Remember when games came self-contained on disks?
this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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the only part to waiting to play the game was the drive home, not the game downloading, then downloading again with the updates.
PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN
I never tire of reading this, just due to how prescient it is
Those CD loading screens made me long for my cartridges, to be fair...
The transition away from discs is not inherently bad. Discs read very slowly. Cartridges are better for load times.
I always wondered why we didn’t transition to flash storage. Would be much easier to scale smaller releases, too.
The Switch went back to it, or never left if you view it as a DS/3DS successor
I thought about this right after replying. Really, the GC, Wii and Wii U were more exception than rule with Nintendo. They’ve always liked their cartridge formats.
I remember Nintendo getting trolled for still using cartridges with the Nintendo 64 when Sony was already using discs and it looked like the future. Nintendo’s response even then was the cartridges were faster, basically eliminating load time.
If only they could have figured out storage density back then.
Losing the RPGs to Sony was devastating to someone expecting (hoping) the N64 would be as good to the jrpg as the snes was.
People seem weirdly attached to the idea of discs, in my experience. Without anything but anecdotes to back it up, I feel like people view discs as adult and cartridges as childish.
Might be a generational thing you're perceiving. For someone about my age, carts were what we used as little kids (NES, SNES) and a little longer if you stuck with Nintendo (N64) over PlayStation. The PlayStation kids tended to view Nintendo as "kid stuff."
Yes, I've considered that. Nintendo has mostly stuck to cartridges and their games are mostly cartoony, which is associated with childishness.
I feel like most people don't care they just want physical media and not be required to only go digital.
Actually, in that regard I feel like the majority of people are fine with the transition to fully digital.
I doubt most are fine with it, but its not a priority enough to not buy a specific game.
Switch carts are way easier to lose for one. Hard to lose a blu ray in my experience
Disc was way cheaper to produce
Kinda moot these days when everything is using flash storage. Transfering a Blu-Ray to storage at 100MB/s before playing is an acceptable compromise if it means you can use the fastest possible storage for all games, without the cost.
Of course, this wouldn't work on a portable not named PSP
Nothing can reach an nvme drive. I heard Switch 2 had longer loading times from cartridges vs loading from internal storage or micro SD express card. And there is no way to store 100+GB games in there. Yeah textures in 4k hurt.
I rather a game load a little bit slower than having to spend hundreds more for expanded storage or waste hours manually installing and uninstalling games.
I think you're probably in the minority on that one.
A DVD can hold 4.7GB. 500GB is 107 DVDs.
Not when the games are over 20GB. A HD-DVD dual layer disc can hold 30GB. That should be more than enough for a self-contained game.
And it was the full game, not a broken mess that required updates and DLC to continue the story before the next title in the series.
Well one of those is just for saved data while the other is for the whole game.
Yeah. To make a fair comparison, you'd have to take the number of games in your PS/2 library and multiply it by 4.7 GB per game.
Not necessarily. That's the max size but tons of games were 1.5-3GB. My modded OG xbox has iso's loaded directly on the drive. Jurrassic Park: Operation Genesis is like 600mb.
That's why I went with the 4.7 GB DVD as the average. Actual game disks ranged from 700 mb CDs to the 8.something GB dual later DVDs, with actual game sizes ranging anywhere in-between.
This is a pretty terrible comparison considering those cartridges didn't include any game data... You could probably still use them today, the only thing they held was game save data...
I'm sorry, but no it absolutely was not. If you had more than a single user those bad boys filled up relatively fast.
This. I hated them so much.
At least they were better than the memory cards for the original PlayStation, which didn't even hold enough data for a single player. I'm pretty sure there were some games that used most of a card by themselves.
I just got a 1tb ssd last month, and holy crap it's the same price i got for 125gb 8 years ago.
Also i still remember the 8gb pendrive i got in around 2008, for that price today i can get 256gb storage with the size of my cat's toe bean.
My first-ever USB pendrive was 256 megabytes, in 2003.
It was a godsend, because to that point I'd been using floppy disks. It was brushed metal and came in a little faux-leather carry pouch. I guess they figured it was so damn expensive, they should at least make it feel premium.
I've still got it, and it still works. Quite useful actually for random jobs like flashing the BIOS on old machines that refuse to read from anything too large, or too new.
The PS2 has a hard drive slot but just didn’t come with one by default. There was an official Linux release for it and in Japan you could even use it as a DVR. I don’t think this is a fair comparison.
I still remember in high school being so envious of my friend when he got a 1GB hard drive lol