Moments in Gaming History: Nintendo wants to go to CD ROM and then doesn't?

[neon/drifter]

So I think we all know the infamous story of how Nintendo sought out CD ROM technology in the early nineties and made decisions that lead to the creation of the Sony Playstation AND the disastrous Philips CD-i.

I was talking with a co worker about the story today and for the first time in my life, I came across a plot hole in the story that neither of us knew the answer to.

If Nintendo wanted a disc based solution going into the 90s, then why, after the debacle of switching from Sony to Philips, did we end up with the Philips CD-i and not, for example a Nintendo CD-i? We know that the contract allowed Philips to use Nintendo IP and that's how we got such great legends as Zelda Wand of Gamelon and Hotel Mario but...

Nintendo's next console was the N64. It stuck with cartridges. What was the whole point of that? Why did Nintendo just decide to reverse course after getting that close to a new medium before anyone else?

I tried doing my own research and I can't seem to find that one detail though I did find the original NYT article from 1991 talking about the whole ordeal! Blast from the past! https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/03/business/nintendo-philips-deal-is-a-slap-at-sony.html

Big thank you to anyone who knows the missing details to this well known story!

 

[Crushed]

One common theory at the time was that Nintendo never took the CD add-on thing that seriously, but that they simply wanted to draw attention away from both Sega and NEC, who both had CD add-ons for their own systems.

Case in point: a forgotten aspect of the narrative is that Sony and Nintendo actually announced a year after the Phillips announcement that they had worked things out and would be moving forward with a deal again. (But obviously never did)


The actual answer is that Nintendo realized that by the time an SNES CD would come out, it would have only a short time on the market before the Ultra 64 would come out and make it obsolete. (Remember that the N64 was supposed to launch a year before it actually did). Nintendo had Donkey Kong Country and Super FX games to extend the SNES's lifespan without a costly add-on like Sega did with the Genesis. As for why the N64 didn't use CDs, I think it was a combination of Nintendo feeling burned by the major players in the CD market and the architecture of the N64 itself not being very friendly for CDs, iirc.

The Weird History Of The Super NES CD-ROM, Nintendo's Most Notorious Vaporware

Nintendo never released a CD-ROM gaming system. But for a while in the early 1990s, it flirted with the idea. That protracted will-they-won’t-they romance produced pages of breathless gossip columns in video game magazines, a mountain of vaporware, some terrible Zelda games, and one priceless...

kotaku.com

 

[TubaZef]

Why did Nintendo just decide to reverse course after getting that close to a new medium before anyone else?

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Not before anyone else, SEGA and NEC got there first with the SEGA-CD and the PC-Engine CD. AFAIK Nintendo gave up on the "SNES-CD" after the SEGA-CD being a big flop.

As for the N64... it's one of those things that seem obvious in retrospect, but at the time, it wasn't that easy of a decision. CDs had problems when compared to cartridges, really slow reading times being the biggest downside.

Their biggest reason to keep using cartridges though was probably wanting to have more control over the media being used as CDs would have to be produced by a third party.

 

[bomma man]

The main reasons that come to mind are:

• Piracy;
• Control over the manufacturing process and supply;
• Load times.

Probably in that order. That the GCN used small, proprietary disks suggests that all three were still a concern then.

 

[Madao]

The main reasons that come to mind are:

• Piracy;
• Control over the manufacturing process and supply;
• Load times.

Probably in that order. That the GCN used small, proprietary disks suggests that all three were still a concern then.

Click to shrink...

i would add cost to those since a CD drive would have been much more expensive than a cart slot and we know how much nintendo likes to cheap out.

 

[Rydeen]

i would add cost to those since a CD drive would have been much more expensive than a cart slot and we know how much nintendo likes to cheap out.

Click to shrink...

However cartridge manufacturing costs way more than manufacturing a compact disc.

I think the timing aspect of it was a big one, but I also think the lukewarm market response to the Sega CD, and then the 3DO and eventually the Phillips CD-i itself also played a part in Nintendo deciding against the CD SNES add-on as well as the N64 being cartridge based. Any decision about the software format for N64 would've been made a few years before Playstation's release so Nintendo had to be looking at the contemporary market and be seeing what the consumer response to DC-based game systems was at the time.

 

[Velveteen Touch]

Don't forget that Nintendo controlled (for the most part) the cartridge manufacturing side of things. That would've been a huge cut in their income to just give up on. So after their small experiments, suddenly "loading times" became a giant sticking point for the company. Never mind the other advantages CDs gave game makers.

 

[Faddy]

The main reasons that come to mind are:

• Piracy;
• Control over the manufacturing process and supply;
• Load times.

Probably in that order. That the GCN used small, proprietary disks suggests that all three were still a concern then.

Click to shrink...

There was probably a concern about how they would extract licensing fees from CDs.

If they don't own the production could software devs print their own games and cut ninty out of their own console? Because i think they were making good money on cartridge manufacturing and royalties in the NES and SNES days. Losing that revenue wouldn't be the same as piracy, but a large danger to nintendo because they had no skin in the CD format committee.

 

[bomma man]

There was probably a concern about how they would extract licensing fees from CDs.

If they don't own the production could software devs print their own games and cut ninty out of their own console? Because i think they were making good money on cartridge manufacturing and royalties in the NES and SNES days. Losing that revenue wouldn't be the same as piracy, but a large danger to nintendo because they had no skin in the CD format committee.

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I don't know the specifics but I have to imagine that that was a big factor. They would still reserve the right to license the games, but they would probably run up against anti-competition laws if they mandated that they could only buy disks through them. It's crazy to think of now, but back in the cartridge era the cost of the cartridges themselves was sometimes the biggest expense of the whole development process (which, as a side note, I guess is probably why there were a decent amount of 100% complete games that never came out in that period). Part of that is the physical expense - cartridges back then were basically RAM, not flash memory - but companies like Nintendo having a monopoly over the manufacturing also probably had a lot to do with it.

 

[Sixfortyfive]

I don't know the specifics but I have to imagine that that was a big factor. They would still reserve the right to license the games, but they would probably run up against anti-competition laws if they mandated that they could only buy disks through them. It's crazy to think of now, but back in the cartridge era the cost of the cartridges themselves was sometimes the biggest expense of the whole development process (which, as a side note, I guess is probably why there were a decent amount of 100% complete games that never came out in that period). Part of that is the physical expense - cartridges back then were basically RAM, not flash memory - but companies like Nintendo having a monopoly over the manufacturing also probably had a lot to do with it.

Click to shrink...

This specific console generation is what really laid all of that out in plain sight. It's the only time in history I can think of where video games got cheaper, and significantly so... but only for the CD-based systems. The earliest NES games cost about $25 MSRP at retail. Later NES games, which frequently utilized extra, expensive chips inside the cartridges, roughly doubled that price. Top-shelf games on the Genesis and SNES hit $80, with some really rare exceptions actually ballooning to the $100 mark.

Then the Saturn and Playstation came along and everything dropped down to $50 or less. Meanwhile, the N64 was still often pushing games in the $70-$80 range. The biggest reasons that are given for Nintendo's choice of game medium for this era are control over the manufacturing process and the licensing revenue, which I believe, but it's kind of funny to think that in order for their games to actually be competitively priced against their competition, they would have had to slash the MSRP so much that it would have eroded these supposed advantages anyway.

 

[UltraMagnus]

The licensing fee angle always seemed a bit suspect to me. At the end of the day, Nintendo could charge whatever they wanted as a licensing fee, regardless of the format.

So if cartridges meant they were making an extra $5-$10/unit because they were the manufacturer on top of the physical cost of the cartridge, they could simply just have slapped a $5-$10 surcharge on a Nintendo 64 specific disc, otherwise the disc is not licensed to play on a N64 system.

There is no "fairness commission" where a developer could go to and say "hey, CDs are cheaper, they shouldn't be able to charge us this extra amount". It would still in the end probably end up cheaper for the developer anyway.

Also Nintendo was looking at proprietary style discs anyway, the SNES CDs were supposed to come in caddies, not as a naked disc, which I believe was supposed to also have a lock out chip inside the caddie to prevent piracy.

You can see here it's not a disc, it's a disc inside of a plastic caddy, which Nintendo could have easily made into a proprietary design and then you wouldn't be able to just go to any random CD manufacturer to have the discs made.

 

[OsakaDon]

Did you see this guy that modded and made his own SNES-CD Playstation add-on?
The add-on has a full Playstation in it. So it can play all PSX and SNES games. PSX games are played with the SNES controllers through the SNES system.
Super cool.

https://medium.com/attract-mode/yup-thats-a-nintendo-playstation-alright-eeb8ac34b242

 

[bomma man]

The licensing fee angle always seemed a bit suspect to me. At the end of the day, Nintendo could charge whatever they wanted as a licensing fee, regardless of the format.

So if cartridges meant they were making an extra $5-$10/unit because they were the manufacturer on top of the physical cost of the cartridge, they could simply just have slapped a $5-$10 surcharge on a Nintendo 64 specific disc, otherwise the disc is not licensed to play on a N64 system.

There is no "fairness commission" where a developer could go to and say "hey, CDs are cheaper, they shouldn't be able to charge us this extra amount". It would still in the end probably end up cheaper for the developer anyway.

Also Nintendo was looking at proprietary style discs anyway, the SNES CDs were supposed to come in caddies, not as a naked disc, which I believe was supposed to also have a lock out chip inside the caddie to prevent piracy.

You can see here it's not a disc, it's a disc inside of a plastic caddy, which Nintendo could have easily made into a proprietary design and then you wouldn't be able to just go to any random CD manufacturer to have the discs made.

Click to shrink...

Licensing revenue /=/ manufacturing control and profits - they were two different revenue streams. I agree that CDs vs cartridges is a little bit of a red herring, as even if Nintendo had gone with CDs for the N64 they almost certainly wouldn't have reduced their licensing fees.

Given that there is Nintendo Playstation in the wild, couldn't this be verified? Isn't that just the disk tray?

 

[UltraMagnus]

Licensing revenue /=/ manufacturing control and profits - they were two different revenue streams. I agree that CDs vs cartridges is a little bit of a red herring, as even if Nintendo had gone with CDs for the N64 they almost certainly wouldn't have reduced their licensing fees.

Given that there is Nintendo Playstation in the wild, couldn't this be verified? Isn't that just the disk tray?

Click to shrink...

I'm pretty sure it's not, this is ages ago but I remember having that issue of EGM, they had a picture of the disc itself inside of a caddy. This also would have solved the issue of kids scratching discs accidentally.

Yeah as for licensing fee, if the setup for the N64 was akin to

$20 paid for the cartridge itself (which Nintendo pockets $5/unit from)
+ $10 licensing fee = $15 ultimately in Nintendo's pocket.

They could have just turned out and stipulated this

10 cents paid for the CD, but the licensing fee is $15 flat. Nintendo gets the same money, but the developer is still happy because they save about $15/copy of a game anyway.

EDIT: Here it is:

You can see the discs come in a individual plastic caddy. The discs/caddies were also supposed to have a small chip inside that would have some amount of memory for game saves and anti-piracy ... so this design even as is couldn't be done by any ol' CD manufacturer to begin with. Nintendo could easily stipulate you have to buy from them.

 

[Rydeen]

Given that there is Nintendo Playstation in the wild, couldn't this be verified? Isn't that just the disk tray?

Click to shrink...

On the only known existing Playstation/Super NES CD, It is just a disc tray, there's nothing proprietary about the CD-drive.

 

[UltraMagnus]

I mean it would track that Nintendo simply never bothered to tell Sony about the caddy CD design because they had no intention of honoring that deal anyway, lol. But definitely it looks like for their actual Nintendo made SNES CD drive, it was supposed to be discs encased in their own individual caddy.

Which wouldn't have been bad, it would've prevented a lot of disc scratches.

Would have made piracy a lot more difficult too.

 

[Psxphile]

Sometimes I wonder how different things would be if:

a) Nintendo had actually gone through with the SNES CD-ROM add-on.
-or-
b) Nintendo forewent cartridges altogether and incorporated the 64DD as the N64's main storage format at launch.

 

[Pokemaniac]

Something that I think is important to keep in mind is that CD-based gaming didn't really start taking off in a big way until the N64 was already pretty far in development. It's not unreasonable to think that Nintendo saw the poor performance of CD-based systems up until that point and just how bad of a medium they were for actually running games off of (price per gigabyte has always been basically the only metric optical media are actually competitive on) and thought that CDs just weren't worth the downsides yet and stuck to cartridges. With hindsight, we know that the downsides ultimately didn't matter once paired with a sufficiently appealing platform, but I don't think that would have necessarily been obvious at the time.

Even now, optical discs are a pretty terrible medium for physical games, but they've only managed to stick around because no one wants to pay for the cartridges that would actually be necessary to run games off of.

 

[Rydeen]

It's not unreasonable to think that Nintendo saw the poor performance of CD-based systems up until that point and just how bad of a medium they were for actually running games off of (price per gigabyte has always been basically the only metric optical media are actually competitive on) and thought that CDs just weren't worth the downsides yet and stuck to cartridges.

Click to shrink...

When they were doing R&D for the N64, it would've been the Phillips CD-i, the 3DO, the Jaguar CD, and the NEC PC-FX as the "next-gen" CD-based game systems on the market, so I can understand why Nintendo decided to stick with cartridges for the N64 at that time.

 

[Typhon]

As for why the N64 didn't use CDs, I think it was a combination of Nintendo feeling burned by the major players in the CD market and the architecture of the N64 itself not being very friendly for CDs, iirc.

Click to shrink...

Could you elaborate on this?

 

[Pyro]

I thought they stuck with cartridges for better control of manufacturing and royalties and then cited "no loading" and anti-piracy as deflections.

 

[Onix555]

The main reason people forget is the predatory contract that would basically give Sony all of Nintendos IP. Better to yeet that one

 

[Hilarious_Bearious]

Sometimes I wonder how different things would be if:

a) Nintendo had actually gone through with the SNES CD-ROM add-on.
-or-
b) Nintendo forewent cartridges altogether and incorporated the 64DD as the N64's main storage format at launch.

Click to shrink...

I think using the ferromagnetic DD drive would have been disastrous. The only thing it was really best at was being writable. For everything else, they were middle of the road, often being closer to the weaker side between cartridge and CD. For example, storage sizes closer to cartridge, but speeds closer to CD. AFAIK they would be cheaper and quicker to produce than carts, but not as cheap and quick as CDs. Plus relying on magnetism means that they will eventually be corrupted by ambient magnetic fields.

I imagine the drive would have been costly. A console port is a custom part, but simple so cheap to produce. A CD drive was a pretty sophisticated piece of tech for the time, but benefited from economies of scale. The DD drive seems like it would have the worst of both worlds in this regard.

 

[Cheerilee]

Nintendo never wanted CD. Ken Kutaragi (the father of PlayStation) wanted CD (because he was very much ahead of the curve, all the was up until he was fired for putting multi-threading and Blu-Ray in the PS3 before the industry was ready for such things).

Ken Kutaragi went behind Sony's back to make the SNES sound chip, because he wanted to make audio in games better. He asked his bosses for permission to work on the SNES when Hiroshi Yamauchi was already standing right next to him with a purchase order.

My guess is, the Sony/Nintendo SNES CD contract was the sound chip contract (based on the year that David Scheff attributed to the contract) and all it said was that Sony had the right to manufacture and sell Sony-branded SNES hardware. That's not something Nintendo would've had a problem with, since Nintendo made their money from cart sales, and extra hardware out in the wild would only push more cart sales.

Kutaragi decided that the world needed CD, so he made a CD drive for the SNES, and somewhere along the way someone at Sony realized that a CD drive would be a backdoor into bigger/cheaper games for the SNES, and that Sony was holding the keys to that backdoor. And remember, all that Nintendo cared about at this point was the royalty that they got on game sales.

Nintendo realized the terrifying implications of Sony's SNES CD (partially because Sony started courting SNES developers like Square), so they asked Sony for the keys, and Sony rightfully but ruthlessly said "No."

So Nintendo went nuclear and threatened Mutually Assured Destruction, by asking Phillips to make an SNES CD for Nintendo. Based on the Phillips CDi, because Nintendo needed something slapped together quickly. If Sony was going to launch SNES CD, then Nintendo would also launch SNES CD, and they would be incompatible, and the market would be confused, and both sides would lose.

Sony eventually caved to Nintendo's pressure and agreed to give Nintendo control over all "games" for the SNES CD, while Sony would control "educational software", with Nintendo being the final judge over which is which. Then Nintendo asked Sony to meet with Phillips and merge the two units into one better-than-both unit, and Sony met with Phillips, and then Sony quit the project, saying that merging the two units was impossible. Then Nintendo did nothing with CD, because they never really wanted CD. Sony approved Kutaragi's "PlayStation-X" project as an angry revenge project against Nintendo (which ditched the SNES's 2D roots and focused on 3D so hard, Sega was spooked into putting a second CPU into the Saturn, because Kutaragi was always advanced).

Nintendo games on the CDi are a laughable footnote.

 

[Psxphile]

Netflix should option the rights.

10 episode mini-series The Spin, directed by David Fincher.

 

[Sectorseven]

I know it's easy to say in retrospect, but I feel like the Gamecube is what N64 should have been: a controller that looks approachable and a disc based system (even if it used mini discs to combat piracy, it would have been better than carts).

 

[Pokemaniac]

Nintendo never wanted CD. Ken Kutaragi (the father of PlayStation) wanted CD (because he was very much ahead of the curve, all the was up until he was fired for putting multi-threading and Blu-Ray in the PS3 before the industry was ready for such things).

Click to shrink...

"Multithreading" was not the problem with Cell, as the Xbox 360 also supported it. The problem is that the SPEs are very much not normal CPU cores which made them difficult to work with.