What if the Nintendo 64 had been CD-based?

[Greg2600]

I just wonder if the games would've looked just as shitty. N64 graphics were terrible. I think they would have been at least as bad as the PS1.

I would have to disagree there. N64 may have aged poorly now, but the graphics were head and shoulders above the PS1. Take any 3D-platformer, it's not even close, N64 characters were actually rounded, unlike the boxy PS1. PS1 games were often slow and jittery, not quite as bad as the 3DO, but N64 games had good framerates. The type of media wouldn't have mattered, if the console used the same graphical hardware.

Wow, Sega almost came in a strong second in the generation. Sony did so much right that anything from Sega - or Nintendo - was never going to beat them, but come on... a CD64 would have been vastly better hardware than the Saturn, and you know Sega wouldn't have insisted on the draconian anti-piracy measures that ended up hamstringing Nintendo.

Sony had a TON of capital at its disposal; Sega did not. The arcade business was up and down, and they barely made much of a profit aside from the Genesis in North America. Saturn was DOA outside of Japan, and that was well before the N64.

Playstation 5 and Switch would likely not exist, Nintendo would probably be the sole console. The reason I say this is Microsoft is having trouble against Playstation, if Playstation did not exist because Nintendo didn't backstab Sony, Nintendo would not have spent several generations pandering with gimmick consoles. Not only would there be Nintendo exclusives, there'd be powerful hardware capable of playing all major AAA games, and all Japanese and indie games.

This iteration of Nintendo would be the best console publisher, it can still happen if Sony and Nintendo merge into one, but this will never happen.

There would have been competitors, there's simply way too much money to be made on video games. Microsoft were well into gaming (on PC) by time Bill Gates decided to go with Xbox. Apple had somewhat of a history there. Sony was going to produce a game console, whether the Nintendo Playstation happened or not.