Developers often preferred the Playstation for their titles due to the N64's inability to provide media rich content which games such as the Final Fantasy series demanded. Nintendo chose to sell the machine on the merits of its fast-loading cartridge system and the insignificant fact that it featured a 64-bit architecture - unfortunately for Nintendo, people were more impressed by high-capacity CD media, in-game movie sequences and pre-recorded soundtracks than fast loading and the size of the machine's pipeline. Although it was a much higher powered machine than Sony's Playstation or Sega's Saturn, the N64 always lagged behind in sales. The N64 was released in mid-1996 as Nintendo's front-runner in the original next-gen console wars.
