How Storage Media Decides The Fate Of Console Games

How Storage Media Decides The Fate Of Console Games

As long as video games have been in existence, they’ve been seriously constrained by technical limitations. There’s only so much RAM, CPU power, and storage space to go around, but that’s not always a bad thing. In fact, the quirks of the hardware can actually help mold the way games are designed, and there’s no better example of that than storage media itself. From diskettes to Blu-rays, the oddities and limitations of the given medium dictate what kind of games can be made.

To illustrate just how important the storage media actually is, I’ve picked four of the most notable instances of this phenomenon. From the early days of video games all the way to the present, games have largely been molded by the storage medium they were created for. The content itself was informed by how it was delivered to the player, and that’s definitely worth examining.

Diskettes Vs. Cartridges

Image credit: Poirier273

When westerners think of games like The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, the cartridge versions come to mind. That’s the only way those titles were released in North America, but both of those games were actually designed with diskettes in mind. In fact, elaborate systems had to be implemented to even get these titles to work on cartridges in the first place. Zelda and Metroid are Famicom Disk System (FDS) titles first and foremost, and the ability to save your progress was a major step forward.

NES and Famicom cartridges have no inherent way of storing save data. After all, it’s called a “ROM” for a reason. With that limitation in mind, Nintendo began work on developing the diskette-based Famicom Disk System to offer more possibilities for gamers and developers alike. The FDS versions of The Legend of Zelda and Metroid both featured save slots, and allowed users to progress through the game over multiple sessions instead of having to start from the beginning every single play through. Save slots for long and complicated console games were revelatory, and that idea quickly rippled across the entire industry.

Unfortunately, the FDS never made its way outside of Japan, so releasing these intricate games in their original format wasn’t possible. Instead, Nintendo reworked everything to play inside a standard Nintendo Entertainment System. Zelda retained the ability to save, but the cartridge required a battery back-up for the volatile memory. If your battery died, your save was gone forever. On the other hand, Metroid bypassed the save system completely by implementing a password system instead. Neither of these solutions were quite as good as the original diskette implementations, but that fact didn’t stop both titles from selling like hotcakes in cartridge form.

Game Cards Vs. Cartridges

Image credit: Video Game Den & GameStreet

Sega’s 8-Bit offerings never saw much traction in North America, but the Master System had a respectable following in Japan and Europe. The MSX and TurboGrafx-16 had very similar fates, so most North Americans aren’t even aware of the role that game cards played in 1980s video games.

The Master System had two different mediums: cards and cartridges. Cartridges offered upwards of 512KB of storage, but were bulkier and quite expensive to produce. Alternately, game developers could opt to use the smaller game cards. These little cards ended up costing substantially less to produce, but were limited to a mere 32KB.

If a developer wanted to release a smaller, less expensive game, the “Sega Card” was the best option available. Numerous titles were released on this budget storage medium, but it ultimately died out in favor of the larger cartridges. Despite its relatively short lifespan, cards offered an outlet for small, quirky games during an era where releasing games at retail was an incredibly expensive endeavor.