Why the Failure of the 64DD changed everything for Nintendo 

Yes, and more importantly, the cost of cartridge ROM had decreased enough to make it possible for large cartridges to retail at an acceptable price. Once developers had that option available to them, of course they were going to release their games for the bigger N64 market than the tiny 64DD market. Apart from larger game sizes, the other features that the DD offered exclusively (like online connectivity and game customisation) only had very niche appeal in the late 90s.

@@lewisclark1122 they really missed out on a good trend in the 2000s...

Not exactly. The most interesting uses of the DD had to do with the ability to write data & the internal clock. I distinctly remember some of the ideas they had for zelda... It was very advanced stuff for the time.

They had a similar issue with the Famicom Disk System though they saw better success with that. The chip shortage alleviated and costs went back down then Capcom released Ghosts N' Goblins on the console's the first 128 KB ROM and focus shifted back to cartridges. It's almost like they didn't learn anything.

@@JamesTDG xbox is the reaaon why online gaming is mainstream but pc gaming started it

But N64 was pretty much the Sega for Japan, they should've tried in America first!

Honestly, if they didn't have that holier than thou attitude, they would have probably released this stuff worldwide. Like the DD could have been a fail in Japan, but a heavy success stateside. Like, honestly, a NA release alone would have made us tinkerers have an easier time attempting to revive this abandoned piece of tech.

Honestly I think the biggest issue facing the N64 and any add-ons was that Nintendo was arguably too late to the party. By the time the 64 actually reached store shelves both the Saturn and PS1 had been out for at least 12 months and had more or less carved up the market in Japan between them, and in the west the PS1 was already clearly the horse to bet on for that generation. The 64 did decently all things considered, but by the time it really started to gather steam the competition and industry at large was already looking towards the next generation, which I think stalled Nintendo's momentum going forward. There was no point in a wider launch for the 64DD when, in Japan the console was more or less DOA & in the west the Dreamcast and PS2 were just around the corner by the time the DD was ready to go. I think if Nintendo had been ready to go with the 64 at around the same time as Sony and Sega were with the PS1 & Saturn then the 64 could have built up a stronger user base in both regions, and there would have been enough time to actually justify the DD.

@@seanmckelvey6618 Yeah. I think in the long run, being 12 months and 20 days late to the party was perhaps the main reason(especially in Japan) momentum was killed off like that. And like you said earlier, Both Saturn and PS1 had a head start in Japan before the N64 was announced and add-ons in general had a stigma of being too much of a gimmick; especially in the West. But I will say this. Unlike other add-ons, the N64DD was an add-on that would've relied on the same power as the N64 console itself. Unlike the Sega CD, 32X, Atari Jaguar CD, and the Turbo Grafix 16 CD(which all needed their own power supply to power on), the N64 DD wouldn't have needed its own power supply or any extra spec features inside the add-on itself to run effectively; which would've kept cost down very significantly. Meaning if the N64DD was bundled with the N64 console itself at launch, it could've cost no more than $230 or $240. While it wouldn't have changed Nintendo's outcome of coming in 2nd place that generation, it didn't really need to. Just like every other system, it needed its own identity and ts own great library of games/exclusives that couldn't be played or experienced anywhere else to make it stand out!

Interesting- never heard that reason before. Do you have a source for it that I can read?

If you want to go through the modding process, there's always Pretendo, that's slowly replacing WiiU/3DS online functionalities that were lost, including entire Miiverse communities! 😁 And it works on the real hardware, and emulators!👍 It's still a work in process, but the current progress they've been making is incredible, imo. Makes me want to get a WiiU, or something that can emulate the system, just to try it out.

@@NichoMania2 lmaoo then they best hope the big N dont find out and bust out their iconic Ceast and Desist order.

@@y0gafire really though. But hopefully, since it doesn't use NNID's and you have to make your own new ID, it'll be like the Wii's re-made online functionality fro Mario Kart/Brawl, where they just let it be.

I love Nintendo since the Nes days, but there attitude towards there home brew community is disgusting. Sure sew the pirates but people who want to play online leave them be. I wish they at least allowed a local host option on the console it self. Shame on u Nintendo !!

I'm a proud Wii U owner too!

The two of you grew up to be lovers.

The Phone app solution is horrendous, i will agree. I mean at that point you might as well use any other app to ring your friends.

You cannot write to a CD, the DD had tons of writeable storage space. Much more than a disc based with memory cards had. The PS2 memory card was regularly 8 MB for the entire thing, and we're expensive. It had it's pros with huge cons.

@@danieljimenez1989 By far the biggest con of the disk drive was simply that it would have massively increased the cost of the system if they had wanted to include it from the beginning, and it would have increased the risk of not being able to manufacture the consoles as quickly as they want. As a separate upgrade, it would be even more expensive, and then also customers aren't guarunteed to buy one if they're not forced to, and then you may be afraid to release a game for an add-on if many console owners don't have one. The lower capacity of the floppy disks were not really a huge con at all at the time. The much larger size of CDs was actually pretty overkill back then for this console generation. Most Playstation games didn't need anywhere near 700 MB of space, though it certainly did make it easy for game developers to use high quality audio and (especially) music, if they wanted to. FMV was rarely, if ever, all that important for games, as using in-game cut scenes is an excellent alternative which most videogame artists believe to be a superior choice most of the time. The best thing about FMV was that it was new and marketable, but it was ultimately not actually that important in terms of making the games better (and games which made heavy use of FMV tended to be worse because of it). FMV video also added significant development costs, especially if you wanted to do a good job of it. Some degree of FMV with floppy disk drive disks still would have been entirely feasible, especially because the disks were so much cheaper that multi-disk games would not have been prohibitively expensive, and would have been entirely feasible for big-budget game releases (if Nintendo was smart, they would not have charged any additional licensing fee for each additional disk used by game developers for the same game).

Interesting resource. I've not previously heard of them till now.

GX was great but X to me is peak F-Zero. I find the physics and controls to be the best in the series. Too bad Nintendo never made the full game including the Expansion Kit, available on any other platform but the 64DD. Long live emulators.

The voice is definitely AI generated. It’s such a turn off for me, i usually stop watching once I realize

No bc I was actually thinking this like it sounds so ai generated and it's crazy

@@Roverfan24 It's definitely not AI generated, but I'm pretty sure its a voice actor for hire

@@nathan___gage Pretty sure it's AI generated. It distorts in weird ways and has unnatural pauses.

I like it actually. It makes it seem a little scary

I agree.

They were afraid to make the system cost a lot more, so I think they were never going to do that. It would have added a huge cost to the consoles, in part because the disk drive apparently needed the RAM expansion that was released later as the "expansion pak" to work properly. That being said, I think, with the benefit of hindsight, it probably would have been worth it for them. They under-estimated just how much growth potential and demand for videogame consoles and videogames there was at this time, and having the disk drive included from the beginning would have made the system significantly better, would have encouraged more developers to stay with them or to make games for their system, and would have allowed the games to have been better. More developers and better games help sell consoles, and Nintendo was in a DOMINANT position at that point in time, with a ton of mind-share and brand loyalty, but they had already seen other consoles (or CD add ons) fail in large part because they were way too expensive, such as with the Sega CD, 3D0, and Jaguar CD drive, and they were afraid of failing for the same reasons, under-estimating just how much more valuable higher capacity storage media was about to become, but also under-estimating their own ability to use that technology to make great games. It would have been a bigger financial risk, but they were also a much financially stronger company than Sega at that point in time, and would have been able to absorb financial losses whilst putting in the necessary investments to push a more expensive disk drive equipped system into a strong and profitable position within the console market. The disk drive would have made them a lot more competitive against Sony, but the initially higher cost of the system could have still really hurt sales earlier on, so it's hard to say for sure just how successful the disk drive would have been. Personally, I think if they had started taking advantage of the benefits of the disk drive early on with first party game releases (and potentially also game expansion releases), this would have overcome any early poor sales that the system may have had due to being more expensive. I don't know how much more it would have cost them to be able to still support the use of cartridges in ADDITION to the floppy disks, but that could have made a lot of sense. To my knowledge, there was just the one game, the Japanese version of F-Zero X, which used both a cartridge AND the 64DD for the expansion and track editing software which came with it, and it is a great example of how both technologies could compliment each other well. The disk drive still loaded a lot slower than cartridges, and Nintendo execs have claimed that Zelda wouldn't have been able to run as well off of the disk drive, though I think they were likely exaggerating, to try to paint their decision to not use the disk drive for Zelda in a positive light. Load times between areas would have definitely been a lot longer, but they still would have been a lot faster than typical load times on Playstation games, and I don't think that would have been much of an issue. Slowdowns from loading assets during gameplay might have been a bigger issue, but I really don't think this issue would have been all that big, it just would have changed the most optimal way for programmers to program the games. Speaking of which, lower latency memory probably would have been a better idea as well. Something which doesn't seem to ever get mentioned is that the floppy disks from the disk drive were MUCH cheaper to make per GB than the cartridges, and they would also mean that every game developer would have had a lot more minimum space to work with, as every disk had 64MB of storage space on it. While this is still much smaller than CDs, other systems like the Playstation didn't really need anywhere near 700 MB, as FMV video was very rarely, if ever, an important feature in a game (in game cut scenes are probably a better artistic approach most of the time). Having so much extra space probably mattered more in terms of how it allowed them to use high quality music and lots of voice. The floppies were actually a really good, well rounded technology for the time, having around three times faster loading speeds, and much faster data access/ seek times as well, AND of course allowing for fairly large amounts of re-writable data and user data to be stored on the disks. The much lower cost per MB of the disks would have also still made it feasible to use multiple disks for large story-driven games such as Final Fantasy Seven. If the developer didn't have to pay any additional licensing fees when using a second or third disk for the same game, the added cost of each additional disk may have been a small fraction of the cost of the first disk (which would have included a licensing fee paid to Nintendo).

where have you been the last 25 years?

@@earlusmcdivettit's a rhetorical question

No. Sony and the Philips company created the CD. Sony created the disc drive with Nintendo. Nintendo backstabbed Sony by signing a deal with their competitor(Philips) So Sony decided to create their own gaming console aka The Playstation. The rest Is history...

@@malik87breaker no I think the dude you replied to was the one with the rhetorical question. The first guy just made a statement.

Yes…Albeit very poorly while glaringly missing the mark .

Thanks!

The mistake Nintendo made was making it too similar to the Wii in looks and name, where people thought it was just a tablet accessory for the Wii. If they just called it "wii 2" it probably would have been more successful since that made it obvious it was a completely new thing.

Funny you should write this, a video regarding this situation is actually in the works.

@@thequestgamer Can't wait to see it

I think the only way they could have made it work is through bundling it. They did this with the Ram Addon's for later titles. I'll be visiting it at some point soon. But they basically bundled a ton of games with the add on paks to get people to buy them. I think in the case of the DD though, it needed to launch with the system. It was pretty much in danger the longer it waited and the more dated the project became. Also imagine developers trying to work with it, a constantly changing market where the tech is not straight forward. it all just seems like a mess from the start.

@@thequestgamer You still have this problem even today with things like VR/motion controls on modern PlayStation. VR is niche and expensive to develop for. And Sony, about to release VR2 for PS5 in a couple months (which costs more than either PS5 unit, disc or digital) shoots themselves in the foot by not including backwards compatibility. This on a console that already does have it, and for the much smaller VR library that needs all the support it can get. Even as a VR owner for the PS4 one, I can't justify having to store 2 VR headsets in my house. VR2 will probably bomb which will be a shame as it won't find the audience it could have had.

Yeah that's actually a very good point to be honest. I didn't really make the comparison until you mentioned it. VR has been a struggle definitely for developers too. I do feel like eventually they will nail VR but it's just not there yet.

Even in the PC space, the "customers don't like addons" adage holds true. Though there it's more "customers don't like nonstandard hardware", and adoption of new capabilities only really takes off with some standardisation. AdLib and Sound Blaster compatibility serving as defacto standards for sound cards (later succeeded by the official Windows sound API), Parallel ATA for hard disks and CD-ROM drives (now replaced by Serial ATA), TCP/IP for networking, and DirectX and OpenGL for 3D accelerated graphics.

@@Roxor128 It's not that "customers don't like addons" as I'm sure they'd gladly buy a well-supported addon if they had the money. It's that addons inconvenience everyone. They throw a wrench into what is already a complicated business. The N64DD caused so many problems for what was already a console (N64) that had a hard time getting good developers on board with it. Development time in console generations is limited, as is the space to develop one game on one console when competitors exist, or even when the previous console still gets games. It's a lot of work in a short time, and it isn't the most justifiable work either. It's amazing console developers have made so many excellent games in such relatively short times.

I have a love/hate relationship with that console. The lack of titles always brought me down, but things like Nintendoland were amazing with the controller dynamic.

Weren't DD disks much smaller in capacity than that? I seem to remember those were 64 MB or less.

@@danieljimenez1989 by the late 90s. Zip drives reached max 128 mb. This would have been beneficial to the n64.

@@Bronxguyanese mm I also remember the 'super zip' of a one gig disk. But they weren't compatible with the older zip disks drives so you ahd to buy a new drive and the new medium.. they died almost as soon as they launched.

@@danieljimenez1989 They were 64MB. Honestly, they were a great, well-rounded technology at that point in time, and it's an absolute shame that Nintendo didn't decide to include them in the system from the beginning, but they were never going to be willing to add that much more cost to the base console, as they were really afraid of it hurting sales, they were afraid of the added financial risk involved of potentially selling the systems at a loss, and possibly also worried about the feasibility of scaling up production fast enough. While 64MB may still seem really small compared to the 700 MB capacity of CDs, 700 MB was actually overkill for the fifth gen consoles, and these floppy disks still had loading times that were three times faster, and also seek times that were about three times faster as well (75ms vs around 200ms). The vast majority of Playstation games didn't need anywhere near 700 MB. Of course, when 700 MB was the minimum size of the storage media, a lot of game devs ended up using a lot more space than they needed to, but, trust me, the vast majority of Playstation 1 games would have easily been able to fit on just one 64MB disk, and with minimal to no sacrifices in terms of lowering audio quality due to higher compression, and drastically reducing the space available for FMV would have been no major loss. Many Playstation games literally used less than 64MB in total, sometimes MUCH less than 64MB, despite being on CDs. The Playstation had 3MB of RAM if you included the texture memory, it's not like they could actually use all that much data at any given time! With CDs, you could potentially use very high quality audio, and didn't need to mess around with audio compression as much, at least with music, as I believe the PS1 could play CD quality audio, or at least very good quality audio, without sapping too many system resources during gameplay, which certainly was a major benefit for the Playstation, though I think most games didn't actually take advantage of this potential (making CD quality music which fits well with your game is not easy and not cheap, and paying for licensed music can be very expensive!). However, 64DD disks would have made it far more feasible for N64 games to use better quality music and sound as well, so the gap in capabilities in terms of audio quality would not have been all that significant. Even 8MB cartridge based games on the N64 could still have surprisingly good music (I honestly have no idea how the music in Blast Corps can be as good as it is on such a small cartridge, it's really impressive). 64MB floppy disks may also not seem like a very significant improvement in capacity over the capacity of cartridges, especially if you know that it was actually possible to make cartridges up to the same capacity. However, it wasn't until years later that the ROM chips used in the carts became cheap enough for 64MB carts to become economically feasible, with only a handfull of games ever using 64MB, and with 32MB carts still being quite uncommon outside of first and second party titles. With the floppy disks, I believe the cost to manufacture each 64MB disk would have been lower than the cost of even an 8MB cartridge, and the MINIMUM size available to each developer would have become 64MB. The cost per MB with the floppy disks was MUCH lower, and if developers didn't have to pay any significant additional licensing fee for each additional disk used for a multi-disk game, the cost per MB of multi-disk games would have been significantly lower still, and very feasible.

I'm going to give this video a little bit more breathing room before I hit with another DD video, but i will definitely be covering the DD games as well as the super disc.

Games at the time weren’t that big though, a lot of early PS1 games barely pass the 100 MB size. The extra disc space was often used for Redbook audio, voice acting or FMV sequences.

You can look at the sizes of downloaded ROMs on disk. Also - Star Fox is 1MB. Untextured Polygons and animation doesn’t take up too much space.

Lets never forget the virtual boy

@@aceassn716 sometimes I think we should forget that one...

*parental *can't

@@alvallac2171 you must be proud of yourself. here, take my like buddy.

What would you say is your favorite console out of the 4?

@@thequestgamer - SNES, GAMECUBE, NES, N64. I respect the N64 and have fond memories of my time with it. When going back to play games with a modern retrospective: the sports games on the N64 were bad then and aged terribly. However, the SNES and NES sports games still hold up. For example, Madden 64-2001 are an unplayable mess, but Madden 95 & 96 on the SNES are relevant gems to this day. TechmoBowl (and Tecmo Super Bowl) are also still fondly played by fans. The same can be said of the NBA games and NHL games. In terms of racing games the N64 seems to have only a small selection which have held up: Star Wars Episode I racer (which is better on Switch), Wave Race, and Wipeout 64. I know there are fans of a few others for good reason, but to just pick up and play without nostalgia glasses? No thanks. Meanwhile the SNES Mario Kart & F-Zero are leagues better. Additionally, the SNES has so many fun action packed racers like Rock-'n'-roll racing, Battle Cars, Biker Mice from Mars and more. All different and fun. The N64 pretty much doesn't have any meaningful RPGs - sorry to insulate someone's favorites, but nothing that compares to the library of options on the SNES. The N64 didn't even get a Metroid game, while Super Metroid is an all time classic. MegaMan X games vs MegaMan 64? No contest. I could go on. I loved my N64 and played many games, but it didn't age well and it struggled to compete with the PS1 even in its day.

There’s Extreme G, 1080 snowboarding, Snowboard Kids 1 & 2, F-Zero X, Mario Kart 64, Cruisn’ Trilogy, Diddy Kong Racing plus a crap ton more racing games for the N64. You’ve got great FPS games like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Turok 3, The World is not Enough, Doom 64, Quake 2. You’ve got great party games like Pokémon Stadium 1 & 2, Mario Party 2 & 3, Super Smash Bros, Worms Armageddon. You have hidden gems like Sin and Punishment, Mischief Makers, Bangai-o, Blast Corps, Ogre Battle 64, Goeman, Chameleon Twist. The N64 is a great console with plenty of good games. People are so lazy when it comes to the N64. They hate Banjo Kazooie then think the console is bad 😂😂😂😂

It would of failed because kids love magnets 🤣

First SimCity for Nintendo. I should have clarified better. As there were other versions later.

I think the big advantage would have been more storage space for uncompressed textures. The limited memory cache for texture processing led most developers to move towards the use of uncompressed textures during the system's later years. This, for course, presented a difficulty with limited cartridge space, but less so with a larger format like the 64DD. Visually, the results would have been pretty noticeable, giving the games more of a "high-res" feel compared to the washed up appearance of many of N64 games.

*could've *made the N64 (past tense) *CD-based. They could have chosen *acceptable *drive, BUT even though *times, they *expensive, while *times, and *cartridges *I (this word, and any contractions based on it, should always be capitalized) *the whole 64DD *should've just gone *N64, because *wouldn't have needed *would've been *more successful than (comparative) *eventually was, despite *policies (to pluralize a noun that ends in -y, drop the -y and add -ies) *and the eventual piracy on it. I'm not quite sure what "my bet" is supposed to mean here. Perhaps "my opinion," "my guess," "my two cents"?

Absolutely. Nintendo land was a fantastic title. I spent many hours playing that on weekends with friends.

You bought 4 Wii U's? That's dedication. You alone probably boosted their console sales by a few percent haha.

@@thequestgamer What can I say? I had games that I wanted to play from Smash to Zelda, and I wasn't going to let some thieves ruin that for me.

I also am a happy proud wii u owner/player

Proud owner as well. Love my wii u

Thanks for the sub and kind words!

*already

Tech Wise, but nintendo always will have the IPs, in their pocket.

*its (inanimate object)

Glad you enjoyed it!

I can assure you I didn't add any filters to the videos. Some of the sources were from DVD's so the original documentaries had the filter applied. Wasn't possible to remove or clean them up.