25th Anniversary of the Nintendo 64

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

I totally forgot about it until today, but mid 2021 marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the Nintendo 64. Development began in 1993, under codenames like Project Reality and Ultra 64.

Originally released in Japan on Sunday, 23 June 1996, it was later released in North America on Sunday, 29 September that year. The release in North America was originally intended for Monday, 30 September but was moved back to the previous Sunday, fearing many children would play truancy from school to get the new video game console before their friends, not uncommon in Japan at the time when new video games were released.

Release in Europe and Australasia was first intended in time before the 1996–1997 Christmas and holiday season, but ended up postponed until Saturday, 1 March 1997, a time of the year when Santa Claus, Mrs. Claus and their reindeer are all supposed to sleep in their hangout in the Arctic. :)

These days, there are children who believe this console is from 1964...

https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/06/anniversary_the_nintendo_64_launched_25_years_ago_ today

https://www.cbr.com/nintendo-64-25th-anniversary-legacy/

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[Andrew NDB]

I respect respect the N64. And it had its hits. To me, in the big scheme of things it kind of feels like a misstep, though. It represents Nintendo alienating Squaresoft (now Square-Enix), Rare, Philips and more. Power players that millions of fans loved even a few years before as brands with series, companies that were now asked to cross-develop for Nintendo with tiny cartridges that everyone else had moved on from. Most of them said no, or sent the N64 inferior versions. Nintendo zigged when everyone was telling them they should have zagged... and yes, everyone loves Mario 64 and Goldeneye, but it kind of forever cost them the console war.

Refusing to acknowledge CD as the next form of gaming media hamstringed Nintendo at a critical time in gaming history. Aborting the already developed (like, I remember seeing pictures of it in Nintendo Power) CD peripheral for SNES was dumb enough (and birthed the Sony Playstation as a rival, which they poured money into to create and then Sony just ran with it... and why shouldn't they have?) but to avoid it for the N64? Weird.

Honestly they've never recovered from the oddly cartridge-based N64. Ever since then the people in charge sort of felt emboldened by the backlash. "We're not like Microsoft! We're not like Sony!" But it was Nintendo's ground to literally give up to both players. And Nintendo did happily... for virtually no reason. The "they're a family company!" stuff went out the window with the release of Mortal Kombat 2, which did not have sweat instead of blood anymore. So that was in the past, even by the time of N64.

It's really interesting. And puzzling. Also a little bit sad. Though I do admire Nintendo for mostly sticking to its guns in trying to innovate. Personally, I wish they'd have stayed the course with the Wii as by that point as it was a big win after the ho-hum of the GameCube (which was funny as that was only a halfway admission that they were wrong about CDs... as in "OK, OK, we're arriving late now... but we still have our weird values so we will give you DVD *MINI* discs! That's all!"). You know, poured more dollars into an interactive experience. Like if the Wii was the PS1, imagine what the Wii PS5 equivalent would be. That's what I wanted to see. Instead they kind of kept their general idea intact of innovation... but shifted it into some kind of hybrid portable/light motion/also on the big screen model... which really sells all 3 things short and makes them now a leader in nothing. I mean, I guess the Wii U and the Switch technically outlasted anything Sony attempted in the handheld department... but this doesn't seem at all like a victory to me. It seems like a calculated defeat, with the intent on just survival after a series of bad decisions.

I mean, I guess they weren't as dumb as Sega? Though I like that Sega took big risks. But honestly if Nintendo had made the right decisions at the right times... I'm not sure we would have even seen a Sega Dreamcast. Imagine the Sega Saturn going up against the combined might of Nintendo and Sony under the Nintendo banner with a proper successor to the SNES. And now imagine what today would look like.

[Leo656]

So much of that is Monday Morning Quarterbacking, though. Like it's easy to say NOW "Oh, the system that ended up being the N64 should've just been a CD system, they cut their own throat,", but that oversimplifies some things while ignoring a ton of others.

For starters, at that specific moment in time the technology for a CD-based console had never proven itself advantageous, not in the home console market. Sure, computers were already CD-based but PC gaming and console gaming even then had very little to do with each other, so what was going on in one industry had no real effect on the other. When Nintendo had to decide whether or not to jump into the CD gaming realm in the mid-90s, it was looking at the Sega CD, the Turbo CD add-on for the Turbografx-16, the Jaguar CD, and even their one-time partner Philips and the CDi... all spectacular failures for various reasons, all of which divided their respective companies' fans and screwed up the market. There's "looking to the future" and then there's taking Big Risks when your current model seems to be working just fine without such risks. One can hardly blame mid-90s Nintendo for not chasing the - snicker - "success" of the Sega CD.

To their credit, Nintendo recognized even very early on that part of the problem was they simply had no expertise with that type of technology, which is why they partnered first with Sony and then Philips, to develop the actual CD consoles they planned on doing. The fact is, early-90s CD consoles had a notorious failure rate, to the point where part of why they're such expensive "collector's items" if you can find one in working condition nowadays is because a lot of them bricked very quickly back then. So for Nintendo to chase that dragon, they knew they couldn't do it alone since they'd never manufactured a CD console before, thus the short-lived Sony partnership, sort of like what 3DO Company did by partnering with Panasonic and other experienced manufacturers in developing the 3DO console. So at least they had a mind on getting around the then-faulty technology in hopes of providing a better product than their competitors.

Problem with THAT was, now you've got a company like Nintendo, which for a decade has done just fine not sharing credit (or profit) with anyone, and they're "forced" to partner up with someone else, in turn giving them a backdoor into an industry where Nintendo owned at least half of the market share. It's not hard to see at all why Nintendo didn't see much upside, on their end, to the Sony partnership; in all likelihood, Sony would have eventually broken ties with Nintendo and started developing their own video game consoles anyway, and Nintendo saw no advantage to creating their own competition. YES, that's what eventually did happen, but there was no way at all of knowing that would happen at that time. As it was, one of the most prominent factors in switching gears to partner with Philips was because Philips had no designs on competing with Nintendo in the home console space, and putting Nintendo characters onto the CDi was little more than cheap advertising for Nintendo than anything else. It was a low-risk partnership for Nintendo, who basically saw the prospective Sony partnership as "Helping Sony get into the games business". Like, honestly why would they have done that? Yes, Sony later developed the Playstation on their own and ended up taking over the market, but at least Nintendo can say "Well, we may have left the back door open but at least we didn't just up and give them the keys."

Games themselves are another factor Nintendo was likely looking at. If you look at most of the CD games of the early-90s, they're not great. FMV trash was everywhere, and Nintendo clearly didn't have any interest in making those types of games, and those types of games were synonymous with "CD-based video games" at that point in time. The actual GOOD games on stuff like the Sega CD, usually only "needed" the CD enhancements for the music, or if it was a movie-based game they could have short clips. But if you're Nintendo, and you're looking at things objectively, and you see that "Hmmm... the game based on the movie 'Hook' sold a lot better on cartridge than CD, despite the Sega CD version having movie clips and CD sound", you can forgive them for thinking that it just wasn't an area they needed to dump a lot of money into for such negligible returns. And as silly as it seems now when we've all become used to such things, back then a lot of gamers just plain didn't want to deal with load times, skipping, etc., and thus to many gamers a cartridge-based system was for them the better choice.

Obviously, people talk about how sticking with cartridges cost them Square, who jumped in bed with Sony, how Final Fantasy VII set the whole world on fire, all of that. But the thing we're forced to look at is, at that time, such a loss was probably considered a giant "Who cares?" RPGs in America were never anything but a super-niche genre UNTIL FF7 came out, and nobody but huge nerds ever played them. Sure, FFII and III for SNES did okay numbers, and there's a ton of great RPGs on the SNES, but those weren't the games that sold the system nor were they ever the biggest-selling games. Therefore, losing Square and FF7 was most likely something Nintendo entirely shrugged off at first. And it makes sense; anyone who tells you that "Everybody knew FF7 would be a world-changing event" is lying; nobody knew it would be a hit until it was. And without that game and Metal Gear Solid, Sony's PS-era dominance is immediately up for grabs regardless of format.

Then, of course, you have Nintendo's own history with switching formats and pursuing "newer, better technology" when they'd introduced the Famicom Disk System. It was the same thing, nearly 10 years earlier - "Floppy disks are better, there's more memory, you can make bigger games, they're cheaper to make and sell, etc. etc." And then it came out, worked okay for a little bit, but in the end was a gigantic bullsh*t hassle for Nintendo. The technology wasn't as dependable, piracy was rampant, the audience was now split between people who Had and Didn't Have the add-on so they were forced to choose which system to develop games for... ALL of this weighed heavily on their minds when they had to choose whether or not to make the N64 a CD-based console, because they'd already gone down similar roads not too long before. So NOW, they're looking at all the same problems (which nobody had yet gotten around), and figured "Yeah, what we're already doing is working Just Fine."

And of course, the biggest issue was always piracy, and it's honestly not hard to fault them there, either. Obviously now in the digital era it's a lost cause, but at the time it was a very real thing and it makes sense they'd want to protect themselves by making it as difficult as possible for their games to be pirated.

I mean, I get it. In hindsight, it seems like a huge "What were they thinking?!" moment for them to have stayed with cartridges when it seemed like everyone else was going CD. But they had plenty of valid reasons, based on the market and their own experience, for staying the course. When the Saturn came out and developers complained that it was a total mess to develop for, Nintendo looked at that situation and were like "See? We told you, it's just a hassle we don't need."

Other than technophiles, pretty much nobody in 1994-1995 gave Sony a fighting chance no matter what they say now. Other than, "They make CD stereos so obviously their CD game consoles should be more functional than those of Sega or others," everyone was more or less thinking "Who are these jokers thinking they can just swoop in and take over this business they have no experience in?" Sony in 1994 was spoken of the same way Microsoft was in 1999 or thereabout when they announced they were doing the Xbox - "They don't know the business, they don't have the connections, they might have good hardware but it will ultimately fail because of those other things." That was the overwhelming expectation. Nobody could've predicted that Sega would implode, that the Saturn would self-destruct on the launch pad, thus eliminating one huge competitor altogether and leaving a clear path for Sony to swoop in and pick up the pieces. We look back on things like that and say, "Man, should've seen THAT coming!" But nobody did, and nobody could've.

It makes for nice, bite-sized bits of "history" to say, "Nintendo stayed with cartridges when everyone else went CD, they were dumb and that's what cost them everything." And in hindsight, that might technically be true, but anyone who was there and following the situation closely at the time can say that it's a HUGE oversimplification which ignores that for every "dumb" decision Nintendo made at the time, they had a perfectly valid reason for making it, and a lot of people thought they were playing it smart by playing it safe.

I mean, at the end of the day the games Nintendo was banking on didn't necessitate the CD format, anyway. Can anyone say that Ocarina of Time or Super Mario 64 would've been "better" on a CD? Doubtful. Music-wise, maybe, but that's about it. When all was said and done, I think the only two games that came out on the PS1 that made Nintendo regret their decision at all were FF7 and Metal Gear Solid, two games which definitely needed to be on CD but also two games which nobody could ever have predicted would be as huge as they ended up being.

Remove FF7 and MGS - two games a LOT of people bought a PS1 just to play those games on - the whole thing gets a lot murkier, and remove the sales those games pulled in and Sony's dominance of that generation isn't so clear-cut anymore.

[Leo656]

If you had both the N64 and PS1 consoles at the time, like I did, which one you preferred came down to what games you played more than any technology. Obviously Mario and Zelda fans needed an N64. If you played sports games, you probably spent more time on the PS. If you played wrestling games, it was no contest, N64 all the way. RPGs? Had to be PS. Fighting games? Probably PS overall, as the controller was better for those and more of them came out for the PS by far, but whenever a game like MK4 came out for both systems a lot of people preferred it on the N64 even though the PS version had more bells and whistles.

At that time I mostly played Mario, Zelda, and wrestling games, and not much else, so I spent way more time with the N64 than my PS. I pretty much only played three games for the PS the first two or three years I had it. So all the "more advanced" technology and such just didn't mean anything to me if the system didn't have the games I wanted to play on it. Outside of FF7 and MGS, I didn't really care. Nowadays, it's much more balanced since I play more games in general, but at the time I definitely got more miles out of the N64. BUT, if I were a sports gamer or a big fighting game guy, it would likely have been different.
------------------

Kind of a funny/sad story about my very first N64 experience. It came out just after my Birthday, and as a treat I remember my parents had rented the console and Super Mario 64 from someplace. And for whatever reason... I didn't like it. :lol: Like I guess it was just "too different", or something, or maybe I was overwhelmed, I really can't say. But I am embarrassed to say that my first hour into it, I was underwhelmed, and in turn that really pissed my parents off because we didn't have a lot of money at the time and so them renting it was a Big Huge Deal and they expected me to be over the moon. So when I said "I kinda don't like it"... man, that was tense. I *think* it sent my Mom on a bender and she ended up going out drinking all night, but then again that happened a lot back then so maybe she just used that as an excuse, I don't know.

I DO know that literally like a half hour after that, though, something "clicked" and I was completely in love with it from that point on. I don't even remember how many times I've played and beaten that game over the years; that was my go-to game every time we had Christmas break, since I had a few days off from school to just do nothing but play that game for like a week. So many awesome memories.

I'm still mad at myself for that first impression, though. :ohwell: I mean, if I'd had a better understanding of the situation I might've not come outright and said "I kinda don't like it". Even worse was how I fell in love with it shortly after anyways, but not soon enough to avoid starting a Whole Big Thing. Sigh.

[Prowler]

I absolutely loved the Nintendo 64 back in the day. Nintendo handled the transition to 3d extremely well, imo. The only property of theirs that didn't see to make the transition that successful was Donkey Kong. DK64 is considered to be pretty much a poor man's version of Banjo-Kazooie, and we haven't had a 3d DK game since then. Instead, Nintendo went back to adopting the Donkey Kong Country style and formula to modern times. Still, I had fun with DK64.

As for the whole CDs thing, yeah, go back and play Saturn and PS1 games and try not to get frustrated with the insanely long loading times. Could you imagine playing Super Mario 64, Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie and Ocarina of Time with such long loading times?

N64 definitely aged the best out of its generation. But I have no interest in going back to it nowadays. A lot of its classics have better versions in more moder systems with remakes and remasters.

Losing Square's support did cost them winning the gen and paved the way for Sony to dominate the console market, but it's not like the N64 wasn't a success. Pretty sure it sold about 40-45 million units worldwide. That's about the same as the GameCube and the Wii U together. I'm sure Nintendo wishes both those consoles had sold as wlel as the N64. N64 was a very influential system for the industry, and everyone heard of Mario 64 and Ocarina and is aware of their impact. Plus, Nintendo might have lost Square, but still kept the Rare support. Rare was in its prime when they were making games for the N64. Even if the console didn't have a library as large as the PS1, it still had a very respectable bunch of exclusive titles.

[CyberCubed]

I'm not reading all that but the N64 gave us groundbreaking games like Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Super Mario 64, the first Smash Bros, Mario Kart 4, Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie, Turok 1 and 2, Starfox 64, F-zero, Diddy Kong Racing, etc.

Yeah the N64 missed out on Final Fantasy 7, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil 1-3, Crash, Castlevania, etc....but oh well. N64 had plenty of classics of its own.

[Leo656]

I absolutely loved the Nintendo 64 back in the day. Nintendo handled the transition to 3d extremely well, imo. The only property of theirs that didn't see to make the transition that successful was Donkey Kong. DK64 is considered to be pretty much a poor man's version of Banjo-Kazooie, and we haven't had a 3d DK game since then. Instead, Nintendo went back to adopting the Donkey Kong Country style and formula to modern times. Still, I had fun with DK64.

As for the whole CDs thing, yeah, go back and play Saturn and PS1 games and try not to get frustrated with the insanely long loading times. Could you imagine playing Super Mario 64, Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie and Ocarina of Time with such long loading times?

N64 definitely aged the best out of its generation. But I have no interest in going back to it nowadays. A lot of its classics have better versions in more moder systems with remakes and remasters.

Losing Square's support did cost them winning the gen and paved the way for Sony to dominate the console market, but it's not like the N64 wasn't a success. Pretty sure it sold about 40-45 million units worldwide. That's about the same as the GameCube and the Wii U together. I'm sure Nintendo wishes both those consoles had sold as wlel as the N64. N64 was a very influential system for the industry, and everyone heard of Mario 64 and Ocarina and is aware of their impact. Plus, Nintendo might have lost Square, but still kept the Rare support. Rare was in its prime when they were making games for the N64. Even if the console didn't have a library as large as the PS1, it still had a very respectable bunch of exclusive titles.

Great points! And yeah, I would argue that the games on the N64 have aged better overall than stuff on the PS1 or Saturn has. That entire generation is a bit "rough" graphically but a lot of the stuff on PS1 is downright ugly to look at now.

And good GOD, the load times. Some games had it worse than others, obviously, but with some PS1 games (Smackdown 2 being a notable example) things would take so damn long to load that I'd be concerned that the game froze... which sometimes it did. And that was another thing, I'd sometimes rent PS1 games and aside from long load times they'd often glitch out or freeze, usually at the worst possible time and it would cost me a ton of progress (since stopping to Save your game was still a somewhat-novel concept, I would often forget to do so). You just plain didn't have to deal with that stuff on the N64; you turned it on and were playing the game in ten seconds, no hassle. It was definitely the more reliable format.

I still go back to my N64 fairly often. There's a ton of great games on it which were never ported to anything else and never will be, like Rogue Squadron or the THQ wrestling games. I actually just bought "Goemon's Great Adventure" the other day and there's still about a dozen games I plan to buy for it. So suffice to say I'm still a fan. I still play all of my older consoles, except for my 2600 and Coleco-Vision because I just don't have room to hook them up at the moment.

I'm not reading all that

:lol: It definitely got a lot longer than I'd intended it to.

Short version: It's easy for people to say NOW that Nintendo screwed up by not going to CD format, but at the time nobody expected the PS1 to take off the way it did, they thought Sony was in over their head, and lots of people still preferred carts over CDs since it was proven and reliable technology, while a decent CD-based console had never been done properly yet.

Moral of the story being, "Hindsight is 20/20." At the time, a lot of people figured Nintendo was doing smart business.

[Coola Yagami]

Being a fighting game enthusiast, I had to admit the SNES had reached it's limit and it was never gonna adapt games with crazy animation like Darkstalkers or have the (at the time) huge roster of King of Fighters 94.

For me anyway, it's too bad the N64 went 100% into 'the future of gaming' and forgot about some awesome 2D games. I remember reading a Mexican Nintendo mag asking precisely that, why wasn't Nintendo getting Darkstalkers or KOF or Mark of the Wolves for the N64? Their answer was pretty much they wanted to move past that, not counting MK Trilogy, they wanted every game to use 3D graphics, rendered graphics or any kind of innovation (at the time they were releasing a Yoshi game where all the characters were made out of yarn), but just anything other than 2D sprites because it was 'the future'.

Personally it was a missed opportunity. They at least lost my money. I kinda think if the N64 adapted the Street Fighter III series it would have helped its popularity a lot more back then.

[Leo656]

Yeah, but that was unfortunately the mentality back then among most game developers (and even a ton of fans). "2D is old-fashioned; we need to make everything 3D polygons from now on because that's The Future." Even the PS1 at the very beginning had a mandate from Sony that 2D games were discouraged; obviously they went back on that, but it wasn't designed to run 2D games, which is why the Saturn did so much better at presenting those games. The Saturn was the only console of that generation that was built for both 2D and 3D games in equal measure, so 2D games ran a lot better on Saturn than PS1, except for minor things like graphical transparencies.

It got to the point where basically, the only people in America who were playing the Saturn were huge fans of the Capcom fighting games like X-Men vs. Street Fighter, which were pretty crummy on the PS1 but nearly arcade-perfect on Saturn. The PS1 was a more powerful console, but it simply wasn't built to run those types of games since it was designed at a time when "Everything MUST be 3D from now on!" was the mindset.

So it's not like Nintendo were the only ones guilty of it. I mean, if you look at some of the contemporary reviews for Street Fighter III when it came out, a ton of critics were like "2D sprites? Really? Didn't Capcom get the memo that we're into polygons now? What a wasted opportunity this game is, it's outdated." And then they got a polygon-based Street Fighter game with EX and nobody liked it. Go figure.
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If you were a fighting game fan, the N64 was a bit of a wasteland outside of MK4, for sure. On the other hand, if you liked wrestling games, the PS1 was a joke outside of stuff like Power Move Pro Wrestling and WCW vs. The World. Most of my friends didn't have an N64, but they'd all come over to my place to play WCW/nWo Revenge or WWF No Mercy. They weren't about to buy a whole new console just to play those two or three games, but they always admitted that by comparison the wrestling games on PS1 were mostly crap.

So again, for most people the technology wasn't so much the issue of preference so much as what kind of games they were into.

[Coola Yagami]

Yeah, but that was unfortunately the mentality back then among most game developers (and even a ton of fans). "2D is old-fashioned; we need to make everything 3D polygons from now on because that's The Future." Even the PS1 at the very beginning had a mandate from Sony that 2D games were discouraged; obviously they went back on that, but it wasn't designed to run 2D games, which is why the Saturn did so much better at presenting those games. The Saturn was the only console of that generation that was built for both 2D and 3D games in equal measure, so 2D games ran a lot better on Saturn than PS1, except for minor things like graphical transparencies.

It got to the point where basically, the only people in America who were playing the Saturn were huge fans of the Capcom fighting games like X-Men vs. Street Fighter, which were pretty crummy on the PS1 but nearly arcade-perfect on Saturn. The PS1 was a more powerful console, but it simply wasn't built to run those types of games since it was designed at a time when "Everything MUST be 3D from now on!" was the mindset.

So it's not like Nintendo were the only ones guilty of it. I mean, if you look at some of the contemporary reviews for Street Fighter III when it came out, a ton of critics were like "2D sprites? Really? Didn't Capcom get the memo that we're into polygons now? What a wasted opportunity this game is, it's outdated." And then they got a polygon-based Street Fighter game with EX and nobody liked it. Go figure.
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If you were a fighting game fan, the N64 was a bit of a wasteland outside of MK4, for sure. On the other hand, if you liked wrestling games, the PS1 was a joke outside of stuff like Power Move Pro Wrestling and WCW vs. The World. Most of my friends didn't have an N64, but they'd all come over to my place to play WCW/nWo Revenge or WWF No Mercy. They weren't about to buy a whole new console just to play those two or three games, but they always admitted that by comparison the wrestling games on PS1 were mostly crap.

So again, for most people the technology wasn't so much the issue of preference so much as what kind of games they were into.

I forgot what game it was, I wanna say Darkstalkers 3 but I'm not sure, where some game magazine actually complained the endings were just pictures with text.... as if that particular game series wasn't already known for that, and as if a 2D fighting game is expected to have FMV endings with dialogue and crap.

[Sumac]

Never had Nintendo 64, well, I've never heard if it until 2001, the year it was discontinued, but I have some strange "nostalgia for the thing that I've never encountered in my childhood". Like all those blurry graphics and very peculiar sound gives me this comfy feeling, like those early 3D shooting games, like Half Life 1.

Sadly can't force myself to play its games, aside from few of them, as I don't have enough time and don't want to wrestle with early 3D controls.

Its story is quite interesting, being tied to failed Nintendo Play Station and rise and fall of FMV trash, which nowadays was resurrected in QTE stuff, like Uncharted and "walking simulators". Its funny, how all this took for such "non-games" to rise back to popularity is to make them look pretty, because, gameplay-wise they are not that different from stuff like Night Trap.

I'd say Nintendo 64 was a big misstep for Nintendo, which cost it a lot of fans, reputation and developers, but this misstep makes sense in the context of the events, which unfolded around it.

Aside, from using carts, another big problem of N64 was its hardware design, which on paper was supposed to make it the strongest console of its generation, but in practice meant a lot of headache for developers.

[Leo656]

Haha, I've gotten like that with the Sega Saturn. Back when it was out, I played it like twice, maybe three times since almost nobody I knew had one, and the one guy who did quickly sold it off for a PS1. And at the time, it totally wasn't on my radar, but lately through watching stuff like Sega Lord X's videos I've gotten really nostalgic for it and kinda sad I missed out on it.

My wife had a Saturn, and a bunch of games for it, but somehow or other they vanished a long time ago. She thinks her Mom sold it all off at one point but she denies it. We bought one a few years ago, but we only have like four games for it because those games are f*cking stupid expensive, now. Really pisses both of us off.

[Sumac]

Haha, I've gotten like that with the Sega Saturn. Back when it was out, I played it like twice, maybe three times since almost nobody I knew had one, and the one guy who did quickly sold it off for a PS1. And at the time, it totally wasn't on my radar, but lately through watching stuff like Sega Lord X's videos I've gotten really nostalgic for it and kinda sad I missed out on it.

My wife had a Saturn, and a bunch of games for it, but somehow or other they vanished a long time ago. She thinks her Mom sold it all off at one point but she denies it. We bought one a few years ago, but we only have like four games for it because those games are f*cking stupid expensive, now. Really pisses both of us off.
Sega Saturn and Dreamcast might as well be like machines from alien world to me. Never encountered them in the wild (I saw some pirate discs for Dreamcast, though), but as far as games go, I haven't found anything interesting on them, aside from Castlevanias, MegaMan 8 and some fighting games.

[Andrew NDB]

Never had Nintendo 64, well, I've never heard if it until 2001, the year it was discontinued, but I have some strange "nostalgia for the thing that I've never encountered in my childhood". Like all those blurry graphics and very peculiar sound gives me this comfy feeling, like those early 3D shooting games, like Half Life 1.

Sadly can't force myself to play its games, aside from few of them, as I don't have enough time and don't want to wrestle with early 3D controls.

Its story is quite interesting, being tied to failed Nintendo Play Station and rise and fall of FMV trash, which nowadays was resurrected in QTE stuff, like Uncharted and "walking simulators". Its funny, how all this took for such "non-games" to rise back to popularity is to make them look pretty, because, gameplay-wise they are not that different from stuff like Night Trap.

I'd say Nintendo 64 was a big misstep for Nintendo, which cost it a lot of fans, reputation and developers, but this misstep makes sense in the context of the events, which unfolded around it.

Aside, from using carts, another big problem of N64 was its hardware design, which on paper was supposed to make it the strongest console of its generation, but in practice meant a lot of headache for developers.

Agreed. Which meant they basically had none. An experimental Castlevania game that didn't take off. One Mario game. 1.5 Zelda games. No Metroid games. A Goldeneye game that keeps getting remade. No real staying power at all within its own life.

I did bet on Nintendo with the N64 back in the day and this made me unpopular with friends in that way (in the same way I held onto my Sega Master System till the end while everyone was touting their NESes). In the end, they were right. Which isn't to say there aren't a couple of gems on N64... there are.

[D Piddy 1982]

At the time I was a "Sega man". I had previously chosen the Megadrive over the SNES which I had zero regrets over (at the time).

So when push came to shove I got a Saturn. Didn't regret that at the time, and still don't now.

To touch on what others have mentioned, looking back now the N64 and the Saturn have actually aged better than the PS1. It's funny, the PS1 was basically the "cool" console to own, as it had what was perceived to be "adult aimed" games (Resident Evil, Tekken etc). N64 was "for the kids" and Saturn allegedly didn't do 3D as good as the PS1.

I ended up getting an N64 a couple of years later as my friend had one and I LOVED playing on his Mario 64, Mario Kart and Goldeneye. They may have been just a few games, but they were DAMN FINE games.

I never got a PS1. Got a PS2 though.

Funnily enough I now had a PlayStation mini (or Classic) and also the same with the SNES mini. Love the SNES mini, PS1 mini turns out it's meh.

Even though I still have my Saturn (and N64) with a shed load of games, I'd still buy a mini version for the HD compatibility and ease of use and space.

[Sumac]

Agreed. Which meant they basically had none. An experimental Castlevania game that didn't take off. One Mario game. 1.5 Zelda games. No Metroid games. A Goldeneye game that keeps getting remade. No real staying power at all within its own life.

I did bet on Nintendo with the N64 back in the day and this made me unpopular with friends in that way (in the same way I held onto my Sega Master System till the end while everyone was touting their NESes). In the end, they were right. Which isn't to say there aren't a couple of gems on N64... there are.
There were also Banjo-Kazooie games and Donkey Kong 64.
In general, N64 library was pretty decent - few games were even revolutionary, but mostly this console was holding up due to the Nintendo and Rare output, with little to no help from other developers.

So it's not like Nintendo were the only ones guilty of it. I mean, if you look at some of the contemporary reviews for Street Fighter III when it came out, a ton of critics were like "2D sprites? Really? Didn't Capcom get the memo that we're into polygons now? What a wasted opportunity this game is, it's outdated." And then they got a polygon-based Street Fighter game with EX and nobody liked it. Go figure.
I think Street Fighter EX was released a bit before Street Fighter 3 and it was basically 2D fighting game with 3D graphics. Even in a side series Capcom was not brave enough to commit to 3D gameplay.

I think, this is what might have killed SFEX - it was basically regular Street Fighter, but in 3D, with little to no ideas of its own and it was worse looking to boot.

And Street Fighter 3 was a critical failure, which nearly killed the whole series. Though it was only part of the much bigger failure called CPS3 - Capcom's brand new hardware platform for 2D games only. It was such a failure that only six games have been released for it. Though, you may say only three games were really released, since out of those six games two were different revisions of JoJo fighting game and three - were revisions of Street Fighter 3.

Remove FF7 and MGS - two games a LOT of people bought a PS1 just to play those games on - the whole thing gets a lot murkier, and remove the sales those games pulled in and Sony's dominance of that generation isn't so clear-cut anymore.
I doubt it - FF7 and MGS1 were juggernauts, but there were plenty of other good games on a system - Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot series, Tekken series (especially Tekken 3), Symphony of the Night, Chrono Cross, Tony Hawk series, Spyro series and, of course, Resident Evil and various racing games.

Tekken 3 was one of the best selling fighting games ever made, so I'd say PS1 dominance was ensured, even, if say, new Final Fantasy was somehow released on N64.

[CyberCubed]

Majora's Mask is a full game and many consider it one of the best Zelda games for 20 years. N64 was huge with online multiplayer thanks to Goldeneye 007, Mario Kart 64, Smash Bros, Mario Party, etc. People forget what a big deal 4 player multiplayer was at the time.

Starfox 64 and F-zero X were also groundbreaking for the time, people forget what huge franchises Starfox and F-zero used to be before Nintendo let them fade into oblivion.

[frank_one]

Modern kids will never understand the feeling of seeing Mario 64 on a screen for the first time. It blew my mind. That game alone was enough of a reason to buy an N64. Modern gamers cannot understand the impact that game had on that generation. And then Ocarina of time came out and it was even better. Still two of the best games ever made.

[Andrew NDB]

Majora's Mask is a full game and many consider it one of the best Zelda games for 20 years.

I dunno. It's not very Zelda like.

[CyberCubed]

I dunno. It's not very Zelda like.

It's exactly like a regular Zelda game using time travel. The Mask transformations are the same as any new concept every Zelda game has (Wind Waker had sailing, Twilight Princess had the wolf transformation, Skyward Sword had the motion controls and sky. Even the 2D games had the dark world gimmick or Minish Cap with getting tiny, etc), and arguably the best. Getting to play as a Goron or Zora and use their abilities in combat or to solve puzzles has never been done again in any other Zelda.

It only has 4 main dungeons but it also has several side dungeons that are almost the same length (the castle in the Ikana valley area, the Moon dungeon, the underground Graveyard, etc). Meanwhile the sidequests are also the meat of the game and has the best NPC quests of any Zelda game, getting all the masks of the game is a feat in itself.

The recent 3DS remake of it was pretty good also, and they made the time travel a bit easier due to portable play, so less fear of messing up or not doing things in time. You can also save at the Owl statues mid-day.

[Papenbrook]

I wasn't even born yet.

I wish I would have gotten to experience it. It would have been awesomely nostalgic.

[Prowler]

Haha, I've gotten like that with the Sega Saturn. Back when it was out, I played it like twice, maybe three times since almost nobody I knew had one, and the one guy who did quickly sold it off for a PS1. And at the time, it totally wasn't on my radar, but lately through watching stuff like Sega Lord X's videos I've gotten really nostalgic for it and kinda sad I missed out on it.

My wife had a Saturn, and a bunch of games for it, but somehow or other they vanished a long time ago. She thinks her Mom sold it all off at one point but she denies it. We bought one a few years ago, but we only have like four games for it because those games are f*cking stupid expensive, now. Really pisses both of us off.

I grew up with both the N64 and the Saturn. My brother got both of them back in the day. The Saturn was very expensive at first but its price went down A LOT about a year after it came out due to not selling very well.

The Saturn did have a good start in Portugal tho. Sega was the KING in Portugal between 1990 and 1995 with the Mega Drive outselling the SNES by a alrge margin. I remember Vritua Fighter 2 having a lot of hype and there being a videogame TV show contest where teenage contestants played Vritua Fighter 2 against each other in the final in a best out of 5 match.

The PS1 actually didn't stand out much at first here, but around a year or so later it dethroned the Saturn and now Portugal was all about Sony consoles and still is to this day.

I liked the Saturn a lot. It was our first 3d system and our first CD game system. VF2, Virtua Cop 2 with the light gun, Fighting Vipers, Fighters Megamix, Virtual On, etc. All pretty fun exclusives and great games for their time. The Saturn had a lot of good fighting games.

Modern kids will never understand the feeling of seeing Mario 64 on a screen for the first time. It blew my mind. That game alone was enough of a reason to buy an N64. Modern gamers cannot understand the impact that game had on that generation. And then Ocarina of time came out and it was even better. Still two of the best games ever made.

I agree 100% with you.

I dunno. It's not very Zelda like.

Well, it certainly doesn't look that different anymore bow that we have BOTW. I've been enjoying BOTW a lot, but it clearly is the most different Zelda game I've ever played after Adventure of Link. I liked that they did things differently, but I'm not sure I like the idea of BOTW becoming the blueprint for all future Zelda games now. Seems like we won't get a traditional Zelda game again for a long time...

[The Deadman]

It's an underrated gem (to me at least), but does anyone remember the 2nd Battletanx game? That was my 2nd ever N64 game and that was so much fun. You're just going around shooting sh*t with giant tanks.

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

Never had Nintendo 64, well, I've never heard if it until 2001, the year it was discontinued

Was the Nintendo 64 a big hit in Russia?

[sdp]

The N64 is my favorite console, it came out at the perfect age for me when I was a little kid but still old enough to actually be able to understand the games I was playing and be able to enjoy them fully. Here is a small Nintendo 64 tribute post (http://miscrave.com/articles/n64/), but yeah I don't care about revisionist history, as a kid you don't have all the money to buy games weekly/monthly so having just a couple of games a year was more than enough for me and those multiplayer games will forever be golden years of my childhood.

Favorite game: Perfect Dark

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

as a kid you don't have all the money to buy games weekly/monthly so having just a couple of games a year was more than enough for me

Your own birthday and Christmas. Those were the only two opportunities through the year for many children and teenagers who grew up in the 1970's, 80's, 90's and early 2000's to get new video games.

In general, more children today have parents who grew up with video games and still play them. That makes them more willing to buy video games for their children.

[IMJ]

I feel like I remember reading about the N64 "Technology" in a Nintendo Power YEARS before it actually came out. I think there were pix of Killer Instinct and news that it was going to be in arcades.

K.I. was released in '94, but is it possible that this was teased in Nintendo Power in something like '90 or 91'? I can't recall...

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

I feel like I remember reading about the N64 "Technology" in a Nintendo Power YEARS before it actually came out. I think there were pix of Killer Instinct and news that it was going to be in arcades.

K.I. was released in '94, but is it possible that this was teased in Nintendo Power in something like '90 or 91'? I can't recall...

These were played at the Winter CES in Las Vegas in January 1994 (not 1995 as the Youtube video film claims).

lqHXaWoCuAY

[Sumac]

Your own birthday and Christmas. Those were the only two opportunities through the year for many children and teenagers who grew up in the 1970's, 80's, 90's and early 2000's to get new video games.

In general, more children today have parents who grew up with video games and still play them. That makes them more willing to buy video games for their children.
In my case, I got games of my own on Birthdays and New Year holidays, however, I have few friends with whom I constantly traded carts back and forth, so most of my knowledge of NES library comes from them. And we didn't had Blockbuster-like chains in Russia.

I feel like I remember reading about the N64 "Technology" in a Nintendo Power YEARS before it actually came out. I think there were pix of Killer Instinct and news that it was going to be in arcades.

K.I. was released in '94, but is it possible that this was teased in Nintendo Power in something like '90 or 91'? I can't recall...
Development of N64 had started around 1993. Original KI was released in 1994 and its development was started in 1993 as well. As for KI being used to demonstrate power of the upcoming Nintendo 64, well, it was fake marketing at its finest.

Nintendo was trying to convince people that "Project Reality" (early name for N64) would be capable of an amazing graphics and they even touted original arcade Killer Instinct as an example of it. Thing is KI arcade board was nothing like N64 hardware. The only thing they had in common was a processor. Everything else was specifically created to run KI.

And if they were trying to convince people that "Project Reality" will be able to run 3D games of that quality, it also was fake, since a) nothing in KI was 3D in the first place (characters were 2D sprites, arenas were FMVs streamed from a hard drive) and b) you'd need astronomically expensive hardware to handle real 3D of that quality back in the day, which is the reason arcade KI was not a real 3D game.

Its not modern developers a "more honest" using CGI trailers for their games, but with a modern power of hardware it is possible to almost reach that quality, whereas back in the 90s it was just nothing, but a fiction.

[IMJ]

Killer Instinct always looked like awkard claymation to me, to be honest. I was never much of a fan.....

[sdp]

The N64 was only revealed like 2 years before it came out, but it was supposed to come out in 1995 so a whole other year after the original date so it felt forever. Magazines and even shows like nintendomania (https://miscrave.com/articles/nintendomania/) kept talking about the Nintendo 64 coming out in the future, but it was only a 2 year wait at most. Nowadays it's normal to wait 2 years for something like a new console. but the difference is we're adults now so time passes quicker.

When you are a kid waiting a year is a big deal, there's a big difference between being in the 2nd grade and the 3rd grade, 6th and 7th etc, so waiting 2 years is a lifetime as a kid. The Switch has been out for nearly 5 years now, by that point the N64 felt like it had been out forever and we were ready for a new Nintendo console, but that's only because as a kid 5 years is a lot, it was basically all your elementary/primary school run, gamecube lasting 5 years meant it was all of your middle school and most of your high school..

[Sumac]

Killer Instinct always looked like awkard claymation to me, to be honest. I was never much of a fan.....
Yeah, those early 90s models indeed look like claymation. Awkward choppy animation doesn't help.

[Andrew NDB]

Killer Instinct always looked like awkard claymation to me, to be honest. I was never much of a fan.....

I didn't mind that and found it somewhat unique at the time. What weirded me away from Killer Instinct was the ridiculous combos in play that you had to figure out. I remember always being beaten in the arcade by little kids who'd mash buttons and suddenly you'd hear "Ultraaaaaa comboooo!!!" and I'd be KOed.

Too much.

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

Some video films:

1ZsDwdUqPw0

J9GmpVh1zFQ

AQz9VYdZ5RM

pFlcqWQVVuU

[ssjup81]

I dunno. It's not very Zelda like.I find it Zelda like. It had puzzle solving and all that, like the others. The only difference was that it ran in a three-day cycle and it was surreal, sorta like Link's Awakening. I will admit that Majora's Mask is one of the darkest games in the franchise's history.Your own birthday and Christmas. Those were the only two opportunities through the year for many children and teenagers who grew up in the 1970's, 80's, 90's and early 2000's to get new video games.

In general, more children today have parents who grew up with video games and still play them. That makes them more willing to buy video games for their children.I only got something like that for Christmas and it wasn't much, but I appreciated it. I knew how much game carts cost. I remember only twice in my life I received games outside of Christmas. In 1993, since it was my first time being stuck at home all summer because I was finally too old to go to the Summer Program I would do (cut off was 11 or 12) and my mother took me to the K-Mart and said I could pick out some games. I was dumbstruck, and even asking if she was sure because, as mentioned, I knew how much that cost and games are "want" not a "need". She said it was okay. I got Star Fox, Mario is Missing, Super Mario Kart, and a couple of others (mind is blank at the moment). The other time was in 1996. My aunt gave me Super Mario RPG for my birthday.

I didn't grow up with an allowance or anything like that, so I could never buy my own games. Even the SNES, I didn't ask for that, I woke up to find it under the tree for Christmas. I'd made honor roll in school. lol When the N64 was about to come out, my parents asked me what I wanted for Christmas, and I listed off SNES games. I was stubborn over the N64 since I felt that the SNES still had life in it, but that Christmas, I ended up with the N64. lol I was thankful for it. ^_^

[Andrew NDB]

I find it Zelda like. It had puzzle solving and all that, like the others. The only difference was that it ran in a three-day cycle and it was surreal, sorta like Link's Awakening. I will admit that Majora's Mask is one of the darkest games in the franchise's history.

Maybe "dark" in the sense that the world is perpetually about to definitively end in 0-3 days. I'd just go with "weirdest," and I don't mean that in a good or bad way.

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

Killer Instinct always looked like awkard claymation to me, to be honest. I was never much of a fan.....

Killer Instinct was just Nintendo's answer of all those versus fighting video games who flooded the international market following Capcom's success with Street Fighter II.

[IMJ]

Killer Instinct was just Nintendo's answer of all those versus fighting video games who flooded the international market following Capcom's success with Street Fighter II.

Oh absolutely it was. And that was the point when making a solid fighting game wasn't enough - you needed a gimmick to differentiate it. KI's were those chain combos.

[Original TMNT Cartoon Fan]

We have forgotten Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire from 1996.

kpt9faBMOgs

[Leo656]

I still gotta go back and finish that one. I played it last year and got really far into it, but I still have like two levels to go I think.

It was definitely a huge deal at the time, but it's aged rather poorly. It's very, very clunky and thus more difficult than it has to be. I'd still say it's worth a look for history's sake, though; that was the biggest Star Wars thing to come out since RotJ so it got a ton of hype at the time.

[Andrew NDB]

Well, it certainly doesn't look that different anymore bow that we have BOTW. I've been enjoying BOTW a lot, but it clearly is the most different Zelda game I've ever played after Adventure of Link. I liked that they did things differently, but I'm not sure I like the idea of BOTW becoming the blueprint for all future Zelda games now. Seems like we won't get a traditional Zelda game again for a long time...

I don't see the comparison between BOTW and MM. BOTW is like the original LoZ for NES but... semi-open world, with cooking and stuff. And less proper dungeons and more puzzle dungeons.

But yeah. I just want to see traditional dungeons out of a new Zelda game. They can keep all the stuff and mechanics from BotW (except... maybe make the swords more durable?).