Collection essentials #398: Nintendo 64

Nintendo was basically the king of home video games for a whole decade. They achieved a near-monopoly with the Famicom and NES in the 1980s, and still remained on top in the first half of the ‘90s with their Super Nintendo despite fierce competition from Sega. In the following generation, 3D graphics were clearly the new norm, and they would jump into the fray with the Nintendo 64 in 1996. This console was well-equipped with 3D capabilities, too. The 64 in the title refers to the console’s full-fledged 64-bit CPU which was cutting edge at the time. In early gaming days, the amount of “bits” a console had was often cited. The Famicom/NES had 8 bits, the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis had 16, the competing Sega Saturn and PlayStation had 32, but now Nintendo would 1-up everybody (pun intended) with 64! Granted, the results didn’t actually LOOK twice as good as the 32-bit consoles, but it was still impressive hardware for the time. 

However…it was clear early on that things weren’t going Nintendo’s way. Indeed, this was the console generation where Sony and their PlayStation would leave everyone in the dust. I already talked about some of the reasons for PlayStation’s dominance in that console’s write-up. 

Nintendo opted to stick with cartridges instead of making the switch to having games on CDs. There were advantages to this. Perhaps the most obvious one is a lack of loading times. When you play a game on a CD, sometimes you have to sit and wait while a game loads whatever it is you’re about to play, which sometimes is just several seconds but can be much longer in some cases. Generally speaking, cartridge-based games load almost instantaneously, and that can be pretty nice. You could often save your progress directly to the memory of a cartridge rather than be required to buy a memory card (though some Nintendo 64 games do require that), and that was a nice convenience. It was much harder back then to pirate cartridge-based games as well, something that Nintendo was very concerned about. 

But the cons of sticking with cartridges far outweighed the pros. Perhaps the biggest one was that CDs were much cheaper to produce, and Nintendo already had a strained relationship with publishers due to them enforcing strict rules since the days of nearly having a monopoly on the industry. There were also problems with making games on a cartridge, mainly the fact that they couldn’t hold all that much space which would prove to be a problem in this fancy new generation of 3D. Developers who wanted to put things like full-motion video and CD-quality audio into their games were much more at home on the PlayStation since CDs and their larger capacity were far more suited to it. The biggest RPG developers also flocked to the PlayStation to make games that came on multiple PlayStation discs which had no hope of ever being on the Nintendo 64 without severe compromises. And so, not only did Nintendo come out over a year later than PlayStation, but the flow of new games was a mere trickle compared to the deluge of software being made for Sony’s console. Nintendo 64’s library is much smaller and less diverse than that NES or Super Nintendo’s, most obviously lacking in the RPG department but also missing big games in other genres such as fighting games (there’s not even a single Street Fighter!) and shoot ‘em ups that it more than likely would have had if Nintendo didn’t stubbornly stick to the cartridge format. 

That being said, the Nintendo 64 was definitely not a total flop, and it was still a fairly common sight in family households in the late ‘90s. Nintendo’s own output was still strong, and blockbuster games in their biggest franchises were a huge shot in the arm and kept the console relevant. Also, British second-party developer Rare really took it to the next level and produced a series of exclusive hits on the Nintendo 64 that were almost as popular as Nintendo’s own lineup. But people who weren’t fans of Nintendo and Rare often wound up with a very negative opinion of the console.

While Nintendo 64’s library may have been fairly small and lacking in some areas, there was one major advantage it had over the PlayStation, and that was…multiplayer games!! Nintendo 64 was the first mainstream console ever to have four controller ports built into the console. Other consoles could support more than two players in the past, but one would have to buy a “multitap” adapter to hook up more than two controllers, which was always a bit of a niche option. But now that every Nintendo 64 owner had access to four controller ports, developers really jumped at the chance to make great party games that supported four players at once. Nintendo 64 was the console you wanted to see at parties!

Nintendo 64’s controller is rather odd, with three grips for two-handed human beings. The idea is that certain games control movement using the joystick while others use the d-pad, but you never really need both at the same time, so the left hand holds onto the grip of the relevant movement option. There a “Z” button on the middle-back of the controller as a sort of substitute for the L button which the player won’t have access to holding the middle grip. This type of controller design is still unique to the Nintendo 64 and would not become a new norm for gaming. However, this was the first mainstream console to have an analogue stick on every controller, something that has been the norm for consoles ever since. PlayStation and Saturn both got controllers with analog after the Nintendo 64 launched.

As a kid who especially loved Nintendo, obviously I loved the Nintendo 64. It launched when I was six and I don’t quite remember when was the first time I actually heard about it or got to see one, but I definitely remember relishing every chance I had to play it at the houses of friends and family. My parents were not quick to buy us one, however. In 1999, three years into the console’s lifespan, my parents recognized my oldest sister and I really wanted one and said that we could have one if we were well-behaved for long enough. I don’t remember exactly how long that period was, but I do remember the moment that he told us we were getting it. He said to us something like, “You guys are really, really close. In fact, you’re so close that…you got it!!” Needless to say, I was pretty psyched, and for the next couple years I spent an awful lot of time with it. The console shown in the photo is the very system from my childhood.

It’s hard to call the Nintendo 64 one of the greatest consoles of all time. It probably wouldn’t make my top 10. But it certainly had some very wonderful games and I think of it very fondly. Is it worth revisiting today? Well, that sort of depends on what you want to play, but there are definitely still reasons to give it a look. Granted, a lot of the strong multiplayer games from its heyday now feel a little obsolete since there are generally better options on newer consoles now. But in the coming weeks I’ll be posting about some of my favorites on the console and their merits, and you’ll find I have no shortage of games to talk about and things to say about them. Stay tuned.