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My sense is that the N64 cartridge just couldn’t compete with the optical disc formats for content storage as RPGs just exploded in size and complexity at the t

My sense is that the N64 cartridge just couldn’t compete with the optical disc formats for content storage as RPGs just exploded in size and complexity at the time. (And way too many rendered cutscenes!)

chongli 3y ago
The N64 cartridge format was the biggest mistake Nintendo made with a mainline console. It was like building a formula one car with a gas tank the size of a thimble. The PS1 absolutely ate Nintendo’s lunch in that round of the console wars. Nintendo went from the undisputed champion of 3rd party libraries (with the SNES) to an also-ran. Sure, Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are classics. But what’s a must-have 3rd party N64 exclusive? I can’t even think of one.
- redhale 3y ago
  Goldeneye
- wingmanjd 3y ago
  Maybe Goldeneye? But yeah, there aren't a lot that come to mind.
  - chongli 3y ago
    I had some fun playing Goldeneye with friends back in the day. Though I’ll be honest, I have no desire to play it again. On the other hand, I’d happily play SM64 and OoT through again, along with dozens of NES and SNES titles.
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      Well I recently learned that Goldeneye was ported to the Xbox Live Arcade but then never released, and a few years ago the ported program leaked. It's widescreen and higher resolution than the original, but otherwise the same I believe. I am still dreaming of the day I can get the Xenia emulator properly running that game on linux, which so far has been problematic for me.
      - larusso 3y ago
        It got released for Xbox and on the Switch.
        goosedragons 3y ago
        It's not the same as the XBLA remaster. The current Xbox and Switch versions are basically emulated ROMs. The XBLA remaster had a lot more changes and improvements like the Perfect Dark XBLA remaster that was released.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
        Update: the latest version of Xenia for Windows runs nicely for me in proton (installed as a non-steam game in steam as that's the easiest way for me to run it with proton) and the Goldeneye XBLA remaster ran just fine! I plugged in an xbox controller over USB and it ran wonderfully. That was fun! I played through a few levels and it all went smoothly. It seems theres a couple different versions of the goldeneye leaked remaster out there so make sure to try a couple different ones if you have any issue.
    - nonethewiser 3y ago
      I think your point still stands but I think Goldeneye is obviously an example of a great third party exclusive. Controls dont hold up well but that’s irrelevant.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    N64 primarily shined with four player gameplay. Third parties that focused on that tended to do well. However, besides Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie, Blast Corps, Super Smash Bros (made by HAL Labs), Mario Party (made by Hudson Soft), Diddy Kong Racing (Rare), MLB feat Ken Griffey Jr, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, WCW vs NWO: World Tour, Wipeout 64, Excitebike 64 (Left Field), and NBA Courtside. Not a ton of stand outs, admittedly. In the first two years of N64's existence, there were only a few dozen titles even released on the console.
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    Goldeneye isn't a third party exclusive. It's a game published and funded by Nintendo, just handled by an external studio (Rare).
- dnhrtnwg 3y ago
  Blast Corps. Loved it!
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    I lost countless hours on that game, so fun.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    Blast Corps was such a unique and innovative game.
- radicaldreamer 3y ago
  CDs were also so much cheaper than cartridges to manufacture that margins must've been a fraction of what the Playstation enjoyed
  - eru 3y ago
    Though piracy was also much easier with CDs.
    - anthk 3y ago
      PS1 = cheapest or among the most cheap devices to play Audio CD's. PS2 = the same, but with DVD movies.
      - eru 3y ago
        There were pretty cheap audio CD players around when the PSX was current. You might be right for the DVD.
        anthk 3y ago
        Players, it depends. A good music set (not a cheap radiocassete) with speakers and such was around a 1/3 of the salary of an average worker in Spain.
        eru 3y ago
        Well, a PSX doesn't have any speakers on its own.
- dmamills 3y ago
  Aside from the PS2, Nintendo owns the top 2 to 4 best selling consoles of all time. All three of them are cartridge based, included their most recent console. They may have been outsold in the fifth generation of consoles, but first party software gave them longevity that their competitors wish they could replicate. Where is Master Chief and who, Crash Bandicoot, now?
  - atomicnumber3 3y ago
    The switch and DS aren't cartridge-based in the same sense at all that the SNES and N64 were though. The progression was generally: ROM - VERY fast but small Optical disks - slower but much larger Flash carts - best of both worlds by the time we started using flash for game consoles Nintendo f'd up by staying on ROM carts for the N64 because it limited your storage space so much. And the benefit - faster load times - was probably lost on many people. (Notice how no N64 game has loading screens of any notable length). OOT just uses brief fades to black.
  - offices 3y ago
    >Where is Master Chief...? Not Master Chief, try 'Steve' from the best selling game of all time.
    - dmamills 3y ago
      If you can consider a Mascot something non-exclusive to the brand, introduced fourteen years after the release of the Xbox, and brought on through an acquisition, then sure.
      - offices 3y ago
        Like Pikachu?
- zik 3y ago
  Conker's Bad Fur Day
  - siva7 3y ago
    Still besides OoT the best N64 game and vastly underrated when released near the end of the console lifecycle as an adult game.
    - chrisco255 3y ago
      I'm not sure it would hold up as well today. It was a fun platformer parody game though.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I think what I find amusing is this idea that the game must be exclusive to prove ... something, not sure what, about the N64. exclusives are generally a lock-in scam for the companies and say absolutely nothing about the games on a system. The question is, did the N64 have a lot of amazing games on it, and the answer is unequivocally yes.
  - chongli 3y ago
    I say exclusive because a lot of the non-exclusive games (ports) had severe compromises which meant they were way better on other systems (PS1 or PC). Compare any of the sports games on the N64 to their PS1 counterparts and the difference is stark.
    - eru 3y ago
      But why would you expect the non-exclusives to be better on console A instead of console B?
      - chrisco255 3y ago
        At the time the hardware differences were more significant than they are in modern systems (we're also in an era of diminishing returns on graphical improvements). Playstation 1 had larger storage space and could take advantage of prerendered graphics and full motion pre-recorded video, but the actual real-time graphics were more limited on the PS1 than the N64. The N64 had also created the analog thumbstick, and although Sony would later copy and improve the design with the Dual Shock controller, initially N64 was a far superior platform for games with twitchy 3D gameplay like platformers and even first person shooters. Another factor was multiplayer. For party games, N64 was a superior experience, as up to 4 players could play at once vs. PS1's two controller ports. At any rate due to these factors you'd have to make various trade-offs when porting a game from PS1 to N64 or vice versa (cut back on multiplayer, reduce textures, adjust controls, compress audio, etc). There was also no such thing as a universal game engine like Unity or Unreal that could cross-compile for both platforms. On each system you'd have to bake an engine from scratch.
- smus 3y ago
  Isn't Super Mario 64 third party? It's hal labs, not nintendo
  - chongli 3y ago
    No, it was developed by Nintendo EAD, the largest first party software division within the company.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    Smash Bros was HAL Labs, not Mario 64. That being said, HAL Labs worked closely with Nintendo on the title, and Nintendo owns a significant stake in the company.
- causi 3y ago
  Your opinion of what is a must-have may vary, but Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie, Super Smash Brothers, Paper Mario, and Rocket: Robot on Wheels.
- flashback2199 3y ago
  You excluded must have first party exclusives which was probably the main selling point of the console..
  - chongli 3y ago
    I was trying to make a comparison with the SNES, which had a huge list of amazing 3rd party exclusives, in addition to the first party must-haves. It would not be difficult to build a library of several hundred great games for the SNES. Compared to that, the N64 was a huge step back! After picking up the first party games, can you even make a decent top 20 third party games? It’s brutal!
    - flashback2199 3y ago
      Yeah I think you're right now that I think about it some more
- EmilyHughes 3y ago
  I disagree. I loved that there were no loading times. I always thought PS1 games felt cheap and slow compared to N64 games. Nobody really used the CD space for game content, they just filled it up with ugly prerendered cutscenes, which I didnt care about.
  - BramLovesYams 3y ago
    I agree 100% on the loading times. This is an issue I still have and find myself often just playing something from an old cartridge (N64 or Gameboy) rather than waiting for a modern game to load up.
  - scott_w 3y ago
    That’s great for you and other N64 owners. However the sales figures don’t lie.
  - bluedino 3y ago
    I'd also take the blurry N64 graphics over the Playstation's pixelated, distorted, sparkly, jumpy textures.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    It was a generation later but I remember going to my Cousin Tony's place where I'd play Metroid Prime on the GameCube (disc-based but short stroked) which did a great job of minimizing and hiding loading times and also Mafia on the PS2 where it would seem to take 10 minutes to load a level, then I'd take a long and boring drive across town to some Italian restaurant where I was supposed to shoot the people up but I'd get shot up myself and have to wait through the loading screen and repeat the drive. Maybe if I wasn't an adult with a driver's license it would have been more cool but the difference in loading time was striking.
  - Tiktaalik 3y ago
    Developers filled the CD space with tons of textures and cd quality audio. This pushed the visual and audio fidelity beyond what developers were capable of on the N64. This is why despite having lower polygon counts, Playstation games often look better than N64 games. The former having a variety of detailed textures, while the latter have one low res texture smeared over everywhere.
- lelandbatey 3y ago
  I'd have said Bajo Kazooie and GoldenEye.
- bdw5204 3y ago
  The must-have 3rd party N64 exclusives were the AKI wrestling games (The 2 WCW/NWO games, WrestleMania 2000, No Mercy and the 2 Japan-exclusive Virtual Pro Wrestling games). Pro wrestling fans still consider them among the best video game representations of the sport (along with certain PS2 era WWE games and the Fire Pro Wrestling/King of Colosseum series). This was also meaningful at the time the N64 was current because that was also the last time period when pro wrestling was genuinely mainstream popular in the US. Other than that, pretty much all of the games you'd actually want to play on N64 are Nintendo or Rare games.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    Yeah WCW vs. NWO: World Tour was pretty groundbreaking at the time with the grappling system. It was a sequel to a PS1 game, but the gameplay on World Tour was just so much better. I remember it being a fun multiplayer gaming experience too.
  - robinson7d 3y ago
    You’re absolutely correct, but I’d love to hear more about why Rare is an exception. Is it just because they mostly made games for SNES before N64? If so my recollection was that SquareSoft and Enix (separate at the time, IIRC) were similar until PlayStation enticed them, and in our 20/20 hindsight (FFVII and all) we wouldn’t bundle those Nintendo companies like we might consider Rare. Again though, you aren’t wrong! Rare covers many of the non-Nintendo greats on N64 (GoldenEye! Banjo Kazooie! Donkey Kong 64! Conker, if you were in a fairly narrow range of maturity!), but they did some Sega before N64 and a lot of Xbox afterward, so I just expect there’s probably some interesting details left to expand here :) If there’s not much to it other than that they were a shining star with a ton of Nintendo investment, all good.
    - chrisco255 3y ago
      Rare worked closely with Nintendo on their titles. Nintendo provided top-level support for Rare. They had done fantastic with the Donkey Kong Country series on Super Nintendo, so Nintendo had a lot of trust in them and a great working relationship at a time when the company held their cards a little too closely to their chest. I think Nintendo's dev tooling for the N64 was pretty weak and devs were struggling as it was with the transition from 2D to 3D in the crucial early years of the platform. That coupled with the capital intensity made it prohibitive for smaller studios to develop on. But Nintendo trusted Rare and fronted the capital to publish. Later Rare was acquired by Microsoft.
- justworkout 3y ago
  > Nintendo went from the undisputed champion of 3rd party libraries (with the SNES) to an also-ran. And Nintendo hasn't recovered since. The Gamecube had a great library, but very little of it was third party, especially compared to the PS2. The Wii was used as a dumping ground by third parties and just got garbage while the 360 and PS3 got major releases. Wii U was completely ignored, and now the Switch's third party content is either last gen ports or heavily downgraded versions of PC games. Handhelds, of course, were different. The GBA, DS, and 3DS all had pretty large third party support and high quality support at that. But that one mistake has hurt them for 30 years. They've had huge waves in hardware sales, but software sales by third parties will probably never reach what the SNES and NES had. People sometimes complain about there being yet another Zelda and yet another Mario, but Nintendo's core series are the only thing carrying their platforms.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    The Nintendo Switch is the second best selling console of all time, with over 132 million unit sales. It outsold the PlayStation 4 by a long shot (117 million), and is only superceded by the PlayStation 2 (155 million units). The Wii was the 5th best selling console of all time. Of all the console makers I would argue it's Microsoft that is currently struggling the most. The Xbox X has sold less than 20 million units and sales have been dwindling. Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft has no strong differentiator from the Playstation.
    - dkdbejwi383 3y ago
      Xbox is a really odd one, they only have significant market share in North America - it's something like 20% in Europe, and insignificant in Asia. Personally, I don't know anyone who has an Xbox. It's either PlayStation for high-end or Switch for more casual gamers (or a 2nd console for PS owners). It seems that most of the games you can't play on those two systems are available on PC (e.g. Starfield), which anecdotally in my experience is where people tend to play it.
  - andrepd 3y ago
    The Wii, Wii U, and Switch are all consciously a different platform from the corresponding Playstation/Xbox. Of course they're not gonna have the same games as them or PC. If you want to play Call of Duty 27 or GTA V, buy one of those instead.
- okeuro49 3y ago
  > But what’s a must-have 3rd party N64 exclusive? I can’t even think of one. Goldeneye
  - Karuma 3y ago
    That game is from a second-party developer.
    - chrisco255 3y ago
      "second party developer" is kind of a loose term. Rare had close relationship with Nintendo at the time, and were allowed to produce games for some of Nintendo's IP, but they ultimately ended up being acquired by Microsoft, so they weren't so exclusive that Nintendo could prevent that outcome.
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  >But what’s a must-have 3rd party N64 exclusive? I can’t even think of one. NGE 64
- andrepd 3y ago
  Goldeneye? :p
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  What’s a must have 3rd party exclusive for the switch?
- jasonjayr 3y ago
  Goldeneye? IIRC it was one of best/first/well-done 4-player-on-one-screen FPS games
- NeoTar 3y ago
  > Sure, Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are classics. But what’s a must-have 3rd party N64 exclusive? I can’t even think of one. Banjo Kazooie? Developed by Rare but published by Nintendo, global sales of 3 million.
  - smooshV 3y ago
    not 3rd party
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Funny how 'cartridges' beat out discs in the long term in the since that flash memory has eaten everything. There was this short time in the 1990s when everybody and his brother were inventing some kind of 'disc', for instance there were the magneto-optical discs like the audio Minidisc (love 'em but my Net MD recorder just died) and the MO disc used by the NeXT cube and then there were the "floptical" discs like the ZIP disks and the N64 DD disc. Writable and rewritable optical discs dropped in price more quickly than anyone thought possible and not long after that, USB flash drives and SD cards where everywhere. Most portable game consoles since 2010 have been flash-based, often with some kind of modified SD card (e.g. Vita, Nintendo Switch.) I just bought a 256 GB SD card for $20 which is bigger than any commercialized disc even if it is a little pricey for software distribution. And of course stationary consoles are going towards digital distribution, you can buy a digital PS5 now and a digital XBOX is coming soon and ultimately the storage is... Flash.
- zztop44 3y ago
  But Nintendo is in the enviable position of consistently releasing some of the best and most popular games in the world as first party exclusives every generation like clockwork. It’s not to say that things might not have been better if they’d gone with a CD-ROM format for the 64. But the brand differentiation with Sony that emerged in that generation has been the cornerstone of their (extremely successful) strategy going forward.
- deergomoo 3y ago
  To a lesser extent they repeated it with the GameCube. Those little mini-DVDs are only 1.8GB. The GameCube was easily capable of playing the likes of Grand Theft Auto—it was significantly more powerful than the PS2—but those games came on 9GB dual-layer DVDs, so it was just never gonna happen. The reputation Nintendo had picked up for being the “kiddy console” probably didn’t help either.
- masfoobar 3y ago
  I find the history of the N64 interesting but, I guess, it is because it is part of my teen years. I was sooooo onboard with the N64 when first announced (or project reality at it was named at the time) and early screens. Dont get me wrong - I understand why they stayed with cartridges. Load times really were faster than CD and one argument Mayamoto used was music changing on-the-fly (like mario creeping up on a sleeping enemy, which changed up-beat music to a lulaby) but is it really all that important? My friend had a playstation. It was a great system but the load times for some games were absolutely terrible! For me it killed the mood. The 'experience' for some games made me prefer the inferior snes version at times, especially when looking at beat-em-ups. How different would Mario 64 be if the N64 was CD-based from the beginning? Honestly, I think it would have changed the quality of the game -but not for the better. Of course, in N64 was CD system, then we wouldn't have anything to compare it to... therefore this comment wouldn't exist. lol. The CD version might have included some full motion video and crisper quality music, but I think all other areas would have been the same as the cartridge version, except for load times. I think Ocarina of Time would have been painful to play on CD but then the design of the game would have gone a different route if N64 was CD. From memory, the two biggest problems the N64 had (from my perspective, at time of writing) were using Cartridges, and being released much later than the Playstation and Saturn. CD's were 'the thing' at that time. To have a games console which allowed for much more space for games.. and be a music player, was a big deal for your 90's kids in their bedroom! Going by memory, in Europe/UK, the Saturn came out mid-95. Playstation came out not long after. I think the playstation was £100 cheaper on release compared to the saturn. I think the Saturn was about £400. The N64 did not come out until March '97. -- over 1 year later! -- N64 was cheaper than Playstation and Saturn on launch (compared to their launch price) but I wouldn't be surprised if playstaion had already dropped it's price so was comparable. I think Nintendo slashed the price of the N64 from £250 to £150 within 4 weeks! Dont get me started on the 64DD. I thought it was great at the time but, in reality, the idea of adding components to games consoles was already getting annoying (Sega proved that with their Genesis/MegaDrive.. CD, 32X, etc) Maybe N64 could have done better if being a DD right at the start, having 'decent' space and maintaining load times speeds.
  - masfoobar 3y ago
    forgot to mention n64 had 4 controller ports -- multiplayer support seperated it from the competitors.
aidenn0 3y ago
Absolutely; Square considered targeting the 64DD; but those were like 10% the size of a CD, so it was still a lot more expensive than targeting a CD. Nintendo considered the load-times of a 2X or 4X CD drive to be far too slow, and 8X drives to be too expensive. PSX load times did really suck; games did things to mask them. For an existing RPG it was still worth it, and with the prerendered cut-scenes that were planned for FFVII it was a no-brainer.
- sotix 3y ago
  To add to your point, here’s the producer of FFVII, Hironobu Sakaguchi: “It was starting to become clear to us what the memory capacity for the different next-gen consoles would be. Our games were going to need a huge amount of memory. The Final Fantasy VI CG demo we made for the Siggraph exhibition took 20 megs all by itself. We thought that demo had a lot of visual impact, so there really wasn’t much question about which hardware we would use; if we were going to realize the promise of the demo we had shown at Siggraph, nothing but the CD-ROM format would suffice. Another reason for choosing the CD-ROM was related to price. I think one of the big reasons the first Final Fantasy was favorably received by players, and the later games in the series gained so many fans, was that you could buy those games for around 5000 to 6000 yen. We tried to have the same pricing for Bahamut Lagoon, Gun Hazard, and our other later Super Famicom games, but using cartridge ROM meant those games had to be sold for over 10000 yen. New players did not flock to those games like they had before. If we used CD-ROM for Final Fantasy VII, we’d be able to have a 2-disc game at a price of 5800 yen. I was hoping it would be possible to make a game that could sell several hundred thousand copies.“ https://shmuplations.com/ff7/ https://shmuplations.com/ff7/
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    It would have been cool if someone had made a NES and/or SNES cartridge which had a built in CD reader.
    - a1o 3y ago
      Wasn't this the usage of the bottom SNES port?
kmeisthax 3y ago
Prerendered cutscenes ate up the lion's share of the disc. If you sacrificed on those and used lots of compression, you absolutely could build an RPG on the N64 that would stand up to whatever you could do on PlayStation. However, nobody wanted to do that. The only RPGs we got on the N64 were Quest 64 and Paper Mario. The reason why requires diving into the development history of what would have been a third RPG for the system: MOTHER 3. To put it bluntly, they ran out of storage space, and pivoted to the N64 DD to get more. The custom floppy disks the N64 DD took could hold 64MB[0]. Even then, this wasn't enough, so the game was then broken up into two parts: an N64 cartridge plus a DD expansion pack, which would give them 96MB in total to play with. MOTHER 3 would then continue in development hell before being canned and reborn as a Game Boy Advance title[1]. Fire Emblem was also supposed to release on the N64. However, unlike Itoi biting off more than he could chew with the N64, FE64 failed because the head designer, Shouzou Kaga, didn't even want to touch the hardware. He'd stalled for time by working on Satellaview FE games[2] on the SNES, and then left Nintendo entirely right before Thracia 776 came out. He'd then release a totally-not-Fire-Emblem clone on PlayStation and get sued into oblivion for... basically telling all the games press that he was making Fire Emblem on PlayStation. So that's a 50% success rate for RPGs on the N64 - not a good look. Could homebrewers do better? On prior Nintendo systems, cartridges executed in-place - that is, the CPU bus and game cartridges were wired up such that the game was effectively the system's boot ROM. This also meant that the CPU address bus width would limit the size of the game without further bankswitching. On the N64, however, cartridges load into memory through the PI bus, which has a separate address space from the main MIPS CPU. PI bus uses 32-bit addressing, and the address range allocated to the cartridge would allow up to 3.75GB ROMs. Data storage devices that large would never exist during the lifespan of the N64, but building an N64 cartridge that large would be practical today. I suspect loading the ROM image into emulators or flashcarts wouldn't be too difficult either. And, of course, if you did manage to hook your N64 up to ridiculous amounts of storage, you could do crazy dynamic loading tricks like this[3]. If the N64 wasn't limited by storage space, RPGs would have actually looked better than on PlayStation, and render in real time to boot. [0] Cartridges were later produced at this size, notably for the N64 port of Resident Evil 2 [1] This did not actually fix the problems with MOTHER 3. If anything, it made them worse, because GBA cartridges are limited to 16MB without bankswitching. The game used significant amounts of compression to deal with this, which complicated efforts to make an English translation. MOTHER 3 would also not release until a month after the DS Lite, which meant that an official English release of the game was very much out of the question. [2] The Satellaview was a SNES hardware addon that allowed downloading games off of satellite radio services operated by St.GIGA. Think of it like Nintendo's equivalent to the SEGA Channel, except Japan-only because satellite radio didn't even exist in the US yet. [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf036fO-ZUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf036fO-ZUk
deaddodo 3y ago
That was a major component, but a few of the big names would still have published with Nintendo if they didn't spit in their faces by giving first-party dev teams such a heavy focus at the expense of second and (especially) third party devs.
cubefox 3y ago
That's not true at all. Games like Zelda were absolutely possible on the N64 and close to traditional RPGs. The only thing that wasn't really realistic was to make extensive use of pre-rendered background stills like in Final Fantasy (due to relatively large file sizes), or pre-rendered FMV (due to massive file sizes). But neither of those things were in any way required to make an RPG. In fact, heavily relying in pre-rendered stuff has mostly been abandoned since.

chongli 3y ago

The N64 cartridge format was the biggest mistake Nintendo made with a mainline console. It was like building a formula one car with a gas tank the size of a thimble. The PS1 absolutely ate Nintendo’s lunch in that round of the console wars. Nintendo went from the undisputed champion of 3rd party libraries (with the SNES) to an also-ran. Sure, Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are classics. But what’s a must-have 3rd party N64 exclusive? I can’t even think of one.

redhale 3y ago
Goldeneye
wingmanjd 3y ago
Maybe Goldeneye? But yeah, there aren't a lot that come to mind.
- chongli 3y ago
  I had some fun playing Goldeneye with friends back in the day. Though I’ll be honest, I have no desire to play it again. On the other hand, I’d happily play SM64 and OoT through again, along with dozens of NES and SNES titles.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Well I recently learned that Goldeneye was ported to the Xbox Live Arcade but then never released, and a few years ago the ported program leaked. It's widescreen and higher resolution than the original, but otherwise the same I believe. I am still dreaming of the day I can get the Xenia emulator properly running that game on linux, which so far has been problematic for me.
    - larusso 3y ago
      It got released for Xbox and on the Switch.
      - goosedragons 3y ago
        It's not the same as the XBLA remaster. The current Xbox and Switch versions are basically emulated ROMs. The XBLA remaster had a lot more changes and improvements like the Perfect Dark XBLA remaster that was released.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      Update: the latest version of Xenia for Windows runs nicely for me in proton (installed as a non-steam game in steam as that's the easiest way for me to run it with proton) and the Goldeneye XBLA remaster ran just fine! I plugged in an xbox controller over USB and it ran wonderfully. That was fun! I played through a few levels and it all went smoothly. It seems theres a couple different versions of the goldeneye leaked remaster out there so make sure to try a couple different ones if you have any issue.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    I think your point still stands but I think Goldeneye is obviously an example of a great third party exclusive. Controls dont hold up well but that’s irrelevant.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  N64 primarily shined with four player gameplay. Third parties that focused on that tended to do well. However, besides Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie, Blast Corps, Super Smash Bros (made by HAL Labs), Mario Party (made by Hudson Soft), Diddy Kong Racing (Rare), MLB feat Ken Griffey Jr, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, WCW vs NWO: World Tour, Wipeout 64, Excitebike 64 (Left Field), and NBA Courtside. Not a ton of stand outs, admittedly. In the first two years of N64's existence, there were only a few dozen titles even released on the console.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  Goldeneye isn't a third party exclusive. It's a game published and funded by Nintendo, just handled by an external studio (Rare).
dnhrtnwg 3y ago
Blast Corps. Loved it!
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  I lost countless hours on that game, so fun.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Blast Corps was such a unique and innovative game.
radicaldreamer 3y ago
CDs were also so much cheaper than cartridges to manufacture that margins must've been a fraction of what the Playstation enjoyed
- eru 3y ago
  Though piracy was also much easier with CDs.
  - anthk 3y ago
    PS1 = cheapest or among the most cheap devices to play Audio CD's. PS2 = the same, but with DVD movies.
    - eru 3y ago
      There were pretty cheap audio CD players around when the PSX was current. You might be right for the DVD.
      - anthk 3y ago
        Players, it depends. A good music set (not a cheap radiocassete) with speakers and such was around a 1/3 of the salary of an average worker in Spain.
        eru 3y ago
        Well, a PSX doesn't have any speakers on its own.
dmamills 3y ago
Aside from the PS2, Nintendo owns the top 2 to 4 best selling consoles of all time. All three of them are cartridge based, included their most recent console. They may have been outsold in the fifth generation of consoles, but first party software gave them longevity that their competitors wish they could replicate. Where is Master Chief and who, Crash Bandicoot, now?
- atomicnumber3 3y ago
  The switch and DS aren't cartridge-based in the same sense at all that the SNES and N64 were though. The progression was generally: ROM - VERY fast but small Optical disks - slower but much larger Flash carts - best of both worlds by the time we started using flash for game consoles Nintendo f'd up by staying on ROM carts for the N64 because it limited your storage space so much. And the benefit - faster load times - was probably lost on many people. (Notice how no N64 game has loading screens of any notable length). OOT just uses brief fades to black.
- offices 3y ago
  >Where is Master Chief...? Not Master Chief, try 'Steve' from the best selling game of all time.
  - dmamills 3y ago
    If you can consider a Mascot something non-exclusive to the brand, introduced fourteen years after the release of the Xbox, and brought on through an acquisition, then sure.
    - offices 3y ago
      Like Pikachu?
zik 3y ago
Conker's Bad Fur Day
- siva7 3y ago
  Still besides OoT the best N64 game and vastly underrated when released near the end of the console lifecycle as an adult game.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    I'm not sure it would hold up as well today. It was a fun platformer parody game though.
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
I think what I find amusing is this idea that the game must be exclusive to prove ... something, not sure what, about the N64. exclusives are generally a lock-in scam for the companies and say absolutely nothing about the games on a system. The question is, did the N64 have a lot of amazing games on it, and the answer is unequivocally yes.
- chongli 3y ago
  I say exclusive because a lot of the non-exclusive games (ports) had severe compromises which meant they were way better on other systems (PS1 or PC). Compare any of the sports games on the N64 to their PS1 counterparts and the difference is stark.
  - eru 3y ago
    But why would you expect the non-exclusives to be better on console A instead of console B?
    - chrisco255 3y ago
      At the time the hardware differences were more significant than they are in modern systems (we're also in an era of diminishing returns on graphical improvements). Playstation 1 had larger storage space and could take advantage of prerendered graphics and full motion pre-recorded video, but the actual real-time graphics were more limited on the PS1 than the N64. The N64 had also created the analog thumbstick, and although Sony would later copy and improve the design with the Dual Shock controller, initially N64 was a far superior platform for games with twitchy 3D gameplay like platformers and even first person shooters. Another factor was multiplayer. For party games, N64 was a superior experience, as up to 4 players could play at once vs. PS1's two controller ports. At any rate due to these factors you'd have to make various trade-offs when porting a game from PS1 to N64 or vice versa (cut back on multiplayer, reduce textures, adjust controls, compress audio, etc). There was also no such thing as a universal game engine like Unity or Unreal that could cross-compile for both platforms. On each system you'd have to bake an engine from scratch.
smus 3y ago
Isn't Super Mario 64 third party? It's hal labs, not nintendo
- chongli 3y ago
  No, it was developed by Nintendo EAD, the largest first party software division within the company.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Smash Bros was HAL Labs, not Mario 64. That being said, HAL Labs worked closely with Nintendo on the title, and Nintendo owns a significant stake in the company.
causi 3y ago
Your opinion of what is a must-have may vary, but Goldeneye, Banjo-Kazooie, Super Smash Brothers, Paper Mario, and Rocket: Robot on Wheels.
flashback2199 3y ago
You excluded must have first party exclusives which was probably the main selling point of the console..
- chongli 3y ago
  I was trying to make a comparison with the SNES, which had a huge list of amazing 3rd party exclusives, in addition to the first party must-haves. It would not be difficult to build a library of several hundred great games for the SNES. Compared to that, the N64 was a huge step back! After picking up the first party games, can you even make a decent top 20 third party games? It’s brutal!
  - flashback2199 3y ago
    Yeah I think you're right now that I think about it some more
EmilyHughes 3y ago
I disagree. I loved that there were no loading times. I always thought PS1 games felt cheap and slow compared to N64 games. Nobody really used the CD space for game content, they just filled it up with ugly prerendered cutscenes, which I didnt care about.
- BramLovesYams 3y ago
  I agree 100% on the loading times. This is an issue I still have and find myself often just playing something from an old cartridge (N64 or Gameboy) rather than waiting for a modern game to load up.
- scott_w 3y ago
  That’s great for you and other N64 owners. However the sales figures don’t lie.
- bluedino 3y ago
  I'd also take the blurry N64 graphics over the Playstation's pixelated, distorted, sparkly, jumpy textures.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  It was a generation later but I remember going to my Cousin Tony's place where I'd play Metroid Prime on the GameCube (disc-based but short stroked) which did a great job of minimizing and hiding loading times and also Mafia on the PS2 where it would seem to take 10 minutes to load a level, then I'd take a long and boring drive across town to some Italian restaurant where I was supposed to shoot the people up but I'd get shot up myself and have to wait through the loading screen and repeat the drive. Maybe if I wasn't an adult with a driver's license it would have been more cool but the difference in loading time was striking.
- Tiktaalik 3y ago
  Developers filled the CD space with tons of textures and cd quality audio. This pushed the visual and audio fidelity beyond what developers were capable of on the N64. This is why despite having lower polygon counts, Playstation games often look better than N64 games. The former having a variety of detailed textures, while the latter have one low res texture smeared over everywhere.
lelandbatey 3y ago
I'd have said Bajo Kazooie and GoldenEye.
bdw5204 3y ago
The must-have 3rd party N64 exclusives were the AKI wrestling games (The 2 WCW/NWO games, WrestleMania 2000, No Mercy and the 2 Japan-exclusive Virtual Pro Wrestling games). Pro wrestling fans still consider them among the best video game representations of the sport (along with certain PS2 era WWE games and the Fire Pro Wrestling/King of Colosseum series). This was also meaningful at the time the N64 was current because that was also the last time period when pro wrestling was genuinely mainstream popular in the US. Other than that, pretty much all of the games you'd actually want to play on N64 are Nintendo or Rare games.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Yeah WCW vs. NWO: World Tour was pretty groundbreaking at the time with the grappling system. It was a sequel to a PS1 game, but the gameplay on World Tour was just so much better. I remember it being a fun multiplayer gaming experience too.
- robinson7d 3y ago
  You’re absolutely correct, but I’d love to hear more about why Rare is an exception. Is it just because they mostly made games for SNES before N64? If so my recollection was that SquareSoft and Enix (separate at the time, IIRC) were similar until PlayStation enticed them, and in our 20/20 hindsight (FFVII and all) we wouldn’t bundle those Nintendo companies like we might consider Rare. Again though, you aren’t wrong! Rare covers many of the non-Nintendo greats on N64 (GoldenEye! Banjo Kazooie! Donkey Kong 64! Conker, if you were in a fairly narrow range of maturity!), but they did some Sega before N64 and a lot of Xbox afterward, so I just expect there’s probably some interesting details left to expand here :) If there’s not much to it other than that they were a shining star with a ton of Nintendo investment, all good.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    Rare worked closely with Nintendo on their titles. Nintendo provided top-level support for Rare. They had done fantastic with the Donkey Kong Country series on Super Nintendo, so Nintendo had a lot of trust in them and a great working relationship at a time when the company held their cards a little too closely to their chest. I think Nintendo's dev tooling for the N64 was pretty weak and devs were struggling as it was with the transition from 2D to 3D in the crucial early years of the platform. That coupled with the capital intensity made it prohibitive for smaller studios to develop on. But Nintendo trusted Rare and fronted the capital to publish. Later Rare was acquired by Microsoft.
justworkout 3y ago
> Nintendo went from the undisputed champion of 3rd party libraries (with the SNES) to an also-ran. And Nintendo hasn't recovered since. The Gamecube had a great library, but very little of it was third party, especially compared to the PS2. The Wii was used as a dumping ground by third parties and just got garbage while the 360 and PS3 got major releases. Wii U was completely ignored, and now the Switch's third party content is either last gen ports or heavily downgraded versions of PC games. Handhelds, of course, were different. The GBA, DS, and 3DS all had pretty large third party support and high quality support at that. But that one mistake has hurt them for 30 years. They've had huge waves in hardware sales, but software sales by third parties will probably never reach what the SNES and NES had. People sometimes complain about there being yet another Zelda and yet another Mario, but Nintendo's core series are the only thing carrying their platforms.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  The Nintendo Switch is the second best selling console of all time, with over 132 million unit sales. It outsold the PlayStation 4 by a long shot (117 million), and is only superceded by the PlayStation 2 (155 million units). The Wii was the 5th best selling console of all time. Of all the console makers I would argue it's Microsoft that is currently struggling the most. The Xbox X has sold less than 20 million units and sales have been dwindling. Unlike Nintendo, Microsoft has no strong differentiator from the Playstation.
  - dkdbejwi383 3y ago
    Xbox is a really odd one, they only have significant market share in North America - it's something like 20% in Europe, and insignificant in Asia. Personally, I don't know anyone who has an Xbox. It's either PlayStation for high-end or Switch for more casual gamers (or a 2nd console for PS owners). It seems that most of the games you can't play on those two systems are available on PC (e.g. Starfield), which anecdotally in my experience is where people tend to play it.
- andrepd 3y ago
  The Wii, Wii U, and Switch are all consciously a different platform from the corresponding Playstation/Xbox. Of course they're not gonna have the same games as them or PC. If you want to play Call of Duty 27 or GTA V, buy one of those instead.
okeuro49 3y ago
> But what’s a must-have 3rd party N64 exclusive? I can’t even think of one. Goldeneye
- Karuma 3y ago
  That game is from a second-party developer.
  - chrisco255 3y ago
    "second party developer" is kind of a loose term. Rare had close relationship with Nintendo at the time, and were allowed to produce games for some of Nintendo's IP, but they ultimately ended up being acquired by Microsoft, so they weren't so exclusive that Nintendo could prevent that outcome.
GoblinSlayer 3y ago
>But what’s a must-have 3rd party N64 exclusive? I can’t even think of one. NGE 64
andrepd 3y ago
Goldeneye? :p
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wodenokoto 3y ago
What’s a must have 3rd party exclusive for the switch?
jasonjayr 3y ago
Goldeneye? IIRC it was one of best/first/well-done 4-player-on-one-screen FPS games
NeoTar 3y ago
> Sure, Super Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time are classics. But what’s a must-have 3rd party N64 exclusive? I can’t even think of one. Banjo Kazooie? Developed by Rare but published by Nintendo, global sales of 3 million.
- smooshV 3y ago
  not 3rd party
PaulHoule 3y ago
Funny how 'cartridges' beat out discs in the long term in the since that flash memory has eaten everything. There was this short time in the 1990s when everybody and his brother were inventing some kind of 'disc', for instance there were the magneto-optical discs like the audio Minidisc (love 'em but my Net MD recorder just died) and the MO disc used by the NeXT cube and then there were the "floptical" discs like the ZIP disks and the N64 DD disc. Writable and rewritable optical discs dropped in price more quickly than anyone thought possible and not long after that, USB flash drives and SD cards where everywhere. Most portable game consoles since 2010 have been flash-based, often with some kind of modified SD card (e.g. Vita, Nintendo Switch.) I just bought a 256 GB SD card for $20 which is bigger than any commercialized disc even if it is a little pricey for software distribution. And of course stationary consoles are going towards digital distribution, you can buy a digital PS5 now and a digital XBOX is coming soon and ultimately the storage is... Flash.
zztop44 3y ago
But Nintendo is in the enviable position of consistently releasing some of the best and most popular games in the world as first party exclusives every generation like clockwork. It’s not to say that things might not have been better if they’d gone with a CD-ROM format for the 64. But the brand differentiation with Sony that emerged in that generation has been the cornerstone of their (extremely successful) strategy going forward.
deergomoo 3y ago
To a lesser extent they repeated it with the GameCube. Those little mini-DVDs are only 1.8GB. The GameCube was easily capable of playing the likes of Grand Theft Auto—it was significantly more powerful than the PS2—but those games came on 9GB dual-layer DVDs, so it was just never gonna happen. The reputation Nintendo had picked up for being the “kiddy console” probably didn’t help either.
masfoobar 3y ago
I find the history of the N64 interesting but, I guess, it is because it is part of my teen years. I was sooooo onboard with the N64 when first announced (or project reality at it was named at the time) and early screens. Dont get me wrong - I understand why they stayed with cartridges. Load times really were faster than CD and one argument Mayamoto used was music changing on-the-fly (like mario creeping up on a sleeping enemy, which changed up-beat music to a lulaby) but is it really all that important? My friend had a playstation. It was a great system but the load times for some games were absolutely terrible! For me it killed the mood. The 'experience' for some games made me prefer the inferior snes version at times, especially when looking at beat-em-ups. How different would Mario 64 be if the N64 was CD-based from the beginning? Honestly, I think it would have changed the quality of the game -but not for the better. Of course, in N64 was CD system, then we wouldn't have anything to compare it to... therefore this comment wouldn't exist. lol. The CD version might have included some full motion video and crisper quality music, but I think all other areas would have been the same as the cartridge version, except for load times. I think Ocarina of Time would have been painful to play on CD but then the design of the game would have gone a different route if N64 was CD. From memory, the two biggest problems the N64 had (from my perspective, at time of writing) were using Cartridges, and being released much later than the Playstation and Saturn. CD's were 'the thing' at that time. To have a games console which allowed for much more space for games.. and be a music player, was a big deal for your 90's kids in their bedroom! Going by memory, in Europe/UK, the Saturn came out mid-95. Playstation came out not long after. I think the playstation was £100 cheaper on release compared to the saturn. I think the Saturn was about £400. The N64 did not come out until March '97. -- over 1 year later! -- N64 was cheaper than Playstation and Saturn on launch (compared to their launch price) but I wouldn't be surprised if playstaion had already dropped it's price so was comparable. I think Nintendo slashed the price of the N64 from £250 to £150 within 4 weeks! Dont get me started on the 64DD. I thought it was great at the time but, in reality, the idea of adding components to games consoles was already getting annoying (Sega proved that with their Genesis/MegaDrive.. CD, 32X, etc) Maybe N64 could have done better if being a DD right at the start, having 'decent' space and maintaining load times speeds.
- masfoobar 3y ago
  forgot to mention n64 had 4 controller ports -- multiplayer support seperated it from the competitors.

aidenn0 3y ago

Absolutely; Square considered targeting the 64DD; but those were like 10% the size of a CD, so it was still a lot more expensive than targeting a CD. Nintendo considered the load-times of a 2X or 4X CD drive to be far too slow, and 8X drives to be too expensive. PSX load times did really suck; games did things to mask them. For an existing RPG it was still worth it, and with the prerendered cut-scenes that were planned for FFVII it was a no-brainer.

sotix 3y ago
To add to your point, here’s the producer of FFVII, Hironobu Sakaguchi: “It was starting to become clear to us what the memory capacity for the different next-gen consoles would be. Our games were going to need a huge amount of memory. The Final Fantasy VI CG demo we made for the Siggraph exhibition took 20 megs all by itself. We thought that demo had a lot of visual impact, so there really wasn’t much question about which hardware we would use; if we were going to realize the promise of the demo we had shown at Siggraph, nothing but the CD-ROM format would suffice. Another reason for choosing the CD-ROM was related to price. I think one of the big reasons the first Final Fantasy was favorably received by players, and the later games in the series gained so many fans, was that you could buy those games for around 5000 to 6000 yen. We tried to have the same pricing for Bahamut Lagoon, Gun Hazard, and our other later Super Famicom games, but using cartridge ROM meant those games had to be sold for over 10000 yen. New players did not flock to those games like they had before. If we used CD-ROM for Final Fantasy VII, we’d be able to have a 2-disc game at a price of 5800 yen. I was hoping it would be possible to make a game that could sell several hundred thousand copies.“ https://shmuplations.com/ff7/ https://shmuplations.com/ff7/
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  It would have been cool if someone had made a NES and/or SNES cartridge which had a built in CD reader.
  - a1o 3y ago
    Wasn't this the usage of the bottom SNES port?

kmeisthax 3y ago

Prerendered cutscenes ate up the lion's share of the disc. If you sacrificed on those and used lots of compression, you absolutely could build an RPG on the N64 that would stand up to whatever you could do on PlayStation. However, nobody wanted to do that. The only RPGs we got on the N64 were Quest 64 and Paper Mario. The reason why requires diving into the development history of what would have been a third RPG for the system: MOTHER 3. To put it bluntly, they ran out of storage space, and pivoted to the N64 DD to get more. The custom floppy disks the N64 DD took could hold 64MB[0]. Even then, this wasn't enough, so the game was then broken up into two parts: an N64 cartridge plus a DD expansion pack, which would give them 96MB in total to play with. MOTHER 3 would then continue in development hell before being canned and reborn as a Game Boy Advance title[1]. Fire Emblem was also supposed to release on the N64. However, unlike Itoi biting off more than he could chew with the N64, FE64 failed because the head designer, Shouzou Kaga, didn't even want to touch the hardware. He'd stalled for time by working on Satellaview FE games[2] on the SNES, and then left Nintendo entirely right before Thracia 776 came out. He'd then release a totally-not-Fire-Emblem clone on PlayStation and get sued into oblivion for... basically telling all the games press that he was making Fire Emblem on PlayStation. So that's a 50% success rate for RPGs on the N64 - not a good look. Could homebrewers do better? On prior Nintendo systems, cartridges executed in-place - that is, the CPU bus and game cartridges were wired up such that the game was effectively the system's boot ROM. This also meant that the CPU address bus width would limit the size of the game without further bankswitching. On the N64, however, cartridges load into memory through the PI bus, which has a separate address space from the main MIPS CPU. PI bus uses 32-bit addressing, and the address range allocated to the cartridge would allow up to 3.75GB ROMs. Data storage devices that large would never exist during the lifespan of the N64, but building an N64 cartridge that large would be practical today. I suspect loading the ROM image into emulators or flashcarts wouldn't be too difficult either. And, of course, if you did manage to hook your N64 up to ridiculous amounts of storage, you could do crazy dynamic loading tricks like this[3]. If the N64 wasn't limited by storage space, RPGs would have actually looked better than on PlayStation, and render in real time to boot. [0] Cartridges were later produced at this size, notably for the N64 port of Resident Evil 2 [1] This did not actually fix the problems with MOTHER 3. If anything, it made them worse, because GBA cartridges are limited to 16MB without bankswitching. The game used significant amounts of compression to deal with this, which complicated efforts to make an English translation. MOTHER 3 would also not release until a month after the DS Lite, which meant that an official English release of the game was very much out of the question. [2] The Satellaview was a SNES hardware addon that allowed downloading games off of satellite radio services operated by St.GIGA. Think of it like Nintendo's equivalent to the SEGA Channel, except Japan-only because satellite radio didn't even exist in the US yet. [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf036fO-ZUk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sf036fO-ZUk

deaddodo 3y ago

That was a major component, but a few of the big names would still have published with Nintendo if they didn't spit in their faces by giving first-party dev teams such a heavy focus at the expense of second and (especially) third party devs.

cubefox 3y ago

That's not true at all. Games like Zelda were absolutely possible on the N64 and close to traditional RPGs. The only thing that wasn't really realistic was to make extensive use of pre-rendered background stills like in Final Fantasy (due to relatively large file sizes), or pre-rendered FMV (due to massive file sizes). But neither of those things were in any way required to make an RPG. In fact, heavily relying in pre-rendered stuff has mostly been abandoned since.