The fall of 1996 graced the world with the Nintendo 64. It was the Big N’s next step up from the Super Nintendo. Anticipation was understandably high. The Super Nintendo was iconic. It had gone to war with the Sega Genesis and won. But gaming was evolving into the 3D space. The PlayStation was already on the market, and the CD technology was making huge changes to how games were developed. The Nintendo 64 was going to be a cartridge-based system. How was that going to stack up against what Sony was offering with the PSX? Let’s take a look back at the Nintendo 64 and how 30 years of time have revealed it to be massively flawed but engagingly fun.
The Cartridge Issue
It’s hard to get around that cartridge problem. It really is. Nintendo was reluctant to change even though developers were pushing them to. Part of this has to do with market control. If a publisher wanted to put a game out on the market, they had to get the cartridges from Nintendo. That made the games more expensive to produce but more profitable for Nintendo. CDs were not proprietary in the same way and were much cheaper to get ahold of. They could also hold a lot more data, which developers desperately needed.
That’s one of the big factors that drove the company Square, aka Squaresoft (now Square Enix), to stop working with Nintendo. The SNES was a console notable for having some of the greatest RPGs of all time. Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy II, Final Fantasy III, and those are just some of the ones released in the United States. There were a lot more games that Square pumped out, even if they didn’t get a stateside push. That working relationship with Nintendo was huge, though. It gave them a big edge over their direct competitor, Sega.
Developers Jump Ship
But the developers at Square had bigger ambitions and knew that bigger games required bigger storage mediums. The cartridges weren’t going to cut it. A game disc could hold roughly around 600 MB of data. A standard Nintendo 64 cartridge could hold, initially, around 12 MB. Eventually they could get up to 64 MB, but those were more expensive. It’s the same problem you could run into when buying a 512 GB SD card vs 1 TB. But imagine you’re a developer and you have the option between trying to compress everything to 12 MB vs having 600 MB to work with. Why would you even bother with the N64 at that point?
The simple answer to that is exposure and market share. Nintendo’s name carried weight. So if you could make a game for the N64, you’d be exposing it to a large and proven audience. The Sony PlayStation was new and untested. But it was gaining traction and opening doors for developers. That’s why Square jumped ship and didn’t release anything for the Nintendo 64.
It Wasn’t Just Square
Square wasn’t alone either. Capcom was one of Nintendo’s biggest third-party developers on the NES and SNES. The Mega Man series, Breath of Fire, Street Fighter, and Disney collaborations were all mainstays on Nintendo consoles. And while they did do some titles for Sega, Nintendo was still their main focus. That changed with the PlayStation. Capcom all but abandoned Nintendo. There were only three games they did for the Nintendo 64. A port of Resident Evil 2, Mega Man 64 (which was a compromised port of Mega Man Legends), and a Disney Tetris game.
Konami was another developer that shifted focus away from Nintendo. They weren’t as adamant as Capcom or Square, though. They still put out a decent number of titles for the N64, but clearly their focus was on the PSX. Put it this way. The Nintendo 64 got a 3D Castlevania game, two Goemon games, and a remake of that Castlevania game. The PlayStation got Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, two Suikoden RPGs, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and a bunch of Dance Dance Revolution titles. Nintendo got the short end of the stick.
Quality Over Quantity on the Nintendo 64
But that’s not to say the Nintendo 64 didn’t have any good games. It just had a lot fewer of them. And we don’t just mean quality titles; we mean titles in general. The estimate of the number of official PlayStation titles is around 4,000. The Nintendo 64 list of titles is closer to 390. Most of the best titles you could only get on the Nintendo 64 were developed by Nintendo themselves or a studio they were closely affiliated with. Of course there are some mild exceptions.
From Nintendo themselves, we got legendary titles like Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, F-Zero X, Mario Kart 64, and Mario’s sports and party titles. We also had Rare coming in hot off their SNES success with GoldenEye, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Blast Corps, Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo-Kazooie, and others. Nintendo even managed to get some fantastic sports titles out thanks to some partnerships that resulted in Excitebike 64, Kobe Bryan in NBA Courtside, and WWF No Mercy. All of that doesn’t even include various Pokémon titles, Star Wars games, and other projects that turned out amazingly well.
So Much Better for Multiplayer Than PlayStation
The Nintendo 64 was a great console for parties. Because it had four controller ports, it made playing multiplayer games so much easier. That and more fun since it made four simultaneous players possible without an accessory. You have four controllers? Good. Plug and play. Many were the parties where people played split-screen multiplayer on GoldenEye or duked it out on Super Smash Bros.
Speaking of controllers, though, the Nintendo 64 controller was then, and is now, a huge point of controversy. The trident design was highly criticized for not being easy to hold and being pretty hard to work with for people with smaller hands. The logic behind it was sound. It just wasn’t implemented as well as it could’ve been. Nintendo was concerned about how people would approach 3D gaming. Their thought was to put the analog control stick front and center in the controller. The D-pad would then be moved to the left part of the trident to distinguish it as being used for a 2D game instead of a 3D one. The right trident would therefore contain all the buttons needed no matter which game you were playing.
A Rough Controller by Modern Standards
Some of the issues come from a modern-day perspective. Your hands are too close together when holding the controller for 3D games. Having only one analog stick feels weird in today’s gaming landscape. It’s almost impossible to use the L button in the top left of the controller if you’re also using the analog stick. But even back then, there were issues with that analog stick. It wasn’t manufactured with durability in mind. The analog stick would wear over time and get loose. Also, the hard plastic ridges on the top of the stick could cause abrasions if you tried to rotate the stick too much with your thumb or palm.
When it came to the power of the system itself, the Nintendo 64 was a very mixed bag. In some ways it could be better than the PlayStation with resolution, loading times, and polygonal rendering. But man, did the N64 fail in comparison almost everywhere else. Audio had to be compressed to fit on the cartridges. The draw distance in games was atrocious. This led to “fog” effects everywhere to hide things just popping up in the field of vision. The capacity for pre-rendered cutscenes was almost non-existent. Plus, from a design standpoint, it was much harder to program for.
The Nintendo 64 is Very Hard to Go Back to
Ultimately, the PlayStation would far outsell the Nintendo 64 and lead to Sony’s eventual dominance in traditional home consoles. Nintendo would eventually bounce back by pivoting from making powerful consoles to making unique ones. The Wii and Switch would end up putting out massive sales numbers. But the Nintendo 64 completely derailed the company’s dominance in the console market.
It’s a really hard console to go back to. Some of the games play poorly due to the nature of figuring out 3D gaming at the time. You have wonky camera controls in a lot of titles, jagged polygonal graphics, muddy and foggy visuals, and a controller that does not fit conventional standards of design philosophies. The game library still has titles that are worth experiencing. But if there was ever a collection of games that could use remasters and polished updates, it’s every quality title for the Nintendo 64. Legendary as it might be, it’s too flawed to want to go back to unless it’s for a game you truly can’t find elsewhere. We’re looking at you, Buck Bumble.
