Games Like Conker's Bad Fur Day

Insomniac Games' gem-collecting adventure placed players in the wings of a young purple dragon exploring vast, colorful worlds. Spyro the Dragon's open, exploratory design and warm personality made it an instant PlayStation classic and launched one of gaming's most beloved franchises.

Rare's charming 3D platformer masterpiece sent a bear and a bird through nine inventive worlds brimming with collectibles, clever puzzles, and an irresistible sense of fun. Banjo-Kazooie refined the collectathon formula with exceptional world design and remains one of the N64's finest games.

The ambitious Banjo-Kazooie sequel with nine interconnected worlds, a massively expanded moveset, multiplayer modes, and first-person shooter sections — bigger in every way than its predecessor.

A direct predecessor to the Grand Theft Auto open-world formula from the same studio, Body Harvest drops a time-traveling soldier into sprawling free-roaming environments spanning multiple eras of human history under alien invasion. DMA Design's ambitious scope — hijack any vehicle, explore vast maps, battle massive alien bosses — resulted in a game rougher than its ambitions but historically fascinating as the missing link between top-down GTA and the 3D open-world games that followed.

Konami's divisive attempt to bring Castlevania into 3D. Castlevania 64's gothic atmosphere, memorable boss designs, and dual-protagonist structure offered genuinely compelling moments despite its rough controls and dated visuals — and Reinhardt Schneider's vampire hunting quest captured the series' atmosphere better than the camera system deserved.

The enhanced version of Castlevania 64 with two new characters — Cornell the werewolf and Henry the Crusader — plus additional stages, improved engine performance, and the complete content of the original game. Legacy of Darkness is the definitive N64 Castlevania experience for players willing to engage with early 3D adventure design.

Rare's ambitious collectathon platformer sent Donkey Kong and four Kong companions through eight enormous worlds in pursuit of 3,821 collectibles. Technically impressive and generously sized, DK64's scope is both its greatest strength and its most criticized aspect — a game of extraordinary content that some consider bloated.

Treasure's side-scrolling N64 platformer built an entire game around a single core mechanic — protagonist Marina Liteyears grabs, shakes, and throws enemies and environmental objects to solve puzzles and navigate levels — then introduced a new application of that mechanic in nearly every stage. Mischief Makers embodies the mechanic-per-level design philosophy that defines vintage Treasure craftsmanship, and its willingness to be a 2D game on a 3D console made it a genuine outlier in the N64 library.

The bizarre feudal Japan-meets-robots platformer starring Goemon, Ebisumaru, Sasuke, and Yae blends non-linear overworld exploration, town-based puzzle solving, and giant mech battles against boss fortresses into a package of cheerful, confident absurdism that N64 owners largely overlooked. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is one of the N64's most overlooked gems — a game that trusts the player's tolerance for the ridiculous and rewards that trust with genuine mechanical variety and charm.

The game that invented 3D platforming as a genre. Super Mario 64 launched alongside the Nintendo 64 and demonstrated, definitively, that video games could work in three dimensions. Its influence on every 3D game that followed is incalculable — this is where the template was written.

Nintendo's most psychologically dark Zelda game dropped Link into the doomed world of Termina, where a moon falls every three days, time loops endlessly, and the inhabitant cast need his help before everything ends. Majora's Mask is a meditation on grief, identity, and impermanence unlike anything else in the franchise.

Widely considered the greatest video game ever made, Ocarina of Time translated the Zelda formula into three dimensions with such perfection that it redefined what action-adventure games could achieve. Its Z-targeting system, time-travel narrative, and extraordinary dungeon design set standards that remain unsurpassed.