Topic: Miyamoto Cites Uniqueness as Key Principle

[BlackNMild2k1]

Deguello, I know you like to debate, but I'm gonna have to give the point to team MegaSane.

Normally I agree with you, but every point of Ian's you tried to counter point was basically off, and Mega Byte did a good job of backing it up. We've had most of these discussions till we were blue in the face over the years so I sure most of us agree on the facts of the N64 vs PS1 situation.

1.) CD's are the main cause for the departure of 3rd parties from Nintendo to Sony
they were much much cheaper(something like $2 per CD vs $10 per cartridge), had lots more space during the rise of the FMV craze and Sony had much cheaper licensing fees with alot more leniency on the type of content they would allow on the system. Nintendo was still in the Yamauchi Iron Fist mentality, and most 3rd parties wanted to get away from that. 

2.)64MB/750MB >>>> 512MB/1.8GB
11.7x space vs 3.5x space
not really sure where your argument was there.

3.) DS is a phenomenom that followed up the GBA which followed up the GB, each was backwards compatible with each other and Nintendo has had the handheld sector locked down tight till this day.  Publishers where supporting PSP with all they got at first, then just PS2 ports and now basically nothing. Their push for PSP didn't work as the DS won the mind share of the consumer. PSP is the best competitor Nintendo it had yet when it comes to handhelds.

[Stratos]

If CDs didn't cause people to turn from Nintendo to Sony then how do you explain the poster on my friends wall that has FF7 images on it and a statement about how the game was bigger than any cartridge could hold. It was a direct attack on Nintendo and the N64 by Squaresoft.

[Mop it up]

If I remember rightly, Squaresoft was openly insulting of Nintendo's choice to use cartridges.

[MegaByte]

I'll also throw in there that though the earlier CD systems failed due to price, power, etc., the few good games (and developers) for those systems shifted to Playstation.

[Deguello]

None of the previous systems had anything near the power of the Playstation... CD storage to that point had primarily been used for movies and music.   It wasn't the CD by itself, it was Sony showing what could be done with CDs and their courting of the publishers.  Also, the PS1 had <5 million in sales by the time the N64 launched, hardly a huge established base.

Actually 5 million was quite massive at the time.  The SNES only sold about 50 or so million, so it's like having being able to run 10% of a race before your opponent even leaves the gate.  I'm not even sure it wasn't higher worldwide than in Japan.  I think it might have even been something like 10 million before the N64 even exists.

Yeah, and you could have multiple CDs.  And almost no games were anywhere near the 64MB because ROMs cost much more back then.  I wasn't comparing byte for byte, I was comparing percentage, and as I said, cartridges don't have as big of a disadvantage as they used to do to advanced compression.  And they also make more sense for a portable given the power consumption and fragility of having a disc drive.

Well I don't see it that way.  I see that the gap between carts and CDs as smaller than Carts/UMDs.  They can make games larger than almost every Gamecube game, and the DS can't even beat CDs now.  And the 512MB DS Card is very rare.  It's usually a 256MB or a 128 MB DS Card to a 1.8 GB disc, which has pretty much the same ratio.

That's not all there is to it.  The initial couple years of sales of the PSP were much better than the Playstation 1.  As we've seen with both DS and Wii, there's a fairly significant time lag before publishers realize which system has the install base that can't be ignored.

The PSP was a major product by an established brand.  Of course it sold faster out of the gate than the PS1.

Quotes talking about FFVII ad campaign mentioning carts.

I think we're putting the cart before the horse here.  FFVII actually started as an N64 game, carts and all before it was moved to the PS1 (I think there might be screenshots to this effect in some old GamePor or something) and even so they had demos of FF6 characters running on the N64.  It was a business deal based on more on userbase and moneyhats, and less on CDs.

It's not like they would have advertised the game like "Final Fantasy VII.  The first game on the Playstation.  Come witness the awesome power of the Playstation having a higher userbase and Sony buying a large percentage of our stock."

But since it seems to be the conventional wisdom I'll back down.  Furthermore, I'll say that I'll say that CDs weren't completely unrelated the PS1's victory, as it did cost less which allowed Sony to underscore Nintendo's licensing fee, which had more impact than just the CDs themselves.

[Mop it up]

Final Fantasy VII was never in development for the Nintendo 64. The demo featuring FF6 characters on the Nintendo 64 (known as "Final Fantasy 64" now) was often misconstrued as an early build of Final Fantasy VII.

More information can be found here:

http://www.lostlevels.org/200510/

[Deguello]

Wikipedia has FFVII on a list of "Cancelled N64 games."  I've also seen that particular demo Mop.  Either way, that proves my point.  They didn't seem to mind cartridges until very suddenly in 1996, if you catch my rift.

The idea that they suddenly just wanted to make games on CDs for "cinemas" is crap.  They either made a business decision to follow a larger audience, or got invested in heavily by Sony and were controlled in that direction.  Both are more logical than than any sort of media war, and IMO, this is proven by DS and PSP.  It's perfectly logical, this decision (I wish they'd make more like it myself.) whereas "Carts vs. CDs" was more marketing flap than anything.

[MegaByte]

No, it's more like they were experimenting with stuff like the FFVI SGI demo, then realized they couldn't fit anything like what they wanted on a cartridge.

[Stratos]

Although many fans continued to perpetuate the myth of a lost Final Fantasy 64 game, some       of the same magazines that had led to the creation of the rumors sought to clarify the situation.        In May of 1996, Volume 4, Issue 5 of Diehard GameFan Magazine contained one such follow-up:                     "Ah, remember SQUARE's beautiful SIGGRAPH demo (GF Vol. 3, Iss. 10)? Though it wasn't the       Nintendo64 game everyone assumed it to be, it still holds a valuable spot in FF history as the       most direct ancestor of FF VII's battle system. Believe it or not, it's actually a pretty cool       (and totally playable) little game. Instead of the usual menu system, you control your characters       by drawing shapes (a star for magic, for example) with the mouse."

This sounds like it could be a Wii game. Makes me wonder if another FF game comes to Wii that it could be like this.

[Deguello]

No, it's more like they were experimenting with stuff like the FFVI SGI demo, then realized they couldn't fit anything like what they wanted on a cartridge.

Well then we'll just have to disagree.  I can't fathom that Square didn't know that Nintendo was going to stick with carts all the way up to 1996 and then suddenly decided to make a PS1 game out of nowhere.

Besides, this is an old war. No sense dragging it up.  It's only on my mind because I believe that Nintendo will probably face it again with the "Zii" or whatever if they elect to choose cartridges (cards, whatever) again as their "disruptive" quality that'll probably cause a lot more fervor.

One curious thing I notice it's that it's only Nintendo that gets grilled about conforming to anything.  Nobody's knocking on Sony's door about touchscreens, so to speak.  And furthermore nobody outside of Nintendo developerwise really comments or is expected to comment that much on other developer's games.  For instance, nobody asks Take 2 about S-E or Capcom games or what they're doing.  And on the hardware side, usually when Nintendo is even brought up in a question it's usually a softball leading to a "We try for a more sophisticated audience" or something like that.

This was even true when Nintendo was dead last (though not by much.)

[MegaByte]

""In August of 95, one of the US's largest CG conventions, SIGGRAPH, was held in Los Angeles. At that time we were not sure what the next generation RPG game should look like, so as an experiment we created a CG based, game like, interactive demo to be presented at the show. It focused on battle scenes that were 100% real time and polygon based. This became the seed of Final Fantasy VII and it was then that we decided to make this a CG based game.  When we discussed designing the field scenes as illustrations or CG based, we came up with the idea to eliminate the connection between movies and the fields. Without using blackout at all, and maintaining quality at the same time, we would make the movie stop at one cut and make the characters move around on it. We tried to make it controllable even during the movies. As a result of using a lot of motion data + CG effects and in still images, it turned out to be a mega capacity game, and therefore we had to choose CD-ROM as our media. It other words, we became too aggressive, and got ourselves into trouble." - Hironobu Sakaguchi

[NinGurl69 *huggles]

And thus the End of Gaming began, along with the Era of Watching Games Instead of Playing Them.  Markerters loved this phase.