@AzatiS said:
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 )
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!
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