Does the n64 justify itself?

video games
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I got started thinking about this because I was watching a video about the Sega Saturn. We all know the story - they put most of their eggs into the “hi res 2d graphics” basket, and had to quickly retrofit it to make 3d games. Bad luck.

It got me thinking though, the n64 put all its eggs into the polygon crunching behemoth machine, which should have been the best horse to bet on at the time. We all know that the ps1 won out (in terms of sales) because of its versatility. My point is that it was the early days of 3d graphics and you couldn’t just make a console that did everything at once. You had to make major sacrifices. In that respect, the n64 is very interesting to me because of the narrative that its read speed, ram, and polygon powers made games like Mario 64 and Zelda 64 possible. But is that true?

I’m thinking specifically of Zelda 64. Could you make a smooth, good feeling action adventure game on the ps1? I suspect yes. Threads of fate managed to make an action game that looked great and ran well in full 3d on ps1. I’m not worried that it came out 3 years later. Sure, they’re not remotely the same game, but I think ironically, Threads of Fate is working in a lot of places that the N64 typically excelled in (except the textures look great). Now imagine Threads of Fate, but you’ve got a way more dynamic camera. Could the ps1 do something like that, or is that the secret sauce of N64’s powerful hardware?

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I really do think the ps1 could do anything the N64 could, in general, except it’d have to be broken up with more loading screens. For Mario 64 your equivalent is something like Spyro. Full 3D, hub world, go anywhere - but you need 15 seconds of loading before you reach any other area. What you get in that tradeoff - better texture memory, cd sound - seems very much worth it.

In my view the main thing the N64 had going for it was that Nintendo made games for it. Pushing polys just doesn’t win the day unless they look pretty, but Nintendo’s software dev was far beyond most others at the time, so that was their strength. The console could’ve been another M2 if not for that. In my opinion!!

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I wish I had more to add here because it’s a great topic, but I don’t really understand the technical specs of any of these consoles well enough to say much. Still, I’ll chip in a few thoughts.

  1. I think @exodus is right that Nintendo as a developer carries the console in terms of its game library. That said, I do think others could have mastered it but maybe the incentives weren’t there early on and then once it was clear PS1 was the winner, everyone just doubled down on that. I remember playing Mario 64 when it came out and thinking it was just the beginning and things would keep getting crazier from there. I was wrong, mostly! It’s weird how the console almost never topped that launch game.

  2. I think the PS1 could do almost everything the N64 could (at the cost of the aforementioned load times), though I want to say the N64 had a knack for rendering really large areas all at once that I rarely saw on PS1, even behind loading. I’m thinking of stuff like some of the bigger Mario 64 levels or OoT’s Hyrule Field (which was mind-blowing when it came out). To me, the biggest 3D platformer levels on PS1 don’t seem as big, though maybe I’m wrong and there are probably some exceptions.

  3. I was a late-comer to Paper Mario, but when I played it a few years ago, I thought “Woah, the N64 can actually do some cool 2D / 2.5 D!” Again, Nintendo is pretty much the only one who ever pulled that off on their console, but I also thought while playing Paper Mario that if the N64 had some a few more games like that, its legacy would be a lot better in terms of games that hold up today (rather than so many titles that felt awkwardly yoked to the 3D of the time both graphically and mechanically). So maybe the N64 needed more or a 2D push?

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Interestingly the PS1 did a couple of big 3D open worlds with Mizzurna Falls and Germs Nerawareta Machi. They look pretty good as well, all things considered.

Mizzurna Falls:
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Germs:
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Not got a lot to add to the N64 bit of the topic as I never had one, but the PS1 sure was capable of doing some big places!

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Ah, well, I stand corrected. Good to know though.

Maybe Nintendo put them front and center more (i.e. used then in more prominent games)? Idk I’m probably on thin ice there.

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There were a lot of factors here -

  1. yes, it was clear PS1 was the winner
  2. PS1 was the easiest of the three contemporary platforms to make games for, with better/more robust dev tools.
  3. CDs were (even moreso now) cheaper to producer games for than carts were. Don’t quote me on this but I believe you had to pay nintendo for your cart run so you were on the hook for a lot of cash. Authoring CDs was a much lower ask financially.
  4. self-fulfilling scenario of there being more games on PS1 because it was popular, meaning more devs with experience of developing games for PS1, meaning higher general skill level with the platform across the board

and probably other stuff I’m not thinking about.

There were of course some non-nintendo games that really pushed the platform – the turok series, doom64, hybrid heaven - but there were more devs trying to push the limits on PS1 because that’s where the money was, that’s where the funding was, and that’s where the experience was.

I think because of this on average the best-looking PS1 games look better than the best looking N64 games (to me!) - but because the N64 did have a few technical advantages there were games (basically all by Nintendo) that couldn’t have been done the exact same way on PS1. I think even Turok would’ve been harder on PS1 than N64. But you might wind up with something like the Saturn vs N64 versions of quake, where you have higher resolution textures, lower framerate with fuller maps (saturn) vs lower res textures, solid framerate with cut-down maps (n64) with neither the clear 100% winner.

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It would be interesting if the 64 could display better textures. That is the real issue with most of the library for me. Tiny, blurry textures filtered and stretched like a murky texture soup. The system did produce some neat effects though. The water in Wave Race and deep powder in 1080 come to mind as things that seemed like PSX couldn’t pull off as well. The analog stick (and optional rumble pak) also changed controllers going forward.

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We can give a little credit to the saturn for analog as well - their analog controller came out a month or two after the n64, so was already in the cards for them. Obviously the dualshock was a bigger step.

N64 displaying better textures is what you see in the ram expansion enabled games. “high resolution mode.” but since that was generally an optional addition it wasn’t as easy or feasible to use it to the fullest extent.

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I’m definitely a little biased as an N64 baby but 4 player multiplayer was a massive deal for my own life. I know PSX could expand to 4 but having it built in, easy to understand for parents and children alike, was huge in my experience. Friends with multiple siblings usually had an N64. In college we had an N64 that we used almost daily from 2013-2015 and was always the centerpiece of parties, easily my most played system for that time of my life. N64 multiplayer is its secret sauce for me more than polygons or cartridges, keeps it timeless to this day.

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King’s Field II and III are great examples of open world games with almost no loading to speak of on Playstation!

I say that, but I’m a huge N64-head! It was my first console!

I don’t know which metric to approach this from…

I could bring up Doubutsu no Mori, but Saturn had its own real time clock. If Saturn had succeeded, it could have had a lot of similar weird experimental stuff Nintendo had cooked up for DD and moved to GCN.

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The N64 justified itself technologically. Essentially, it was the first “proper” 3D system with some very basic 3D necessities like floating point capabilities to ensure no polygon gapping or texture twitching. Sure, under ideal circumstances the PS1 could actually push more polygons, but the N64 could do more things more accurately with them. In some ways the N64 was difficult to develop for, but internally it did actually provide more robust functionality for developers designing 3D games. This is all to say that sure, the PS1 could maybe have done many of the iconic games of the N64, but it would have taken more programming effort to do so, even with Sony’s robust tools. The N64 was simply a more modern, polished 3D hardware architecture.

I say this despite having no nostalgia or love for the N64 and being baffled by some of its technical weaknesses.

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A testament to the N64’s reputation for mulitiplayer: My neighborhood bar has just one video game console-- an N64. They even advertise it on their website! Maybe that comes from simple nostalgia for the system, but more retro consoles set up for quick & easy multiplayer in communal spaces is strictly a good thing imo!

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I honestly think the Dreamcast is better for that, TBH.

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I’m not sure how well the PlayStation would have coped with something like the Mario Party games, at least in the sense that constantly loading and reloading set dressing every two minutes would have evaporated any sense of chaos that those games rely on for their appeal.

By and large I think that the PS1 could probably have managed a reasonable facsimile of most third party games.

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The ram cart helps, but it doesn’t overcome the horrid filtering and limited storage issue. The 64 is unjustifiably blurry!

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not here to make a point, only to show my n64 aprecciation

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the n64 was about as powerful at proliferating polygons as the equivalent 3D-capable PC at the time, wasn’t it? a good chunk of the game-liking population would not or could not invest in their homework and email machine so that it could run the latest 3D lucasarts star wars stuff but maybe they weren’t wrong to invest in the mario machine that also has a bunch of the latest hi-fidelity 3D star wars games on it.

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This is a good consumer-at-the-time’s eye’s perspective of the N64 and a really important consideration here. I think often we (or I’ll just say “I”) forget that real people had to make tough decisions with their real resources when these consoles came out. There’s also a difference between people who were in their late teens or older at the time (thereby having (maybe) more $$$ and autonomy) and people who were still kids (and therefore didn’t).

Here’s what I mean:

Which system has more total games that are worth downloading and emulating to play right now, PS1, Saturn, or N64? I think most people would say PS1 has the most, then Saturn, then N64.

Now, let’s pretend you’re a young kid at the time and games are not free. You’re probably only going to get a few games a year (birthdays, Christmas, saving up allowances, etc). I’d be interested to know what the average number of games an N64 user had by the time they were done with their console was, but I know plenty of people who only ever had 8 or 10 games for theirs. I loved my 64 and I might own 20. N64 has a shallow library overall, but you can get a strong top 8 or so out of it. I think if it’s just picking your best 8 for each system, the race gets a lot closer. Factor in that maybe, if you’re young, your parents won’t buy you M- or sometimes even T-rated games (this was the case for me), and the N64’s case becomes even stronger.

So, going back to the original question. Does the N64 justify itself?

In terms of pure hardware (which I think was the direction @Connor was originally going with it), probably not. The PS1 basically matched it in 3D and had all kinds of other advantages.

In terms of being a good console for a certain demographic at the time? For sure! Big 3D graphics, you get your Mario and Zelda, you get some other cool stuff like Star Wars (credit @rootfifthoctave), and you have four controller ports ready to go right off the bat (credit @mack41). And yes, nowadays it seems like the N64 is loaded with a lot of E-rated stuff and kids’ games, but at the time, some parents might have seen that as an advantage. Maybe it was a better fit for their family. And yes, nowadays it’s clear the N64 has a pretty thin library for a major console, but it’s not as big a deal if many people were just trying to buy a small library of games they really liked (and my guess is that represents the majority of console owners for pretty any console, not just N64).

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I’m halfway through writing a post and your post basically summarises the answer.

What I generally think is, I’m in a younger age bracket than some here based on conversation about college dorms.

There is a more limited selection of games outside of first-party, but when you’re receiving a game for your birthday, Christmas with the occasional rental or pocket money purchase the impact of a smaller game library is not felt as heavily.

Nintendo 64 absolutely killed at after school hang outs, birthday partys, sleep overs, whatever. Goldeneye, Mario Kart, Mario Party, Smash Bros were stables, and other games that had no business having multiplayer have modes built in Donkey Kong has 4 player split screen FPS, I stand by Star Fox 64’s free range dogfighting though and I could play the Pokemon Stadium mini-games competitively if I wanted to.

In saying that, I’ve played few third party published games outside of Wrestling, Snowboard Kids and Mischief Makers.

Another area where N64 fell short are story heavy games. I think this tracks with flagging interest from gamers who had by the 90-00’s then grown into teens or young adults.

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Yes, it’s the same with the switch. Gamers are hypercritical, while normal people just get the thing that works. Switch has lasted many years while gamers since day one were clamoring for a pro console. Most people don’t care and play games on switch. N64 was similar. Not having to mess with fragile discs was a plus, and why it works great as a console for bars, rec rooms, youth groups, karate dojos, etc.

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