One infamous part of the Nintendo 64 era was that Nintendo decided to stick with cartridges, even though both the SEGA Saturn and the PlayStation 1 were using CDs. Some third-party companies were not happy about this, with the most notable one being Squaresoft. Squaresoft would eventually merge with Enix to form Square Enix in the 2000s, but even before they were known as Square Enix, they were a very big third-party company and one of Nintendo’s most reliable ones.
Squaresoft loved releasing games on Nintendo’s consoles, especially Final Fantasy. That changed when the PlayStation 1 released, and one of the reasons for this is due to the limitations that the Nintendo 64 cartridges had in comparison to the CDs of the SEGA Saturn and PlayStation 1. In fact, in a recently published VentureBeat interview with former PlayStation executive Shuhei Yoshida, he revealed that Squaresoft had even tried to convince Nintendo to switch to using CDs.
Yoshida said that “Hironobu Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, loved the potential of CDs. His dream was to create a movie-like Final Fantasy game. He was disappointed when he learned that the Nintendo 64 still used cartridges. His movies couldn’t fit there. Squaresoft tried to convince Nintendo to change that plan, but they wouldn’t. They didn’t believe in CD-ROM at all. That’s why they licensed the Super Nintendo add-on project to Sony in the first place, because they believed CD-ROM was just too slow to ever make for a good game system”.
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