Why exactly?

It's all about trade off's.

The load times issue on the PS1 was generally figured out by 1997 and load times were greatly reduced.

The CD and SCE's 3rd party friendly policies allowed for a great amount of growth in the industry.

It also allowed for more "movie like" gameplay with more cut scenes and voices.

The downside to the latter two is too many companies put too much **** on the shelves. Secondly on my Vita, I cringe whenever I check a file size for a PSone Classic and it is 500-600MB due to the audio and video.

@Yorumi It's all very comparable (to me) to the current day phenomenon of how much you value your own media, you discussed it as well a bit earlier.

It is frankly unusual to collect Blu-ray films, but we do nonetheless. We curate our own libraries and we sometimes choose to revisit media experiences in unbeatably high quality. We pay for reliable experiences such as HD rentals, etc. Chain stores like HMV continue to go out of business, but the Blu-ray format, the 'physical format' par excellence in this day and age, hasn't gone away. We still project media onto screens at the movies and use HQ film rolls to do so.

The cartridge is of equivalent positioning to me: a stance of resistance to mass commercialization, a well founded skepticism toward competing media formats even though these media formats are sure to eventually dominate the business (CD's).

I can't see Nintendo doing anything of the sort nowadays, that's what worries me as well. We could always discuss the inferiority of the systems Wii onwards, or discuss how visually ugly the games became circa GameCube, how oversaturated, and toon like everything became, but maybe we won't as well.

Of relevance though, is really that nobody should care that third party companies abandoned Nintendo's ship due to the choice to keep with cartridges. Not only did keeping cartridges seem benign technologically (more durable as Plywood put it) but he mentions the labor issues that it helped control.

Nintendo should be able to pull through in this industry, but they won't, because they themselves seem uninterested in going all the way with the perception and definition of what a "sophisticated, dedicated gaming system" should look like. A dedicated gaming system today should be refined, deep, it must go beyond being an indie games vehicle, or being a showcase for hyper realistic games, or being a nostalgia driven outlet for Nintendo's evergreen.

If the industry takes a nosedive, it is because none of the big three may acknowledge the inherent power of games the same way we still seem to credit movies and TV with: for being able to make big statements and drive ideas, aesthetics, politics, cultural.

Where are the dark spin offs? Link's Awakening was once tentatively considered a spin-off. But I'd rather take that as a placeholder for what should be considered a spin-off than Hyrule Warriors, any day. Why has Nintendo folded back to Japanese third party support? Where namely, is the European content? Where are the high-profile games on the system from Europe? There are none.

This crumbling of cultural exchange... furthermore, the lack of software creativity (Hyrule Warriors is a placeholder for a metastasis - Japanese branding shoehorned onto Japanese branding going nowhere) will drive the games industry further into a crash. Nintendo headfirst.

@Yorumi @jord I still have an issue of Next Generation magazine, detailing the release of the N64, and interviews thereof. When interviewed about why Nintendo chose to stick with ROM cartridges, Hiroshi Yamauchi replied that both formats have their advantages and disadvantages, with each coming out about evenly performance-wise in the end. Yamauchi believed that from a technical standpoint, some people in the business side of the industry overestimated the merits of disc technology by comparison to ROM cartridges.

One of the "reasons the N64 will succeed" mentioned in one of the main articles mentions that using cartridges had actually cut the price tag on the system itself, from around $350 to $250. Without the need for a CD-ROM drive (which were still expensive at the time) or extra onboard RAM (of which the PS1 and Saturn required for files from their disc-based games to be loaded onto, or else they wouldn't function), the proposition was that starting out with an N64 was cheaper than a PS1 or Saturn. The games were similarly priced in many places ($40-$60, depending on the premium of the title), so Nintendo had actually gone for the "power at a cost to self" approach that so many people seem to want them to go for these days.

Games such as Pilotwings 64 showed off Z-buffering, perspective correct texture mapping, load management, and real time antialiasing, features of the N64 hardware which worked in conjunction with the ROM cartridge format. Certainly, it was a poor format for multimedia suites and large files of uncompressed audio and video, but the actual hardware's gameplay horsepower was leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. Having to perform all of those actions in real time on the PS1 or Saturn at the time would have overloaded their weaker processors, since loading several MB's worth of files at any given time into RAM was too slow a process to keep up. Clever coding techniques developed later on allowed such featured to be preloaded ahead of time in and out of RAM. The N64 never had to worry about that, in part due to the cartridge format.

There are some interesting monetary metrics, as well: Nintendo had around $4 billion in the bank at that point, and went so far as to spend an equivalent of $100 on marketing for every console shipped, which was about 500k at launch. So, that's about $50 million on marketing right off the bat. (Imagine if Nintendo had spend $100-150 on marketing for each Wii U shipped...) That probably also affected cartridge prices.

Third parties hated the cartridges, because each game CD at the time cost about $3 to manufacture, compared to $20-$30 for each cartridge. Cartridges also took about 3 months to make a sizeable volume for mass sale, while CD's could be produced in the same bulk within a week. This all added up to cartridges being an expensive risk for third parties, forcing them to either print in low numbers or go with the competition. Most went with the competition.

As I said in my previous post, the cartridges had significant value as a product made by Japanese workers, while the discs were cheaply produced, usually from Chinese slave wage labor. Even if the supply chain involved was relatively more ethical for cartridges, few cared about that. There was far more profit to be made from selling $3 CD's for $50. (Granted, Nintendo caved to the lust for profit and went on to outsource their GBA's to China...)

There's an interesting point in an article relating directly to Dave Perry in the Next Generation magazine issue on the eve of the N64's release.

In the beginning of November, 1994, Earthworm Jim launched on a 16 Megabit cartridge for the SNES. Two weeks later (as we probably all know), Donkey Kong Country released and blew all the competition out of the water with it's incredible 32 Megabit cartridge. What we may not remember is that Donkey Kong Country had an MSRP of $10 less than it's competitors, including Earthworm Jim. THAT is what set off Dave Perry, and soured him on the whole cartridge concept. As he said, "How the hell are we meant to compete with that?"

Nintendo controlled every aspect of the cartridge manufacturing process- they even owned the cartridge ROM manufacturing plant, which was based in Japan. Nintendo's executives expected to make their real profits from their licensing fees. Since Nintendo owned their cartridge manufacturing process, they received the full benefit of their own wholesale production.

Perry got burned hard by Donkey Kong Country, so unlike the rest of us, he hates that game! That's why he vowed not to support the N64, because he was angry about being on the receiving end of a combination of poor release timing and unequal access to resources compared to Nintendo. He just went to that meet up event which Paul Davies attended to vent his anger and warn others about his horror story.

@RadioShadow Neo Geo got over the 4th problem, but not the 3rd!

@PlywoodStick "Games such as Pilotwings 64 showed off Z-buffering, perspective correct texture mapping, load management, and real time antialiasing, features of the N64 hardware which worked in conjunction with the ROM cartridge format."

I don't know if this directly indicates that the cartridge format was responsible for superior gameplay.. It is as if it does.
Either way, wow, the information was really interesting. Thanks man. Invaluable.

I actually believe that the decision for Nintendo to stick with cartridges for the N64 was an unfortunate fallback plan. Nintendo wanted to move forward with the CD-ROM format as evidenced by their relationship with Sony. But when that relationship went south, I don't think they had enough time or confidence to secure another deal with another manufacturer without severely holding up development of the N64. So, they opted to go with what they knew. Obviously no company is going to say, "well, we wanted to one way, but it fell apart and so we decided to play it safe..."

@Yorumi Yep, you're right. After 2 failed attempts at doing anything meaningful with the CD-ROM format, they had to cut and run. At least that's my opinion. I also think Nintendo were terrified of their games being pirated. But that's another story entirely.

@Yorumi I agree, Nintendo should have been kinder to third parties, instead of more or less stabbing them in the back. I have to wonder how history would have transpired in that alternate universe where Yamauchi was a slightly gentler soul.

The road ahead is definitely a dark cavern of sorts. Hopefully we will find some wondrous things in there, and be inspired as Miyamoto was, instead of finding horrible monstrosities looking to pounce on our fears.

At least the CD-i gave us plenty of YoutubePoops, and a strangely epic collage series of CD-i characters known as "Skies of CD-i Legends"...

@jord Yes, I'm convinced that the cartridge format was superior for certain tasks back in the 90s. With the rise of modern solid state drives set to supplant hard disk drives in the future, cartridges will surely return with a vengeance, in one way or another.

I was lucky to pick up this particular issue from an Electronics Boutique all those years ago. It was a magazine geared towards adults and industry insiders, so I didn't appreciate it's contents back then. Fortunately, it's still in well-preserved condition!

What's funny in considering the remarks from Yamauchi about the cart format encouraging quality software is last gen, wasn't the Wii by far and away the greatest source for trash shovelware?

@Spoony_Tech You don't seem to be very versed in just how successful Nintendo has been with their handhelds, the Wii, amiibos, and Pokemon/Mario.

There was never any "downfall" and even with the Wii U not selling as well as the other consoles it'll barely phase Nintendo in the long run.

@BestBuck15 What had changed was production rates of $3 per CD, with 100s of thousands made within a week, versus $20-$30 per cartridge, with 100s of thousands made within a few months. Third parties could, in fact, influence Nintendo's decisions, by going with the cheaper (in more ways than one) option.

@liveswired I believe that.

As much as I like Nintendo they have shown to be very greedy especially in regards to its share holders over gamers. What got you here? Gamers. Without us you would definitely be nothing

Look at how the Eshop is run. Most of the games in the Eshop are not exclusives. They are games from android and iOS yet in the Eshop they are marked up double what they cost in the other markets. Nintendo says,"hey we don't set the prices the Publishers do." Well it's Nintendos Eshop they should crack down on this practice. But they won't.

@dariusq that's for sure. I've been gaming since 1976 and seen a lot of changes. One thing that never really changes is the price of games even though they are cheaper than ever to manufacture. Pretty soon it will just be paying the programmers crew who made the game when it's all digital and we still pay 49.99 for a game. For collectors I would say it's time to get out. Unless your system could be considered collectible by what you have downloaded but I doubt that. Nintendo has pretty much made it so you can't transfer those games on to someone else if you sold your system.

Was he part of the Earthworm Jim 3D project? I remember that came out on the N64...horrible, but came out. Other than that, I just wondered on where nintendo would be right now, if they would have stuck with Sony. Nintendo and Sony together would make the best games and would be the definite game machine if their partnership didn't end in this era. I still love how both companies never make fun of one another (never in their magazines or web sites or meetings), where when I was getting the X-box magazines, that's all Microsoft was doing...busting on their competition instead of talking about their own system. That's why I never chose Microsoft (had a 360 for a while, but never liked it...sorry x-box fans). Nintendo and Sony will and always will be, my systems of choice, and if they end it, then I end buying any more systems. Love to Nintendo and Sony!

@kingofthesofa Bzzz wrong. He is right he never did release any games on the N64. The only contribution he did for Nintendo after SNES was 'Enter The Matrix' on GC... just saying

@DarthNocturnal Actually, games are probably cheaper today than they were back in the day. I remember that some N64 games and later SNES games could be quite expensive because of the cartridges. For instance, Final Fantasy VI/III cost 70 USD when it first came out, and Ocarina of Time actually cost $80 during its first pressing. Even for games that cost ~$50, you have to adjust for inflation. A $50 NES cartridge in 1985 is equivalent to $111 in today's money. With that in mind, its surprising that game prices haven't gone up even more.