Nintendo 64 vs GameCube

One engineer, two opposite decisions

Genyo Takeda joined Nintendo in 1972. He is the engineer who put battery-backed save memory inside a cartridge, so that a player could switch the machine off and find the world still waiting. He led hardware development on the Nintendo 64, then on the GameCube.

For the Nintendo 64 he kept the cartridge. For the GameCube he dropped it.

The cartridge, and what it cost

The Nintendo 64 went on sale in Japan on 23 June 1996 at ¥25,000, and it was the last major home console built around cartridges. A cartridge starts a game with no waiting, survives being dropped, and is very hard to copy. It also held a fraction of what a CD held. A pressed CD-ROM cost around a dollar to manufacture; an N64 cartridge cost somewhere in the region of twenty-five to thirty dollars depending on its capacity, and the publisher paid that again on every copy sold.

In February 1996, months before the console reached shops, Square announced that Final Fantasy VII would be a PlayStation game. The painted backgrounds and video scenes it needed would not fit on a cartridge. Final Fantasy had sold Nintendo hardware for ten years, and anyone who wanted the next one now had to buy Sony’s machine instead. Other publishers followed Square.

Takeda’s team chose an 8cm optical disc holding about 1.46 GB: far more room, far cheaper to press, and Nintendo’s own format, not one a PC could read.

What the switch to disc feels like in your hands

On the Nintendo 64 a game is simply there. Press power and you are playing. On the GameCube the drive spins up and reads, and you wait a moment before the level starts.

The GameCube will not play a film. Nintendo picked a disc format that avoided the DVD Forum licence, which charged a fee on every machine sold. Nintendo left film playback out rather than sell a games machine that people would buy for its DVD player. Panasonic, which manufactured the discs, sold the Panasonic Q in Japan from 14 December 2001 — a stainless-steel GameCube that played DVDs and CDs. Fewer than 100,000 were made before it was discontinued on 18 December 2003.

The controllers, and the choice the N64 forced on you

The Nintendo 64 controller has three prongs and a single analog stick down the middle. The stick came out of Takeda’s hardware group and was developed alongside Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario 64. Giles Goddard, one of the programmers on Super Mario 64, says: "It wasn’t so much that controller dictated Mario 64, it was just that was the game he was working on."

Rumble arrived a year later as an accessory. The Rumble Pak went on sale in Japan in April 1997, packed with Star Fox 64, ran on two AAA batteries, and plugged into the slot on the back of the pad. That slot already had a tenant: the Controller Pak, which held save data for games without a battery inside. You could feel the hit, or you could keep your progress, not both in the same session.

The GameCube puts the rumble motor inside the pad. It also adds a second, smaller C-stick for the camera, turns the shoulder buttons into pressure-sensitive triggers, and keeps four ports on the front. In 2002 Nintendo released the WaveBird, a wireless controller that worked from about six metres away and did not have to be pointed at the console. Nintendo left the rumble motor out of it to save batteries.

So which is “better”?

On every specification the GameCube wins. It has the faster processor, the greater memory, the sharper picture, and the better controller. And yet it sold about 21.7 million units against the Nintendo 64’s 32.9 million. The better machine is the one fewer people took home.

So the answer depends on what you want to sit down to. Choose the Nintendo 64 for its four-player library and for games that start the instant you press the button. Choose the GameCube for the stronger later library, the second stick, and rumble you do not have to trade your save file for.