Nintendo 64: Bold Choices, Brilliant Games, Bitter Lessons

The Cartridge Decision

In 1996, when every major game publisher was moving to CD-ROM as the primary delivery format for games, Nintendo launched the Nintendo 64 with cartridges.

The decision was not irrational — it had defensible reasoning:

Load times: CD-ROM games had loading screens. Cartridges loaded instantly. For a gaming audience that had never experienced loading screens, this was a genuine quality-of-life argument.

Piracy: CDs were trivially easy to copy. Cartridges were harder and more expensive to duplicate.

Reliability: Cartridges had no moving parts and no risk of disc scratching.

The counterarguments were decisive:

Cost: A cartridge cost approximately $25-40 to manufacture. A CD cost $1-2. Games on CD-ROM could be longer, include more content, and be sold at higher margins.

Storage: N64 cartridges held 64MB at their largest. PlayStation CDs held 650MB. Final Fantasy VII on PlayStation occupied three discs — it was literally impossible to fit on a single N64 cartridge.

Third-party support: Square, which had produced Final Fantasy IV, V, and VI on Nintendo hardware, moved entirely to PlayStation. The Final Fantasy VII announcement — with footage of a game that simply could not exist on cartridge — was the most publicized defection. Other Japanese RPG developers followed.

The N64 era produced almost no major Japanese RPGs because the format that JRPGs required (long games, orchestral audio, extensive pre-rendered cinematics) was incompatible with cartridge economics.

---

Super Mario 64 and the 3D Revolution

Whatever arguments could be made against the N64’s business decisions, Super Mario 64 (1996) was not an argument — it was a demonstration.

Shigeru Miyamoto’s team at Nintendo spent years designing the first fully 3D Mario game. The result was a game that solved problems no one had encountered before: how to control a character in three-dimensional space with a standard analog stick, how to design a camera that followed action without obscuring the player’s view, how to structure platforming levels in a space where the player could approach from any direction.

Super Mario 64 introduced the analog stick as a primary control input (the N64 controller’s thumbstick was designed specifically for this game), used a camera system (controlled by C-buttons) that gave players partial control over their viewpoint, and replaced traditional Mario level structures with open-environment “courses” containing multiple stars collectible in any order.

The game sold 11.91 million copies. More significantly, it established the template for 3D game design that every subsequent 3D platformer built on. When Crash Bandicoot (PS1), Banjo-Kazooie (N64), and Donkey Kong 64 designed their 3D worlds, they were responding to Super Mario 64’s vocabulary.

---

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1998) is the most critically acclaimed game in history.

For most of its run from 1998 through the 2010s, it held the highest review score ever recorded on Metacritic and GameRankings. It is still frequently cited in debates about the greatest game ever made.

The transition from 2D to 3D was managed differently than in Super Mario 64: where Mario’s game was built around the joy of movement through space, Ocarina of Time was built around puzzle-solving, combat, and a narrative that spanned two time periods.

The Z-targeting system — locking the camera and character facing onto an enemy — solved 3D combat’s camera problem. Link would lock onto an enemy and strafe around them while attacking, creating the foundation of a combat system rather than a chaotic 3D brawl.

The game’s scale was unlike anything Nintendo had previously released: six dungeons in child-era Hyrule, six more in adult-era Hyrule, interconnected with an overworld that required revisiting as new abilities were gained, and a story that used the time-travel mechanic to show consequences across Link’s childhood and adulthood.

The ocarina — the instrument the game was named for — was played using face buttons to correspond to notes, teaching players the songs that unlocked puzzles and transportation across the game world. It was one of the most creative controller-as-instrument implementations in gaming.

---

GoldenEye 007 and the Console FPS

GoldenEye 007 (1997) proved that first-person shooters could work on a console.

Rare’s adaptation of the 1995 Bond film was not the first FPS on a console — Doom had been ported to Super Nintendo and Saturn — but it was the first one designed from the ground up for console hardware and a controller without a mouse. The N64’s three-pronged controller, with its analog stick and C-buttons, provided enough input complexity to make FPS controls feel natural.

The single-player campaign was a legitimate mission-based FPS with objectives, stealth mechanics, and difficulty scaling that changed enemy counts and added objectives as difficulty increased. The multiplayer mode — four-player split-screen with a selection of maps and modes — became one of the defining social gaming experiences of the late 1990s.

GoldenEye sold 8 million copies and established that the FPS genre belonged on consoles as much as PC. The template it created — mission objectives, covert operations, split-screen multiplayer — ran through the Perfect Dark, Halo, and Call of Duty franchises.

---

The Library

The N64’s library was smaller than the PlayStation’s and almost entirely lacking in RPGs, but the quality of its first-party and Rare-developed titles was extraordinary:

Nintendo first-party:

• Super Mario 64, Super Mario Kart 64, Super Mario Party
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask
• Star Fox 64
• F-Zero X
• Pokémon Stadium 1 and 2
• Kirby 64

Rare second-party:

• GoldenEye 007
• Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie
• Donkey Kong 64
• Perfect Dark
• Diddy Kong Racing
• Conker’s Bad Fur Day

Third-party:

• Resident Evil 2 (a remarkable cartridge port)
• Turok series
• Mischief Makers
• Bomberman 64 and Bomberman Hero

The absence of Japanese RPG support — no Final Fantasy, minimal Dragon Quest, no Tales series — was the gap that the PlayStation filled entirely.

---

The Sales

The N64 sold 32.93 million units worldwide to the PlayStation’s 102.49 million — a decisive loss by sales metrics.

But the N64’s output per game was extraordinary. Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, GoldenEye 007, Majora’s Mask, and Star Fox 64 all appear on canonical lists of the greatest games ever made at high frequency. The ratio of critical masterworks to total library was unusually high.

---

The Lessons

The N64 era taught Nintendo lessons that shaped its next twenty years:

Third-party relationships matter. The loss of Square and other Japanese publishers taught Nintendo that platform exclusivity required active cultivation, not assumption. The GameCube era saw aggressive third-party courting — with limited success.

CD-ROM’s economics were not optional. The GameCube (2001) used proprietary mini-DVDs. Every Nintendo console since has used optical media or higher-capacity flash storage.

The market could sustain Nintendo without third-party support — the Wii’s success in 2006-2012 with a largely first-party-driven library confirmed that Nintendo’s own games could sustain a platform that competitors didn’t fully support.

The N64 is where Nintendo was humbled commercially and where Nintendo made some of its best work. Both things are true.

---

Playing N64 Today

Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack includes a library of N64 games with online multiplayer and rewind functionality. The library includes most major first-party titles but excludes the Rare catalog (which is now owned by Microsoft and available on Xbox Game Pass).

Original N64 hardware is available on the secondary market. The Everdrive 64 flash cartridge provides access to the complete cartridge library on original hardware. The N64’s composite video output benefits significantly from upscalers for use on modern televisions.