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hey guys this isn't Linus so what's one of your favorite childhood memories

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maybe eating sugary cereal while watching saturday morning cartoons

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sucking capri sun out of a pouch or getting weird love notes from that super

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awkward kid you know who you are well if you were like me it's blowing dust out

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of my old game cartridges which would magically make them work if they'd been

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misbehaving and because all of our old consoles the nes sega genesis gameboy

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etc all use cartridges this is a near universal rite of passage for young

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gamers back in the day but fast forward to modern times and game cartridges have

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largely disappeared nintendo is still using cartridge-like game carts for

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their 3ds and switch consoles but the ps4 and xbox one which are meant to stay

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in the living room still use optical discs and so did all of the predecessor

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consoles it's actually been a long time actually was the n64 was the last time

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that there was a proper game console that was based in your home that still

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use cartridges cds guys they're the future

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water so why have they disappeared and why were they popular in the first place

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well although we usually think of game cartridges as older tech do you remember

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how quickly games used to load compared to modern titles on optical media i mean

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right now you take a game you put in your xbox and now you have to install 50

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gigs to your hard drive then you have to download another 20 Gigabyte patch

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whereas with super mario on the nes you just put it in

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and you play

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please don't use that well not only were the cartridges relatively durable other

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than the aforementioned dust issues but the way they interface with the console

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made them very fast you see when you insert a cartridge into a console the

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system effectively treated its content as part of the system's memory imagine

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how fast modern pc games would load if they were just sitting on a stick of RAM

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that you insert in your motherboard instead of a hard drive or SSD with slower loading times of course it's not

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a perfect comparison game cartridges contained mostly read-only memory or rom

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that stored the code for the game itself whenever you saved your progress the

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save file will be stored on either a small amount of volatile memory that

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needed a coin battery to maintain the data or a special memory chip called an

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eeprom that doesn't need a constant supply of power but could only hold a

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very small amount of information so if cartridges were faster and could hold

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save data unlike optical disks then why did they almost disappear unsurprisingly

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as with many great things in life a huge part of the equation is the cost gain

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cartridges and the rom they contain is a lot more expensive to manufacture than

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optical disks which can be produced for only a couple bucks including their

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packaging and documentation although to be fair they don't really include much

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documentation these days you gotta be eco aka cheap and not give me a cool

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manual to remember how to beat the boss or something i don't know

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what to figure i don't really ever think i found any use at all in manuals

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even though data discs are much more susceptible to things like breakage and

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scratches it was a worthwhile trade-off for the console manufacturers especially

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considering that it's a lot easier to create a high-capacity optical disk than

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create a high-capacity cartridge when games became more complex the optical

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disk also allowed the likes of sony and microsoft to push more games to market

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prior to digital distribution because those optical disks were so much cheaper

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to produce if you released a game that turned out to be a giant dud in terms of

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sales it didn't automatically mean that you were going to be a completely bankrupt company of course physical

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media isn't exclusively in the form of optical disks these days anyone who

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owned a sony disk within the 90s will know just how much of a pain taking an

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optical disk on the road can be so for portability reasons the aforementioned

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nintendo 3ds and switch use game cards something that nintendo has been able to

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get away with thanks to the following costs of solid-state storage and their

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high margins on the first party titles and i guess third-party titles too if

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you think about it i wonder how much nintendo makes for every switch game

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they sell i bet it's a lot at least seven

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what seven dollars seven percent

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seven cents at least okay but it should be noted that modern game

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cards are quite different from the game cartridges of yesteryear they don't

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become part of the addressable memory for the console as instead they're much

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more akin to something like a modern sd card that means load times can still be

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slightly long but there is good news nothing stopping you from blowing the

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dust off of those nintendo cartridges and living the days before your failed

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relationships and crippling student loan debt but if you want to get that

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that one's pretty good