I was there on that fateful day, were you?
After reading that, it seems that two major mistakes were made with the N64. First of all, it would have been MUCH better if the 64DD was already incorporated into the system from launch. There was SO much that they could have done with it, of course, it is not needed anymore now that all systems come with hard drives and large memory add-ons. Back then, 10 years ago, having 64 megabytes of re-writable memory would have been an absolutely huge thing. Most importantly, we would have had Earthbound 64 and a superior version of Zelda available to us. Earthbound 64 was probably the most hyped game that never happened in gaming history. Also, Creator, from what I understood, that game was going to be what SPORE is turning out to be, only we could have had it 6-7 years ago. Losing the 64DD is perhaps the worst thing that occured, had it been a part of the N64 at launch, gaming might be further along now than it is currently. This latest generation did not see nearly as much advancement than the last, this coming generation promises to see a lot more than the current (which is over in 2 months).
What would the N64 have been like had it used CDs? Well, at its time the system had an insane amount of power, but lacked the storage space for much full motion video and pre-rendered backgrounds until the times of RE2 64 and Ogre Battle 64 (which were in its final days). Had the system used CDs, it would have kept some key developers, and had a lot more games released for it than it did. It would have also been able to match and lead the price wars. The downside would be the load times impeding gameplay, games such as Goldeneye, Mario, and Zelda would have suffered as a result in their current forms; though the games would likely have been different, more FMV and higher quality music; graphically I can't see it being much different since Wind Waker and Twilight Princess which take advantage of even higher storage space media don't use much else other than polygons. Perhaps it would be that PSX would have just been to the Industry as Xbox is now.
Of course, if Nintendo had not slipped, there might not be gaming concepts such as DS and Wii available a few years later, as they would not require that level of innovation and invention. Competition is a very good thing when looking at it like this.
I very much enjoyed the article.
