It's fascinating to follow Nintendo "Ultra 64" development history through NEXT Generation magazine

@storm_of_swords: "I hated the long loading screens on my Playstation and I loved that I didn't have to deal with long loading screens on my N64."

Load screens were weird when I 1st experience them but it was worth the wait as PS games were good.

"Also, cartridges have character and there is something that I just love about putting a cartridge in a console and feeling that click before powering it up; whereas discs are just boring."

Well good luck getting cartridges to work. The main flaw when I play old school is getting cartridges to work right away while a PS1 CD is a lesser problem.

Damn, I wanted M2 to be released and become successful along with the Ultra 64. 1996-1997 would've have been so much more interesting.

@SecretPolice: Really? The N64 was my LEAST favorite console. SNES was easily the best. N64 was cool, but extremely overrated.

Imagine if they had chosen CD's and not the overly expensive cartridges. They would have had more multiplats with the best graphics. But they chose the 32MB cartridges LOL. Nintendo kept doing those kind of mistakes with the GameCube as well. The smaller discs ment they would have to remove content and have lower graphics and sound quality compared to the competition. I remember even FIFA games had content removed compared to the PS2 version. Nintendo has no problem making a powerful console, but they make mistakes so that the power is rarely used.

Ruined by choosing to stick with cartridge...unfortunately. :P

Nintendo 64 reminds me alot the PS3. Moronic hardware decisions, broken promises, overhype etc.

Nintendo 64 ended up being way more expensive than competition, lost massive otherwise exclusives to PS because of sales and hardware decisions PLUS N64 was a pain in the ass to develop a game for because of its spastic architecture that led many developers really upset. If we add the costly cartridges decision that many games couldnt fit in there, specially the CGI heavy games that was another serious reason why led 3rd parties away ....

This led to a subpar performance in sales vs the newcomer Playstation.

Its for a reason why in the very end Nintendo apologized for N64 mistakes and reassured Nintendo fans and developers this wont happen again ( hardware speaking )

Ah yes, the console that made Nintendo lose the war.

We got a Necromancer here. lol :P

To be fair:.

Nintendo used cartridges so that they didn’t have to deal with piracy. This as we all know is something that is jealously defended by Nintendo. Yes they where more expensive to manufacture and developers didn’t like that since they wanted their games to sell.

The Nintendo 64 is my favorite console of all time. Mario 64 being my favorite game of all time ( still have my original save file with only 63 stars, never finished it ! Haven’t touched it since I was 12 @ 31 years old now ) that System was amazing. I loved my PlayStation since it had a more mature audience and can be used as a CD player. But the N64 meant pure Joyce and fun especially if you had 3 guests over.

I am glad they stuck to that formula. They still remain the daddy of video games. Yes Sony is doing great, we all know they rule all. Nintendo has 1 thing that they don’t though.

And that lads, is Zelda.

Okay, not all of this is accurate.

The N64 (which in my opinion is one of the worse Nintendo consoles ever) lost it's developer support because of two reasons:

• Choosing to stay with a cartridge format.
• Forcing the developers willing to stay to use Official Cartridge Housing by Nintendo for their games (which Nintendo going to charge them $35 a pop).

That's it. That's why there was a mass exodus of third parties well before the N64 even launched. The problem was never the hardware. It was the tyrannical practices of Hiroshi Yamauchi that caused third parties to leave them. And the reason why none of them ever came back was because a lot of them were left feeling burned and taken advantage of by Nintendo. Especially SquareSoft. Square was so upset with Nintendo that they wanted to break all their remaining contracts they had with them (namely Super Mario RPG: Legend of The Seven Stars for the SNES). Yeah, it goes that far back.

CGI scenes, or as you put it, games that "Couldn't Fit" turned out to not be as big an issue as some thought. Just ask Capcom. They ended up releasing Resident Evil 2 in it's entirety on the N64 right before the GameCube came out. That's right! They fit both discs, along with all the CGI and extra content onto a single cartridge. AND the game looked better than the PS1 version (and if you had an expansion pack plugged in, it looked better than the PC version too).

Anyway, the REAL problem was Hiroshi Yamauchi. His practices were brutal, not just to developers, but to competitors, and even to retailers who carried competing consoles.

In fact, if anyone wants to know what Nintendo was really like in the 80's/90's, just watch this:

EDIT: Got two of them for ya!

Does this old thread from 2017 needs to be bumped again?

Cartridges had some benefits over CDs. Firstly, cartridges had much faster loading times than CDs, which was often frustrating on the PS1. Secondly, due to the quick loading, with clever programming it was possible to use the cartridge like a large extended RAM, which the developer of Indiana Jones was able to pull off. And thirdly, it helped prevent piracy, since CDs could be more easily pirated at the time. Also, the N64 supported audio/video/image compression, so it was possible to compress nearly a CD's worth of content into a large N64 cartridge (as demonstrated by the RE2 port), but only with a significant loss in quality. Nevertheless, the main advantages of CDs, the much larger storage space and the cheaper manufacturing prices, greatly outweighed whatever advantages that cartridges had at the time.

As for the GameCube, that was superior to the PS2 in virtually every way. And the mini-discs weren't much of an issue either. Firstly, the mini-discs loaded faster than DVDs. Secondly, the mini-discs were cheaper to produce than DVDs. And lastly, while the mini-discs had lower storage space (just over 1/3 that of a DVD), the GameCube supported more advanced compression. For example, it supported DiVX, which could compress a DVD's worth of video onto a mini-disc with very little loss in quality. What the GC mini-discs lacked in terms of space, they made up for with more advanced compression. And even if there wasn't enough space, a game could be released on two discs (or more). The GameCube's mini-disc was not a significant drawback the way N64 cartridges were.

Next Gen was such a great magazine.