I think whether people wanted to buy one (obviously they did) is a different question from whether it justified itself technologically while coming out a year and a half (2 years in some territories) after the competition, especially with the speed at which 3D chipsets were evolving at the time.
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Sorry for being a contrarion and slightly tangential, but my experience was not at all the same as others. The N64’s limited library was definitely a huge downside for me as a kid.
I received an N64 at release for my 10th birthday. I believe I had to front half the money for it, because it cost well in excess of how much my parents were comfortable spending for a birthday present at the time. I guess this is where I differ from some kids, being able to put money towards a system cause I always had ample spending money from doing farm work all the time as a kid.
I was beyond hyped for the system, I remember drawing pictures of it prerelease for some art project in school. Mario 64 was everything I wanted it to be, but after I collected all 150 stars and started looking around for something else to play I quickly realized that I was in a barren wasteland of gaming. The first twelve months of that system there were only about two dozen games released. I owned four games in that first year, then between playing friends’ games and going to the rental store every other weekend I quickly exhausted basically the entire N64 library. I would say there were two actual great games in Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64 and a handful of okay titles like Turok and Starfox in that first year.
I was starved for good games to play, so when FF7 came out that was the final straw. The PS1 had all the games and I had to get one. My mother didn’t care that I could purchase a PS1 outright though, she insisted I could only have one game system for some arbitrary reason. So I quickly sold my N64 to a family friend, bought a PS1 and never looked back.
This experience wasn’t unique to me either, I had two friends that also had N64s at the time and they both bought PS1s as well because the N64’s library was a joke.
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I just often am not interested in playing N64 games in the same way I play PlayStation games. GameCube was my first real console generation so bear that in mind. The vast majority of retro games I play are PS1, PS2 and neo geo (cause I can pick up and play it fast.)
I played all the Nintendo hits in middle school in the same way you watch like the AFI top 100 as a kid, liked the Zeldas enough and Star Fox. The only real N64 game I come back to is Sin and punishment, but I’m also far from an expert on the system - I feel like to me it evokes Wii U but with better games.
In terms of the 3D I can’t really feel the difference outside of the fact that Nintendo are really really good at designing movement, is it the graphics or is that them making Mario move good? I feel like the lack of FMV is also very felt.
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I will second the notion that as a kid I could subside that entire generation solely on Nintendo 64 (and the family PC), but in hindsight I think I would’ve been better off with a Playstation. I don’t know if things were different across the pond, but where I live Nintendo 64 games were a whole lot more expensive than Playstation games. If I had gone with Playstation I’m certain I would’ve been able to play a couple more titles, even if it had only been a handful.
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Since we are getting outside the technology discussion one thing I’ll mention is the importance of one’s age when the N64 came out. If you were born after it was already gone, this isn’t a factor and it’s just an interesting old console. But if you were 10 when it came out, it made a lot of sense. If, like me, you were 16 when it came out, it was absolutely the console that was “for children” and any attempt to shake that label wound up looking like conker’s bad fur day (aka for children who like swearing).
The ps1 was for ADULTS (what you think you are when you’re 16) and the Saturn was for weirdos (also acceptable for a 16 year old) but the N64 was for kids. I think if you were already in college by the time the n64 came out it didn’t matter so much if it was for kids because you were obviously old enough to be getting it as a choice rather than your mom thinking you’re still a baby.
This is irrelevant to people born outside that 10-or-so year stretch there but I do think it was a factor in perception at the time.
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Completely agree with that and then some. As a 16 year old working a full time job when the PS1 came out, combined with the n64 being released almost 18 months later in the EU I had the money to buy one and wasn’t going to wait. Not just the delay but the PS1 was so cool and that’s the marketing they went for. They knew their market and went full speed on getting it. I knew a lot of adults with a PS1 at launch but only a handful who got an N64.
Also another factor I think helped is the fact the PS1 played cds. If like myself you’d moved from cassettes to cds for music this seemed like a natural progression in technology and the fact this machine could play them was a great push for me. Seeing a machine coming out using the same technology as before wasn’t as appealing for some, myself included as I’d moved on to a newer one.
I don’t think the N64 needs to justify anything, but had it come out two years or so before the PS1 I think it would have been quite a different view on it both at that the time and now.
Still is 
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Can confirm. I was 6 when the N64 came out. I got it for christmas that year. It was my first own console and I absolutely loved it. Before that I could play with my brothers’ SNES or on the family computer but the N64 was actually mine and it was a glorious feeling at the time. I remember playing Ocarina of Time, Golden Eye, Star Fox, Mario Kart and Mario 64 again and again until their wheels fell off.
I didn’t mind the relatively small catalog as I a) wasn’t aware how big it was and how that compared to other systems and b) games were something I got from my parents at the time and money was limited so even if it had been a bigger selection I couldn’t have gotten more games.
Also: Since I played Banjo Kazooie at around the time I was 6 or 7 I never got the “hate” it sometimes gets for being bad or annoying. At that age I ate up what I got on my plate. And that level with the shark was the most terrifying thing I’d ever experienced right after the grabby hands at the ceiling of the forest temple in OoT.
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Six year old me saw Super Mario 64 and it was over.
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Im with Herb on this one. Family got an n64 when I was 11. Played the heck out of Zelda and then it was like…what is wrong with this console? SNES had all these cool RPGs and i perceived that this more modern console was incapable of doing what the prior one in its generation did and I thought it was messed up. It always bothered me until people started talking about the tech recently. My brother bought a ps1 when i was 12 and i played suikoden 2 and tekken 3 on there and thought this is the best!!!
There was certainly fun to be had on the n64 but as a 11/12 year old i just had a strong sensation that something was ‘wrong’ with it so… lets add that to the mix!
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I remember following the previews for the 64 in magazines since 93-94 (I was 13-14), thinking it would be my next console, since I adored my SNES and it seemed that Nintendo could do no wrong.
When it finally came out, I was 16 and, when I saw Super Mario 64, I thought videogames were finally prettier than the real life.
I ended up buying a PS1 in 98 because, by that time, it was clear that I would end up playing more games on the PS1, and piracy helped that a lot, unfortunately.
As I was already working, Ocarina of Time convinced me to buy a used 64 in 2001, so in the end I had both consoles.
My point is, Nintendo games always justifies consoles. Even if you had only their games there, it’s worth it.
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Going on a tangent from the technical stuff, I was a month short of turning 11 when the N64 was released in Europe and another factor that seems to be emerging, and was a big one for me, was the aggressive pricing strategies from Sony and Nintendo at the time.
Both consoles saw huge price cuts early on, the N64 famously had £100 knocked off within barely a month of its release in the UK. I was massively on the fence about which to get but that price cut, combined with recently seeing the 1996 Space World demo reel tipped me over the edge.As it turns out Sony also had a price cut at around the same time, also of £100 off if I remember rightly but I wasn’t swayed. The idea of four player Mario Kart plus other upcoming games was a big grab to me too.
The other factor that played into this was that all of my closest friends had a PlayStation and/or a Saturn because their older sibling(s) wanted them, and only one other kid in my school that I didn’t really hang out with wanted an N64. I had the best of both worlds.
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Yeah, the complete lack of RPGs on the N64 was baffling. I believe there were like three total released in the US. RPGs were my favorite genre, so I felt hoodwinked when I was seeing this trove of RPGs come to the PS1. Meanwhile all I had to pin my hopes on was a very mediocre-looking Quest 64, which wouldn’t release for the N64 until nearly two years after launch.
To add to the “what’s wrong with the N64?” thing I was always confused by the seeming lack of evolution of graphics. I didn’t play much N64 in the years after I sold mine, but whenever I’d see a new game for it I’d always think “this looks on par to or worse than Mario 64.”
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The perceived lack of evolution is interesting - I do think that was a common sentiment, but of course the graphics did evolve. They pushed more polygons, more physics-based stuff, better optimization - but I think a lot of that was hidden because in comparison to the PS1, the texture work just wasn’t evolving, or couldn’t evolve significantly. There was “high res mode” with the ram pack but it’s pretty tough to perceive. Where on the PS side you had vagrant story and you’re like… graphics will never get better than this. who cares if the polygons jiggled! it had detail.
As gross as this exchange is, there’s lots of technically impressive stuff going on here in just this cutscene. really high polygon count, lots of bones in the animation.
But none of that matters to the perception of the viewer when your “walking around” textures just look like somebody grabbed the stretch tool on a tiny tiny jpeg.
The graphics evolved for sure. But without the evolution of texture work it was pretty hard to notice.
RE2 was actually a good choice for an N64 game in some ways because they could use basically all the texture memory on a few models, and the faces and general texture work all looks really good.
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It’s a shame we never got Nintendo 64 Dinosaur Planet, because that game was really pushing the juices of the hardware.
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Okay I have to admit I only knew about conker’s bad fur day from it being talked about on the show. What the heck is that whole quest? And the sleazy bee guy, ew!
My imagined version of that game based on what I heard was much tamer and definitely less gross. For some reason I expected much more childish boogers and farts humor and less… whatever atrocity that is.
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Never seen gameplay of RE2 N64, that is pretty good looking for the time. I’m not trying to say that graphics didn’t improve if that’s how it came across. I just always felt as a kid that nothing I saw on the system was technically impressive enough or had an art style that worked well enough with the system’s limitations that I thought “this is definitely better looking than Mario 64.”
Like you were saying with Vagrant Story, the N64 doesn’t have any titles(that I know of) like Super Mario Bros 3 or Yoshi’s Island on the previous systems that completely outclass the earlier in-generation stuff so much that any layman like me can look at it and say it looks significantly improved.
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For those who are still learning about RE2 on the N64, MVG did a great deep dive on the work behind it and how they managed to pull it off. It really was some amazing work done by the porting team.
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I’ll triple down on the 4 controller ports being a key key factor for the N64. When I hear people talk about N64 games they talk about Mario 64, Zelda OoT, Zelda MM, and then 4 player games like goldeneye, perfect dark, no mercy, waverace, smash, marko kart, mario party, diddy kong racing etc etc.
Even though most people now are not playing couch multiplayer that was a huge component at the time, and many people look back on that time with rose tinted glasses. It’s fun to play together! So people get excited for the games they used to play with friends. Goldeneye is still fun to mess around in, since it’s so rough around the edges
the other factor is the smoothness. I can’t imagine anything like the Sin and Punishment stage where you’re flying around the battleships would be possible on a PS1 but maybe I’m wrong… It’s a lack of loading but also that polygon output and clarity.
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I actually think it’s a good point though - the N64 didn’t show the kind of dramatic improvement that the PS1 or even Saturn did over its lifetime. At least not in a way that was obvious to the general consumer.
PS1 launch:
PS1 late:
Saturn launch:
Saturn late:
N64 launch:
N64 late:
It’s better! But it’s not as dramatic as the others. And I think part of that is due to the N64 coming out later, and starting at kind of a higher point of 3D awareness, so there was a little less “figure it out” style learning. But the jumps don’t feel quite as big.
to @Sun_Crypt while I do think a version of sin and punishment could’ve been done on N64 it would’ve had to take a performance or poly count hit for sure.
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