Not Even Squaresoft Could Convince Nintendo To Use Discs For The N64
Not Even Squaresoft Could Convince Nintendo To Use Discs For The N64
by binderie1951
18 Comments
binderie1951
From Shuhei Yoshida:
Right. I became the lead account manager for the Japanese publishers and developers. Our goal was to get all the major games in Japan to come to the PlayStation. At the time there were two big teams working with Nintendo, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. For the Japanese audience, those were the most popular games. When a new one came out you had long lines of customers waiting to buy them. It made the national news when a new Dragon Quest came out. There was controversy over kids calling out sick from school to stay home and play games.
Gilgamesh!
Of course, initially they weren’t interested. They were close to Nintendo. But Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, loved the potential of CDs. His dream was to create a movie-like Final Fantasy game. He was disappointed when he learned that the Nintendo 64 still used cartridges. His movies couldn’t fit there. Squaresoft tried to convince Nintendo to change that plan, but they wouldn’t. They didn’t believe in CD-ROM at all. That’s why they licensed the Super Nintendo add-on project to Sony in the first place, because they believed CD-ROM was just too slow to ever make for a good game system.
MyMouthisCancerous
It’s a classic tale of Nintendo under Yamauchi getting too high off their Kool-Aid after they were able to successfully drive off most of their competitors in the industry during the NES/SNES era even with SEGA pressuring them at certain points. Yes cartridges were able to load things faster but CD-ROMs were both cheaper and could store way more content on a single disc, but Nintendo thought that having most of the third-parties under their airtight grip would offer enough sway to just continue working under whatever constraints the format would provide next to what Sony and SEGA were doing. Squaresoft leaving basically foreshadowed the very tumultuous relationship with third-party publishers Nintendo was going to continue to have up until basically the Switch gen in terms of home consoles. They went from being the sole benefactor in the games industry for a lot of developers to arguably not even being seen as a priority at all next to PlayStation and eventually Xbox in the later gens, all because of this one instance of pure stubbornness. It’s the reason why their next few consoles afterwards were basically being carried by Nintendo’s first-party offerings because the third-party stuff was either too sporadic or essentially kids fodder with the GameCube, Wii and Wii U especially
Apparently saying Nintendo used to be a company with its head up its own ass gets you downvoted even though the history is literally there for people to see. N64 didn’t coast behind Sony for no reason
Dukemon102
It was a controversial decision at the time, but in the end that made the games on N64 radically different from the ones on PS1. The latter had games that intentionally needed to be slower to cover up for load times or just have loading screens between any rooms or segment. They had more space, FMVs and high quality audio but it came at the cost of very slow loading times.
The N64 might have lost the Third Party support of the industry at that point, but its games were as fast and frenetic as they were on SNES, without loading screens at all. Imagine playing Ocarina of Time where every single door or screen transition comes with a loading screen or they needed to add filler useless hallways to cover up the fact that the game is loading (Like FFVII did). Or a Super Mario 64 where Mario’s movement needed to be nerfed so he doesn’t catch up with the areas that still haven’t been loaded from the disc and the exploration of the castle isn’t as seamless anymore.
Middle-Tap6088
Both Nintendo and Sega were both ran by very stubborn businessmen. Even after Sony showed up and cleaned house, these two didn’t learn from their mistakes until they either got a new president or was forced to go third party.
Josephalopod
The CDs really were excruciatingly slow. I remember someone brought their PlayStation over one day and I thought it sucked.
miami2881
What a horrible decision by Nintendo
pulyx
This story always annoys me. The ageist in my comes roaring up.
In theory Yamauchi was right. He was just 30 years away from his ultimate standard being met.
Disks were slow AF. But people didn’t mind that when the other benefits offset the slow loading times.
But his stubbornness only hamstrung Nintendo for years. He not only stunted nintendo’s development capabilities he enabled the birth of a product that almost buried them. Thank god for handhelds and pokemon.
[EDIT] Mistook Sakguchi for Yamauchi lol killme
ghostpicnic
This is not news. We’ve known this for decades. It’s the whole reason why Final Fantasy 7 went to PlayStation.
Only_Ad8049
Nintendo didn’t want to rely on or pay anyone else to release their games if they could help it.
The CD add-on deal with Sony was a worse deal than creating a competitor. If I remember correctly, that deal gave Sony the rights to games that used the CD add-on.
In the end, it was a win for gamers to have a more competitive landscape.
AgentSkidMarks
I’m glad they didn’t. N64 games have aged way better than their contemporaries.
lacaras21
I feel like the whole Squaresoft jumping off from Nintendo is made into a bigger deal than it was at the time. Square only really made JRPGs, and JRPGs, even popular ones like Final Fantasy were still mostly a niche market in North America (Nintendo’s biggest market). FFVII was really the first JRPG to go mainstream, while it would have been great to have that on N64, nobody could have predicted its popularity. For North America, the genres that mattered were platformers, sports, fighting, and action games. So no, there was no reason for Nintendo to make major alterations to their hardware plans because Square wanted to make a movie on it.
PckMan
If Nintendo doesn’t do at least one thing to shoot themselves in the foot with every system they put out their heads will simultaneously explode.
Sentinel10
Further underscores the irony that Nintendo and Square’s relationship seems to have repaired itself over the Switch era, the one where Nintendo went back to using cartridges.
Professional_List236
Glad they didn’t hear. The N64 is the most powerful console of the generation, and even with poor sales, it’s strategy is still copied today
serenade1
Pretty sure Square was banished at that time by Yamauchi, right? Don’t think they are in the position for convincing
spinosaurs70
It’s a harder question than people want to admit it if competing directly with Sony would have world, Sony was a large multinational conglomerate it’s possible it would have beat Nintendo regardless of what it did.
But it’s still hard to see the design to go with cartridges and being able to offer a slight price advantage being a good thing.
redditdude68
PS1 has always been the worst PlayStation to me because of those CDs. It worked for most of the market as it was still low cost, had more games/third parties on it and therefore had a lot of the big games of the time like Tekken and Final Fantasy, but I find the majority of its library has aged poorly compared to the N64s.
Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 are still better than many games coming out today.
CrazedRaven01
I heard this was the beginning of Square’s breakup with nintendo, with them ultimately bringing FFVII to the Playstation.
18 Comments
From Shuhei Yoshida:
Right. I became the lead account manager for the Japanese publishers and developers. Our goal was to get all the major games in Japan to come to the PlayStation. At the time there were two big teams working with Nintendo, Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. For the Japanese audience, those were the most popular games. When a new one came out you had long lines of customers waiting to buy them. It made the national news when a new Dragon Quest came out. There was controversy over kids calling out sick from school to stay home and play games.
Gilgamesh!
Of course, initially they weren’t interested. They were close to Nintendo. But Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, loved the potential of CDs. His dream was to create a movie-like Final Fantasy game. He was disappointed when he learned that the Nintendo 64 still used cartridges. His movies couldn’t fit there. Squaresoft tried to convince Nintendo to change that plan, but they wouldn’t. They didn’t believe in CD-ROM at all. That’s why they licensed the Super Nintendo add-on project to Sony in the first place, because they believed CD-ROM was just too slow to ever make for a good game system.
It’s a classic tale of Nintendo under Yamauchi getting too high off their Kool-Aid after they were able to successfully drive off most of their competitors in the industry during the NES/SNES era even with SEGA pressuring them at certain points. Yes cartridges were able to load things faster but CD-ROMs were both cheaper and could store way more content on a single disc, but Nintendo thought that having most of the third-parties under their airtight grip would offer enough sway to just continue working under whatever constraints the format would provide next to what Sony and SEGA were doing. Squaresoft leaving basically foreshadowed the very tumultuous relationship with third-party publishers Nintendo was going to continue to have up until basically the Switch gen in terms of home consoles. They went from being the sole benefactor in the games industry for a lot of developers to arguably not even being seen as a priority at all next to PlayStation and eventually Xbox in the later gens, all because of this one instance of pure stubbornness. It’s the reason why their next few consoles afterwards were basically being carried by Nintendo’s first-party offerings because the third-party stuff was either too sporadic or essentially kids fodder with the GameCube, Wii and Wii U especially
Apparently saying Nintendo used to be a company with its head up its own ass gets you downvoted even though the history is literally there for people to see. N64 didn’t coast behind Sony for no reason
It was a controversial decision at the time, but in the end that made the games on N64 radically different from the ones on PS1. The latter had games that intentionally needed to be slower to cover up for load times or just have loading screens between any rooms or segment. They had more space, FMVs and high quality audio but it came at the cost of very slow loading times.
The N64 might have lost the Third Party support of the industry at that point, but its games were as fast and frenetic as they were on SNES, without loading screens at all. Imagine playing Ocarina of Time where every single door or screen transition comes with a loading screen or they needed to add filler useless hallways to cover up the fact that the game is loading (Like FFVII did). Or a Super Mario 64 where Mario’s movement needed to be nerfed so he doesn’t catch up with the areas that still haven’t been loaded from the disc and the exploration of the castle isn’t as seamless anymore.
Both Nintendo and Sega were both ran by very stubborn businessmen. Even after Sony showed up and cleaned house, these two didn’t learn from their mistakes until they either got a new president or was forced to go third party.
The CDs really were excruciatingly slow. I remember someone brought their PlayStation over one day and I thought it sucked.
What a horrible decision by Nintendo
This story always annoys me. The ageist in my comes roaring up.
In theory Yamauchi was right. He was just 30 years away from his ultimate standard being met.
Disks were slow AF. But people didn’t mind that when the other benefits offset the slow loading times.
But his stubbornness only hamstrung Nintendo for years. He not only stunted nintendo’s development capabilities he enabled the birth of a product that almost buried them. Thank god for handhelds and pokemon.
[EDIT] Mistook Sakguchi for Yamauchi lol killme
This is not news. We’ve known this for decades. It’s the whole reason why Final Fantasy 7 went to PlayStation.
Nintendo didn’t want to rely on or pay anyone else to release their games if they could help it.
The CD add-on deal with Sony was a worse deal than creating a competitor. If I remember correctly, that deal gave Sony the rights to games that used the CD add-on.
In the end, it was a win for gamers to have a more competitive landscape.
I’m glad they didn’t. N64 games have aged way better than their contemporaries.
I feel like the whole Squaresoft jumping off from Nintendo is made into a bigger deal than it was at the time. Square only really made JRPGs, and JRPGs, even popular ones like Final Fantasy were still mostly a niche market in North America (Nintendo’s biggest market). FFVII was really the first JRPG to go mainstream, while it would have been great to have that on N64, nobody could have predicted its popularity. For North America, the genres that mattered were platformers, sports, fighting, and action games. So no, there was no reason for Nintendo to make major alterations to their hardware plans because Square wanted to make a movie on it.
If Nintendo doesn’t do at least one thing to shoot themselves in the foot with every system they put out their heads will simultaneously explode.
Further underscores the irony that Nintendo and Square’s relationship seems to have repaired itself over the Switch era, the one where Nintendo went back to using cartridges.
Glad they didn’t hear. The N64 is the most powerful console of the generation, and even with poor sales, it’s strategy is still copied today
Pretty sure Square was banished at that time by Yamauchi, right? Don’t think they are in the position for convincing
It’s a harder question than people want to admit it if competing directly with Sony would have world, Sony was a large multinational conglomerate it’s possible it would have beat Nintendo regardless of what it did.
But it’s still hard to see the design to go with cartridges and being able to offer a slight price advantage being a good thing.
PS1 has always been the worst PlayStation to me because of those CDs. It worked for most of the market as it was still low cost, had more games/third parties on it and therefore had a lot of the big games of the time like Tekken and Final Fantasy, but I find the majority of its library has aged poorly compared to the N64s.
Ocarina of Time and Mario 64 are still better than many games coming out today.
I heard this was the beginning of Square’s breakup with nintendo, with them ultimately bringing FFVII to the Playstation.