Death of the Video Game Cartridge

What do the Atari, NES, SNES, N64, Game Boy, Sega Genesis and countless other systems have in common? Yes they are video games, duh, that’s not what I was looking for. They are all cartridge-based systems.

For more than two decades video game cartridges of various shapes, sizes and colors dominated the gaming market until finally being phased out in favor of Optical Media beginning in 1994 with the Playstation and Sega Saturn. The last holdout was Nintendo, who released the cartridge based Nintendo 64 in 1996. It had a successful run until being discontinued in 2002.

If you ask most computer nerds why CDs and DVDs took over the market they will tell you its because cartridges are a horribly inefficient method of data storage. If you ask corporate big wigs why Optical media took over, they will tell you it was because they are much cheaper to manufacture than the cumbersome cartridges.

Of course if you caught that corporate big wig off record he would also tell you that optical media is much more fragile and they know that if a disc gets damaged the gamer will try to repair it, fail, then go out and buy another copy of he game. Ever wonder why the Xbox’s tendency to burn a ring into your disc has never been corrected? You can throw a NES cartridge out the window into a pool of water and it will probably still work.

The downside of discs being noted, they do hold a lot more data and have done a lot or the gaming industry. They are smaller, therefore easier to store, usually coming in a standard sized case so when put on a shelf they don’t look as sloppy.

I have to say, however, that I miss the cartridge. Maybe it’s the memories connected to the games I played, maybe it’s the feel of a cartridge or the clunky sound it makes when you insert it. But I do miss them, and that’s one of the reasons I like vintage games.

I honestly don’t see why cartridges can’t make a comeback. A flash drive is about the size of your thumb and can hold 64 GB of data at a transfer rate of 150MB/s so something the size of a Sega Genesis cartridge could arguably hold four times as much, but lets face it, optical media is here to stay and will most likely be replaced with downloaded content, delivered right to your video game console. Sadly, the Cartridge is dead.