Ten, er, nine years ago in gaming
Jan. 13th, 2003 05:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cmdr_zoomAn issue of Nintendo Power from 1994 talks about the recently unveiled Project Reality (what will become the N64) and confidently asserts the superiority of cartridge to CD-ROM based on access speeds a million times faster. "CD-ROM is great for some applications like encyclopedias where speed isn't a factor, and Nintendo may offer a CD-ROM accessory at some future time for the Project Reality control deck." But for "realistic, quick moving graphic applications like flight sims and other 3-D environments"? No way, said Nintendo.
The rest, of course, is history: the Playstation by Sony (the folks who had been talking to Nintendo about building that CD-ROM accessory) came out a year before the N64 and used that time to build unstoppable momentum, a large library of hit titles (including the sequel to Final Fantasy VI, reviewed on the next page), and eventually supplant Nintendo's dominance of the console market despite its "inferior" hardware. The higher manufacturing costs and limited capacity of cartridges, so blithely ignored by the Power article, were the format's downfall, and today all full-size consoles use CD or DVD-ROMs.
The rest, of course, is history: the Playstation by Sony (the folks who had been talking to Nintendo about building that CD-ROM accessory) came out a year before the N64 and used that time to build unstoppable momentum, a large library of hit titles (including the sequel to Final Fantasy VI, reviewed on the next page), and eventually supplant Nintendo's dominance of the console market despite its "inferior" hardware. The higher manufacturing costs and limited capacity of cartridges, so blithely ignored by the Power article, were the format's downfall, and today all full-size consoles use CD or DVD-ROMs.