Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 74: Nintendo 64

Episode Date: September 12, 2016

Jared Petty joins Bob and Jeremy to contemplate the good and the bad of Nintendo's third home console, which launched 20 years ago this month. (Apologies for the audio defects in this episode — they didn't become apparent until we had finished recording.) Be sure to visit our blog at Retronauts.com, and check out our partner site, USgamer, for more great stuff. And if you'd like to send a few bucks our way, head on over to our Patreon page!

This week in Retronauts. Episode, man, let's calculate. It'll be 70 something. 70. Earthbound was 69, bro. I want to say 76. Yes. Hi, welcome to episode 76 of Retronauts, or maybe it's 74.

Whatever the hell episode it is. It's not 64, and we screwed up. Oh, my God, we blew it. Okay. That's it. People are also mad that Leisure Suit Larry was on episode 69 and said it was Earth Pound. And I was like, oh, I missed that train too. You could just retroactively go back and remember the episodes.

So Retronauts is now. cancel. Goodbye, everyone. We're going to be as confusing as Wonderboy. That sounds good. Anyway, hi, I'm Jeremy Parrish, and this week we're talking about the Nintendo 64, which recently, a couple of months ago, turned 20 in Japan, and now this month turns 20 in America, because, you know, time zone differences in everything. It's a big time delay. I don't know. Anyway, so September 27th-ish, 1996, Nintendo 64

launched in America. 20 years later, we're sitting here scratching our heads saying, was that really 20 years ago? My God. Today's adults grew up with it, Jeremy. It's terrifying. Yes. The N64 kids have already retired.

It's just bizarre. They're the N64 elderly now. No one retires in this economy, Jeremy. Oh, that's true. I guess I should say I'm Bob Mackey. Oh, yeah. We'll get around about it. Okay, I'm looking sure.

I'm Jeremy Parrish, as I mentioned before. And this week, people are talking with me about the N64, including, of course. Bob Mackey, I didn't want to point out this is an HD remake of a previous Retronauts episode. Did you know that, Jeremy? No, I didn't. Episode 3 was the, I believe, the, let's see, 2006.

That was the 10th anniversary of the... So apparently, I've covered this ground already, but again, I don't remember doing that. Everybody... It was a different context. You were comparing it to the PlayStation 3's launch. Yes. That was it.

Yeah. Man, I'm glad I have you guys around because I really have no idea. Retronauts is such a fire and forget prospect for me. I just, like, record it and put it on the Internet, and then I'm like, what did I just do? Like, I seriously have amnesia about the show. It's bizarre.

Anyway, who else is here in the studio with us? Oh, hi, I'm Jared Petty from IG. Hi, Jared. Thanks for joining us. I'm glad to be here. This is your first time on the show, and it's nice to have you here after having had a cordial professional relationship with you for so long.

I believe I met you when you were a fan, I believe of one-up at a Pax at some point. Maybe 2012. That wouldn't have been me. No, I have never actually been to a pack. Oh, where did I meet you? I know I met you somewhere. I think, Bob, I think we met right after I got hired at IGN or right before at E3.

Oh, it was E3. That's right. Yeah, I remember that convention center. And I know I met you in Japan for the first time when you were living there. Yes. And stalking Matt Leone from afar. I was stalking Matt Leone from afar. Thank you for allowing me to come here despite those terrifying.

You weren't stalking me, so I'm fine with it. I feel like Matt could use a little terror in his life. He's so placid and so calm. that's a man who just needs his world shaken up. He's a native Californian, so I think that explains it all. South California. Yeah, yeah. Like, he grew up in like San Diego.

That makes sense. Yeah, so he's just completely chill and easygoing. I'm a cranky Midwestern. Hey, I believe I met you on an arcade and you were the scouting party to make sure I wasn't a crazy person. Yeah. That was a tactic that I learned from my now wife who I met through, you know, the internet dating service or whatever. And she, like, had a friend come and look for me. And when I showed up, they were like, okay, he doesn't look creepy so you can go meet him.

So, yeah. You weren't like tenting your fingers and twirling your mustache. I was just looking out for my map. Anyway, so yeah, thanks for joining us. And we are talking this week about the N64 and ruining the fact that we're 20 years older than we were the first time we played the system. That's terrifying because I was in college. Actually, I was in college. Had I graduated?

No, I was still in college. I was an apple-cheeked youngster of 14. ready to make my mark in the world. And I was getting ready to head off to college. It came out right before I had finished. So you're right in between. Very good. So yeah, I guess we all kind of approach the system

from slightly different places. For me, I was, you know, doing some part-time work, and so I could actually afford an N64 as soon as it came out. I don't know about you guys. I'm assuming Bob is, you know, an Applecheek, 14-year-old. Yeah. I wasn't going to save up for a while, right?

I eventually got a job, but not until I was. I was 18 or 17, yeah. I was mostly playing PC games at that point. So the N64 was actually my little brother's console, and that was just fine because I could jump right in and play everything he got. And then when I got to college, that fall in 97, the N64 was the communal four-player gaming machine because that was right around the time of gold. I think you were saying player, because it sounded like you were going to say communal

for play, and that's just... No, no, no, definitely not. But yes, that is a very, very important point. The N64 was the ultimate college room video game machine. I don't think anything now even compares. I literally started high school in 96 when the N64 launch. I mean, I was not living in a dorm, but it was like the hangout system. I mean, we loved our PlayStation too, but I mean, that got the most play amongst people,

even if the games didn't look so great. Oh, those four control reports and the fact that they really encouraged you to grab those. And from Mario Kart on, you had Mario Kart, then you had Golden Eye, and then you had Mario Party and just these. these wonderful, easy pick-up and play social games that you could dump dozens of hours into it. The N-64 takes a lot of flack for some of the design decisions

Nintendo made with the hardware, but its two most obvious design choices, the four controller ports and the cartridge-based games, I think made it just an effortless, easy, social experience because you, like, cartridges are indestructible. You slam a cartridge in the system,

turn it on. Four people are playing right away. There's no startup, no like, br-b-b-b-b-b-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h... Yeah. Like, on PlayStation, you don't have to go through all that. Oh, the chimes. Yeah, like, load times. None of that. You don't have to worry about fragile discs. But you don't have to worry about discs getting lost.

It was just, you know, like, you wanted to play games. But when you were... Slam, Mario 64, or Mario Card 64, you're good. When you were playing with friends, though, it was always, like, the problem was, like, okay, which one of these controllers is broken. Because because one of them is going to be, like, A little wiggly, a little wobbly. There'll be plastic rattling around inside of it.

That's why they came in different colors. Yeah, it's like, get that red, get that Mad Cat's crap away. There was a tactic to it. Until that one of you is going to be automatically disadvantaged. We'd go to the computer lab and play Quake until the lab would close. Run to the door and plug in Golden Eye and just keep going through the night. It was wonderful. I admit that the Nintendo 64 is my least favorite Nintendo console.

But despite that, I still have fond memories of it. I still think pretty highly of it. it's an interesting little slice of video game history. I don't remember what I said about the N64 10 years ago. I don't even care. I believe you were charitable. Okay, charitable is good. I've actually, for the past couple of years,

ever since I started Game Boy World, I've owned the domain ultra-64.com with the intention of doing something similar to Game Boy World. But it's a much more involved process because the first game for the system is Super Mario 64 versus like Super Mario Land. It's a, like, it had fewer games and is a more manageable library, but those games often were very expansive, very large, very involving.

So the N64, yeah, it's, it's an interesting system because it has the sparsest library of any Nintendo console save the Wii U, but, or, you know, Virtual Boy, which is not really good company to be keeping. Does the Wii have a smaller library than the Wii U have a smaller library than the N64? It's kind of hard to say. You know, if you factor in, like, digital releases, they might be about comparable. Yeah, I assume there are more boxed physical games on the N64 because that was the only format, yeah. That'd be a fascinating comparison.

I've never looked at the two to see which one has the larger library. But I do think that they made that a marketing thrust originally. They knew they were going to have fewer games. So they said, but we're going to make them great quality. And then that, of course, became both a point of pride and contention, depending on. on what part of the history you're looking at and whose perspective you're coming from. Across all regions, the Nintendo 64, including 64D,

had just shy of 400 games. That's impressive. That's impressive. That's not that many games. I mean, I expected it to be a lot smaller. It's a console that was around for five years. So, like, that's, you know, 80 games a year on average. I was honestly expecting you to say 200, to be fair.

I was really expecting a lot less than that, yeah. I mean, a lot of these are like wrestling games and annual sports games and racing games. There's probably like 50 that are unique to Japan, and there's three that are unique to Europe. So, no, the system had a decent library. And, you know, because people were making fewer games for it, I feel like the game, like there was more of a sense that this game counts. Like the PlayStation really, you know, the CD. platform, because it was so inexpensive, really gave developers a chance to experiment. It allowed publishers to publish niche games.

You know, the RPG exploded on PlayStation in a way that it hadn't been able to before. And I think a lot of that had to do because with the fact that it was less of a risk to publish those games on disk, like it was cheaper. It was not as much of a problem. But I feel like the developers who worked on N64 are not saying that every N64 game was a gem by God. No, not at all. But I feel like they did have to make it count. They had to really sit down and say, like, we're going to release this game. It's going to, you know, the MSRP is going to be $20 more expensive than a PlayStation game that's equivalent. It's going to have

less memory capacity. It's going to have, you know, worse textures, whatever. Like, if we're going to do this, we've got to make it count. So it was a more strategic system. Yeah, that could lead to quality, that could also lead to conservatism. Right. It's something you knew was going to sell. Both. Both happened. And the system was definitely deficient in certain areas. There were no 2D games released for the PlayStation or for the N64.

Like people talk about how the N64, or the, sorry, the PlayStation and Sony, you know, was really averse of 2D games, but PS1 still had a lot of PS or 2D games. Would you count mischief makers? No. No. It was a 3D backgrounds. 2.5, yeah. Like there were no just pure bitmap games.

The system wasn't geared for it. So it's strange. There were almost no RPGs of note. Wait a minute. What about Mortal Kombat? Trilogy. That being a dick, it's fine. I mean, okay, yeah.

So I guess there were a few ports. Yeah, there was... Killer instinct, okay. Quest 64 was, I guess, an RPG, right? It was. Yeah. One of, like, three... Yeah, there was like, what was it called?

It started with an A... Aiden Chronicles? Yes, Indian Chronicles. Yeah. Gross. But, yeah, for the most part, the games that I really loved kind of stopped showing up on N64

and they migrated to PlayStation RPGs, 2D platformers, that kind of thing. Like, you didn't play those on N64 because they didn't exist. Yeah, Nadi Oxford from your site you as a gamer wrote a thing recently and she was talking about that the N64 was the place

she went for fast 3D action games and it was really kind of excelled at that. I'd forgotten the fact that, you know, even something as obtuse as like that katana, it was PC and N64. Oh, what a weird port that was. Yeah. There were a ton of first-person shooters on N-64,

and that's actually kind of where the modern play-control system for a controller setup for shooters came into being. Like, developers started experimenting with that weird, weird controller and the C-sticks and everything. And, you know, the console first-person shooter went from being this thing that, why would you want to play that to be? I'm like, oh, yeah, okay, I can do this. That's why I am upset, not personally upset,

but a little myth when people are dismissive of Golden Eye, because, like, all I was playing Quake at the time, well, it's like, that's good for you. Yeah, congratulations, are you playing it with your friends on a TV? Yeah, exactly. You're right, Jeremy. They said this can happen. This genre can be accessible to you in your controller,

and here's how, I mean, Golden Eye obviously does not stand up. It's hard to play today. Multiplayer is not fun if you're used to modern multiplayer experience, but still, it wasn't important for a step towards Halo that we all kind of are, not I won't say we're all dismissive, but I think it's really easy to be dismissive because we're like, well, the

PC there was this, you know? Yeah, I never understood that showvenous. I'm even then. We were all playing both. It was, because... I did it first. It was me. Well, Quake was fun, but you could get people to come in and play Golden Eye or Perfect Dark that were not going to give Quake a try, that we're not going to fool around

with that control scheme, that we're not going to fool around with the matchmaking and the LISN and all the stuff you had to do to get that working. And just like Jeremy said earlier, you plug the cartridge in, it just works. And if you weren't used to the PC environment, it's like, okay, get your hand on the mouse, now get your fingers on WAS and D, and then here's all this other stuff. It's like, no, no, just grab the controller, move the control stick. You're fine, you're good.

And that was very important for people to learn how to play an FPS. The N64, in a lot of ways, was the optimal, like the ideal Nintendo experience. It was in a lot of ways everything that Nintendo kind of values in the video game experience, like the meta text around the gaming. It was about couch co-op and couch competition. Like, you didn't have to go online. You didn't have to worry about Internet. It was just like hanging out with your friends and playing.

You didn't have to worry about load times and about dealing with system updates. You just plug in the cartridge. Like, again, like, that's what Nintendo has always been about. Like, they've always tried to push for no load times in their games. They've always really pushed for, you know, local co-op, local multiplayer as opposed to Internet. And that's just, you know, part of, it's baked into their DNA.

It's part of their experience. And I think, you know, it comes from them having started out as a toy company. They're really about the social experience that exists within games. The N64 was, you know, up until we, like there was just no other console that created an experience like that. We just recorded a super NES retrospective and talked about how Sega Genesis was the system you went to for fast. snappy pick-up and play experiences. It's really strange because it was like the switch between Republicans and Democrats in the mid-20th century. Like all of a sudden, what Sega and Nintendo stood for switched in the 64-30-bit era.

It was called the Sega strategy, Jeremy. Yeah, okay. So there's still some Sega Dixiecrats out there. But yeah, no, like it was just a... It's just interesting because in a lot of ways, N64 was... antithetical to everything I had come to expect from Nintendo, but at the same time, it was also like the embodiment of Nintendo. It was weird how it shrugged off a lot of things I associated with the Nintendo brand,

like RPGs, obviously, and that is why, I mean, I had so much anxiety. Like PlayStation or N-64, which one should I get? And I love Mario 64 so much. Played it all the time my friend's house. But as soon as I knew Final Fantasy was going to the PlayStation, that's where I needed to be. And again, it was nice to have friends who were like, yes, we have both. And usually in my situation, I was not that, I was. I was a kid, but I wasn't a super young kid.

So all my friends who had an N64 also had a PlayStation. They were not the people. I'm going to wait six months for the next good game, which was typically what the cycle was. Am I right? Like every six to eight months is the next rare or Nintendo game that you have to play. Yeah. PlayStation, I was buying like two games a week for it for a while.

Yeah, yeah. I had a job. It was fine. I could do that. And those games were less expensive, which also made it easier. Yeah. And N64 was like,

sometimes I would buy a game and play it for a week or two. And then the system would, sit kind of to the side for a long time. I've heard the figure around six a year. I think, yeah, there's about, if you take it over that five-year cycle, you've got about 30 core games that are kind of must-plays on the thing. Yeah. Everything else is sort of, yeah.

So I think that's about right. But there were, what was there was often so golden. I was looking over the old, the old next generation magazine feature about something is wrong with the N-64. Oh, and you remember the Lincoln quote. Yeah. And you're about to quote him. Was that the Shattered Mario Face one.

Yeah. It's a neat one to go back and read now. But one of the things that I saw there that I had never thought about until I reread it was that this was kind of the beginning of video game consoles not having everything. Yes, you know, Sega had Sonic and Mario had Mario. But we were used to this idea of Nintendo's other end of its identity where we have these great first-party games and not quite all the third-party support we want. This started that. And before that, I can't think of a successful console that, and this one was successful. 36 million units, but I can't think of another one that had that kind of weird pick-and-chews

ecosystem, or when you'd make a statement like what you said a minute ago, Bob, this wouldn't me think of it, that he had the PlayStation and the N-64. You weren't there waiting. And I've often wondered what inside Nintendo made that happen? What made them make that determination? Because in the GameCube generation, they obviously made more of an effort to reach out to third parties. You had, you know, Resident Evil from Capcom or you had Metal Gear from Konami there on the GameCube, and yet they sold even fewer GameCubes

than they did N64s. I think in terms of they're not being a pack-in, if that's part of your analysis. I'm talking about the packing card. I'm sorry, if I'm being confusing here. What I mean is that this was a console that was not designed to have every kind of game.

And they were okay with that. Weirdly okay with that. I think N-64 is, in a lot of ways, a miscalculation by Nintendo. It did really well in the U.S., and that's it. Like, it's sold horribly in Japan, and was pretty mediocre in Europe.

It was just in the U.S. where it was extremely popular. And again, I think it's because of that social element to it that really resonated with American players. But I think that Nintendo kind of miscalculated, you know, the compromises they made, how that would affect their relationship with publishers. I think they assumed, like, we have control. You know, we had control in the NES era. We had control in the Super NES era.

they didn't really take into consideration all the side effects that had, all the bitterness and resentment that it bred among publishers. And when they said, like, we're going to keep the same systems in place, you know, cart manufacturing and first-party controls over yields and things like that, publishers were like, no, we don't have to do that anymore. They lost so many great publishers in this era, which is very sad. Right, we'll look into that. Got it.

But yeah, it's a N64 is an interesting creature. So let's go back to the beginning of the whole thing. Of course, video game systems don't just spring whole from nowhere. The N64 had been in development for several years by the time it launched in 1996. It was originally called Project Reality, and the pitch was Jurassic Park graphics on your TV. And this was announced in 1993 when Jurassic Park came out and was in the theaters and it was like wowing everyone. It was before Toy Story.

They couldn't use the Toy Story metaphor because no one knew what Toy Story was. I think they eventually would, though. They didn't eventually switch to Toy Story. It was true that was VM2 or Nintendo that did that. It was everyone. I think it was just easy shorthand for journalists to use. Like, you've seen these graphics.

Well, it's kind of like that, but not really. You know. Right. So the system was announced that Shoshin Kai, 1993. That's Space World. It used to be what Nintendo did instead of TGS, Tokyo Game Show. Now they just don't do anything. There's big home videos.

to show you. Yeah, basically. Yeah. But that was like an all-Nintendo event in Kyoto, I think. And it happened every year. And they announced the project reality. That would be a 64-bit system leapfrogging the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation that had already been announced. It would be priced at $250, which was about half of what everyone expected Sega and Sony's

systems to launch for. They figured it would be like 500 bucks for that. those consoles, and supposedly it would be two times as powerful as the competing systems. So half as much cost, twice as much power. Like, it's a winning combination. Yeah. And it was like, it was pretty hard not to be excited about that prospect. And they were working in partnership with Silicon Graphics, building this sort of magic dream machine built on their $100,000 hardware.

And they were going to scale this down and put it in your living room. And it was going to be the best thing ever. This was the first Nintendo console not designed in turn. internally at Nintendo. I mean, Nintendo's engineers were working on it, and they, you know, worked in close association with SGI. But it was really built on SGI's technology, and they let SGII, in a lot of ways, take the lead on the hardware design. So it was not, you know, led by Gumpi Yokoi or Masayuki Uemura. I think, it represents in a lot of ways a more Western philosophy. And we saw that happening to a certain degree

you know Sega would start to look more toward I mean really Sega had already done that with the 32X that was that was led by the U.S. And then the Dreamcast you know they had the competition with Black Belt and Durandall. No, was it Durandall? Dural. Which one was Katana? Was it just the

Drona? Ketana. Yeah. Dorel's the virtual fighter guy right? the, yeah, the shapeshifted woman. Anyway, so, you know, there was one Dreamcast that was designed in Japan and one that was designed in the U.S. They went with the Japanese design, whatever. But, you know, it just kind of was a product of its times. Like, Japan had led its own console development for a while, but now it was starting to

look to the engineering and computer design experts in the U.S. And really getting, getting... I mean, Dreamcast ran on Windows, right? It had Windows CE as an option. It did not run on Windows. Yeah, they didn't actually do a lot with it. It had the ability, but it didn't actually do all that much. That does sound like a very Western choice, though,

instead of developing proprietary things, you would include like that third party, like malware or whatever. Well, to hear Silicon Graphics tell it back in the day, they said, you know, we put this thing together and thought, there's game applications, and they started approaching companies with it. And there were stories back then that Sega actually rejected this, and then Nintendo turned out to be the better fit. And I actually haven't been able to find who at Nintendo led development.

I found references to Genio Takeda, who had been with Nintendo for a long time, and was kind of, it makes sense, because Takeda, you know, like in the NES era, his work was primarily with Western-facing games, things like Punch Out. He was kind of the guy who, and Star Tropic. Like, he made the games that were more for the American audience,

He was literally Nintendo's first game developer. Oh, yeah? He preceded Gumpai Yoko by a few years. Yeah, he's a really interesting guy. Wow. But, yeah, Takeda, it would make sense for him to be the one sort of spearheading this development that was happening in collaboration with an American company. So, you know, the involvement of SGI led to kind of an interesting assumption, which is that

we'd be seeing Final Fantasy 7 on N64, because, of course, Final Fantasy had been on Nintendo platforms to this point, like that was kind of where Final Fantasy started and where it had really risen to prominence. And Square put together a, the Final Fantasy 6 interactive demo for Silicon Graphics Workstations. And, you know, you've probably seen the tiny little thumbnail-sized videos that have like... That got me drooling. Yeah, little 3D versions of the characters. I remember downloading that on my school's internet at like just a glacial... pace, the tiny little like 240 by 180

FitMap graphic. It took forever for that video to load but it was so great. Terror, Locke and Shadow? I believe so, yes. Fighting a GOLOM. I can see those images in my head. I look at that video so much. It was like a super drawn-out version of what would become Final Fantasy 7's battle system. Like, you think the summons take a long

time, but this battle system was like, it was like that for every fight. But the idea was like, you know, just square experimenting to say how could we move into 3D? I believe you were like, using magic by moving a mouse cursor. Yeah, like you draw like a star shape to cast spells and stuff like that. So, you know, because that was on an SGI workstation and SGI was developing the N64, people

were like, whoa, this is Final Fantasy 7 for N64, even though it's Final Fantasy 6 characters, which I guess people didn't recognize because they were based more like on their, you know, original and mono designs as opposed to the little sprites. But anyway, it didn't help that some magazines were like, this is Final Fantasy 7 right here. I think game fan did that. There's a lot of misreporting. It created kind of a misunderstanding. But at the same time, it was interesting because it did show, like,

hey, maybe Nintendo's going in the right direction here by working with SGI because, like, this is kind of the leading, you know, the leading edge of game design and technology. It's weird that a Square property was the showcase, and I hope I'm not jumping ahead, and we can go back to this later. But Square was sort of the company who led the charge and getting other companies to leave Nintendo. I found this out in researching a piece I did on,

Super Mario RPG for US Gamer. And apparently Square, the president of Square at the time, was contacting people, other developers like, no, we need to be with Sony. This is where we need to be. And apparently that's where all the bad blood came from. The comment from Yamauchi in 99 about how RPG players are losers,

things like that. So, Square really helped people like see the light in terms of leaving Nintendo. Yeah, I mean, Square was like the first notable defection. A lot of publishers didn't show up on in 64, and it was

kind of quiet, you were just like, oh, I guess I never did see a Namco game on In64. Was there one Capcom game, the Mega Man Legendsport? There was Disney's Magical Tetris Challenge. Oh, we can't miss that one. Was Disney, was the Mickey's Crazy game? And also, there was Mega Man Legends, or Mega Man 64. There was Resident Evil 2. Yes, you're right. And there was Disney's magical Tetris challenge. So Capcom made three games.

I have fond, but possibly distorted memories of that Resident Evil 2 port. It was it was remarkable that they got that on to a cartridge. Like, wow, how'd you do that? But... It's an astounding technological achievement. Yeah. I'm sure it plays okay, but... I actually remember it being pretty good, but I, again, I wonder if that's just the rose-colored glasses. I'm pretty sure it looks bad in both versions now, because I have revisited those games,

but yeah. So at some point, the name Project Reality went away, and Nintendo changed to the name Ultra-64, which I guess they decided they couldn't do because, I mean, it made sense, like you had Nintendo, Super Nintendo, now here's Ultra Nintendo. And they put 64 in there because, you know, do the math. Right.

But, you know, there was a Nintendo publisher called Ultra, Ultra Games, so maybe that had something to do with it. I kind of preferred Ultra 64. I felt, like, disappointed when they changed the name. I was like, Nintendo 64 sounds so bland. I mean, the number is significant, but I feel like I needed that superlative to tell me how cool it was. I mean, you had the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. And then it was actually, like, punchy and precise, instead of belaboring, like,

alter a Nintendo 64 system. It was just Nintendo 64. And N64 is, yeah, very euphonic. It just rolls off the tongue. Those are my expectations as a 14-year-old, though. No, I need to be told this is awesome. Like U-S64 doesn't sound as good as N-164. I think it was a good choice.

And I'd have that nice little logo that was like the sort of three-dimensional isometric in. I do like that, yeah. Yeah, we have a table at work that's built on one of those things. I love that thing. So, yeah, like, everything was looking rosy until sometime in, I don't know, 1995 when the game, the system was supposed to launch in 1995, and it didn't. And, you know, Sega came out with Saturn in 1994, then Sony launched in Japan in 1994, and both of those showed up in the U.S. in 95. and Nintendo did not have their system out by that point,

and it wouldn't launch for another year, August, no, September 1995 in the U.S., or 1996 in the U.S. I wonder that just created a rolling compound problem. I think it did. I think, so, you know, the N64 ended up actually being cheaper than originally planned, but so did the other systems. PlayStation was 300, Saturn was 400,

N-64 was 200. If they had managed to get the N-64 to launch with Mario 64 on the same day as PlayStation or like within weeks of it for $100 less, what could they have done? That would have been amazing.

Like they would have been a juggernaut force. And, you know, Mario 64 was still like this amazing experience and everyone had to own it, you know, play it and own the system to play it on. But, you know, they, They gave Sony and to a lesser degree Sega a chance to really establish themselves in the market. And, you know, the PlayStation was in its second generation of software by the time in 64 launch. So you had games like persona.

Well, that's not like a big, you know, people pleaser. But you had, you know, Tomb Raider coming out. You had a lot of these kind of like more refined games beyond the first year of PlayStation. I think PS1's first year was pretty rough. If you didn't want wipeout or ridge racer. If you didn't like racers, there wasn't a lot to really push it. Jumping Flash for life. Yeah, but by fall 1996, PS1 was established.

They also had the volume at that point that when N64 did come out, they were able to undercut the price of the software very quickly, cut down to $50. Start the greatest hits, $25 collection, all in response to Nintendo's launch. were just so much better positioned, and that combined with the large third-party library. Now, one question I have, I remember when I was younger reading about the delays, and most of what I anecdotally remember is the delay in the N-64 being attributed to Mario 64's development. I'm sure it was, yeah.

Is that true? Pretty much all the research I did on this episode said yes. Yeah, we did a whole episode on it, and it was like that in Ocary of Time is basically what Nintendo killed themselves making. This is the first time we're doing this. we have to make it right or else we lose everything. So, yeah, it was a very, like, harrowing development for both of those games. So I guess the question is, if Nintendo 864 had launched on schedule without Mario 64,

would it have been as strong as launching a year late with Mario 64? I say Mario 64 was vital, completely vital, so important. What the head start gave Sony and Sega, I think, was the ability to redefine games for a culture. As the Genesis did, like, you've grown, you've gone, You've outgrown your NES games. Now it's time for us. I feel like this was addressing maybe kids that were a little too young for the Genesis.

Like you played S&S and whatever. Now these are edgy, fun adult games on CDs. Oh, my God. And you need a memory card. It's fun. But, like, I feel like they were trying to age up, you know, in terms of what games could do where Nintendo was like, oh, it's Mario again, which I'm not saying that's bad because Mario 64 is an amazing game.

But still, the impression Nintendo was giving was, oh, it's old video games again. Yeah. they had had something to follow up Mario 64 with immediately that was also very different? That was supposed to be an Akron of time. Right, and that would have helped tremendously. And Mario 64, when it launched, was like something that came down from outer space. I mean,

just never seen anything like that. It was one of those few video games that maybe just stop and jaw dropped to the ground and then when you started playing it, it was even more fun than it looked when you were watching someone else do it. But there was very little after to distinguish that console.

There were good games, but nothing for a long time they made me go, I have to have this until Golden Eye a year later, and by then it may have been too late. You're so right about the impact of Mario 64, and recently on my friend Chris Antiso's podcast, 30, 20, 10, I think it was. This is months ago, but you can actually listen to audio of Mario 64 being unveiled for the first time, and people are gasping and clapping and cheering, like, they've never,

well, they had never seen anything like this before, and I feel like VR is the only thing that will have that impact again on people because it's like something you've never seen. It's AR. Okay, it's Pokemon Go! Pokemon Go does. I didn't have that effect on me. Pokemon Go, not my socks off.

It's a more subtle. But I think Nintendo believed in my R-64 so much that they did not include it as a pack-in. It was not, I mean, it was to save money, but also it was like, this is too important to give away. Like, you need to buy this and you're going to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I mentioned Howard Lincoln a minute ago or a few minutes ago

in response to what Jared was saying about that next-gen issue. In that issue, you know, they are talking to, Howard Lincoln, former president of Inoua, and saying, or was he president? I've totally forgotten. I thought he was their... I was like, wait, I don't remember what he was. Yeah, he was like, he was just their lawyer or something. No, he was up there in the ranks.

I think he took over for Arakawa. Yeah. God, I can't remember. I should refresh my memory. Anyway, they were like, well, you know, there aren't a lot of games coming for the system. So why would anyone want to buy the system? And his response was basically, you can ask me that. response will be just to smile and say

two words, Mario 64. The words were going to be F you. But they really did believe in that game. They felt that it was strong enough to, you know, move the system for a while and let it build up a software library. And they were right. That was the hottest toy. Like, you could not

buy an N-64 at Christmas of 1996. After that, it dropped off, but you know, it still did pretty well for itself in the U.S. I've got to assume that Mario sold one-to-one. I would think, like, why would you buy an N64 at launch and be like, yeah, pilot wings, that's what I'm here for. No one I knew, sorry, everyone I knew with an N64 had it by default.

There was no one who didn't have it who had an N64. I mean, you just had to have it. And yet, so that happens in 96 during the release. And yet by May, we've got a major magazine sitting there asking questions about, hey, is something wrong with this console? The shift in public opinion happened pretty quickly. It's funny that the last episode we did was tied into the PS3 because that's similar to what happened with the PS3 I mean obviously it had a much better fate but that questioning

like what's going to happen now was a very similar thing Sony turned that around but it wasn't a similar place and you know for different reasons it was more price and complexity of development but yeah the N64 like that first year I bought an N64 at launch with Mario 64

I didn't bother with pilot wings. And then I picked up a few games throughout that fall. I picked up Wave Race, which was beautiful, but I also realized, oh, I don't really like racing games that much. So I didn't play it that much. That water looks so good. It looked, yeah, it was great. And it felt great, like the response to the physics of skipping the waves.

It was fantastic. You know, like you could also play Hydro Thunder in the arcades, but I liked Wave Race better. Still, you know, it only had so much value to me. I picked up Turok, which was, it looked good and had a lot of design flaws. It's secretly a Silent Hill game. I had played enough PC shooters or Mac shooters at that point, like the marathon games in Doom, that I was just like, no, this isn't cutting it.

And I was going to get Shadows of the Empire, like Shadows of the Empire I was totally stoked for. I absolutely wanted to play it until I actually saw it in action. and then I was like, oh, this game that was a system seller for me is no longer a system seller. It's basically just that first level and then step away from the console. It was kind of letdown.

If everybody could have just played the first level of Shadows would all been happening. Yeah, so in that first fall, I owned three games, two of which were kind of disappointments to me. And then, you know, in the beginning of 1997, I picked a Mario Kart 64,

played it for like a month solid, and then I was done with it. And I looked and I said, what's next? There's nothing next. Yeah, you were talking about Turok. I dug up an old... IGN began partially as N64.com, and I was digging up an old article from that period

where they were talking about Turok in terms of it being a greater game than Doom or Quake. There was a lot of... My perceptions have changed. Was that Casimacina? I don't know. There was no name attached. No name was attached. I think the strategy for Nintendo was a...

And obviously, it went way off the rails was, okay, first year Mario, second year Zelda. Then it was third year Zelda, right? Because it was 96, Mario, 98 Zelda. So they needed Zelda to fill that gap, but it didn't come at the right time. And I think they lost a lot of headway there because Zelda was also just like a can't miss it, head-turning, jaw-dropping game for a lot of people. And maybe not with the same impact of Mario 64, but it was still huge for them. The magazine that declared in 64 dead in May of 1997,

in October of 1998 declared Zald of the greatest game of all time. Yeah, after having declared Super Mario 64 the greatest game of all time in 96. There's just not enough hyperbole for in 64. And to be fair to them, they said something's broken, but it could be changed. But yeah, and there were other wonderful things. I think about Smash Brothers, which I know Jeremy is not your cup of tea, but talking about wonderful four-person on the couch games. And that came along fairly late, but I was just like, oh, wow,

there's still a good reason to own this thing. And as with, I mean, I think Gold and I, the dismissal was after the fact, but I think with Smash Brothers, there was a lot of skepticism in like, this is just a stupid idea, who cares? And it was so much fun. I mean, like, my friends weren't like into kidding Nintendo characters. We played Duke Nukem and Goldenye and stuff, but we had fun with that game. And I was like, wow, you guys care about Nintendo as much as I do.

I didn't know. Well, you got four people sitting there. That was what made it work. Yeah. You were willing to forgive a lot for that kind of party, jump right in and play experience. And because it was so resembled platformers so much, you knew how these characters controlled from the moment you picked up. Yeah, it was very, like, to the point where the GameCube one had like a 2D platforming mode

and the Wii wanted it too, yeah. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of other things. Again, Mario Party, very important for it. I think about, and then you get Majoras very late, which is a game I can't play because it hurts me. You're one of those people. No, it's incredible, but that timer kills me.

Yeah, yeah. Like, I'm just terrified the whole time I'm playing. It's too intense. That's part of the atmosphere, and I agree it's not for everybody. It's a wonderful game. If you're okay with certain doom at every minute, then it's the game for you. But I think I've spoken enough about Majora's Mask for one lifetime. So basically, in summary, not as many games on N64, but the really great games really and truly were great.

Like, world class, as good as anything on any system. Definitely some of the most important games of all time, period, regardless of how well the system. did or was remembered, Mario 64 and Zelda 64 shaped their respective genres and basically the course of 3D gaming as a whole, I think. Yeah, Mario 64 is Zelda 64 and in a weird way, GoldenEye, even though it doesn't

hold up just because of what it did. No, absolutely, yeah. I don't think there would be Halo if GoldenEy didn't prove that it was viable on consoles. So weird to think that Nintendo was on top of that. That they were the cutting edge. So we should talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the N64. Obviously the biggest strength is that there was an N64 released in the shape of Pikachu.

Yes, I worked at a GameStop, and I believe our back room was half Pikachu-N-64s because they were not really striking while the iron was hot. They were striking the Pokemon iron, but the N-64 iron had already been discarded, and it was in a landfill somewhere. I kind of want one of those RGB-moded, just for the novelty of it. You can touch Pikachu's a little cheek to reset your machine, right? We have one at the office at IGN, and it's a lot of fun play for now. It's just so cute when it glows, it's wonderful.

But you were asking about the strengths, I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, the lack of loading times, which in that period was a significant advantage in some ways. In some ways, yeah. You pop Mario in, Mario just worked, and that was nice. If I'm allowed to read from your notes, I assume I am. Analog controls. I found out that Genio Takeda developed the analog stick, and that was for as crummy as it was in terms of how long it lasted,

it was the first major analog stick in a console context. That was very important. I mean, Atari 5200 had an analog. controller. That's true. But it was bad. Yes. I'm... It didn't, it didn't have the ability to re-center. So, the first actually usable, usable, functional.

Yeah, functional, functional. Yeah, that 5,200 controller is kind of like holding a limp fish in your hand. It's a dead limp thing. It just like, it just a weird oversight. It also breaks two weeks after you buy it. Yeah. So N64, I mean, that that controller was still also pretty fragile. But

it wasn't quite as as fragile as the human hand. It's the, I think, probably the first game system that had to send people gloves to wear while they played video games. That was only because there was a certain Mario, I mean, almost, I would say, like, 30% of the Mario Party minigames involved rotating the analog sticks. So, of course, you put your, you put your palm on it and spin it like that. So you would get these horrible blisters and also destroy your controller. Right. I think by year two or three, if you rattled any N64 controller, you would hear just plastic.

moving around in there. They were not built to last. It took me a lot to get my head around that thing. Just how to hold it first off. And you'd see people holding them different ways. Yeah.

You had helpful, again, Nintendo directions on how to hold in their documentation. But just wrapping your hands around it. And it did a lot of odd stuff. You had the two main face buttons and the four camera buttons over above those,

which could double as fighting game or extra function buttons, but were often used to sort of awkwardly swing the camera around. And you had the port in the bottom as well, which was, you know, you had a controller with, a port in it to plug

something into. That was unusual at that time. Yeah, we talked in the in the Super NES episode, Bob made the case that the like LR, X and Y buttons were an attempt to suggest the third

dimension. But I don't think that's really true because the N64 was the first controller to have a Z button. The Z axis is the third dimension. But did it have X and Y? It did not. It had C up, down, down, left, and right. I mean, in this case, it was explicitly saying the Z axis, you're living in it,

you know, this will help you with, you know, things that involve perspective, in other words. The N64 controller is basically a super NES controller onto which has been grafted two little handles and then this weird tail in the middle. And at the base of the tail is installed the analog control stick. And then on the backside is the Z button. Yes. It's odd. It's a strange controller, and, like, games and manuals had to say,

here is how you hold this controller. There were diagrams. Yeah. That Z button was very satisfying to press, though, in terms of when it was used well. Like, whenever I play Mario 64 on Wii U or whatever, doing those slide jumps across a level are not as fun when I'm not doing the Z trigger, because it just feels like such an important part of that movement. Yeah.

Yeah, it was the first mainline controller trigger I can remember than that weird Colico thing. I can't actually think of a pack-in controller that had that nice kind of... It was a strangely un-ergonomic controller that had some wonderful ergonomic qualities. That was one of them. Yeah. It was weird because it had like the L&R buttons on the shoulders, but you couldn't really use the L button that much because you almost never had your hand on the outside prong to use the D-pad. The D-pad was like deprecated.

And I can't think of any game, I'm sure there are a few, but I can't think of any game where you held it traditionally. with the two outside handles and use the D-pad. I can't think of one off-hand. There has to be at least one. You'd think so, but... Was the all-button ever used is what I want to know. I can't think of anything.

There's probably something. But at the same time, like, they were fumbling toward what would become the standard of game system controls. Those C-sticks, C-buttons, which would become the C-stick on GameCube, were like,

the, you know, like the genetic progeny of their predecessor to the analog right stick and Sony would do that eventually I think in our Mario 64 episode I've uncovered that Miyamoto was kind of regretful of the C buttons

and I think maybe in retrospect he wanted there to be a stick that felt like more of a logical choice but they didn't know I mean they were just figuring things out right I mean yeah things were still like people were still figuring out how does a third dimension work in a video game and the the selection

they made, having basically six face buttons made sense. It felt like a logical evolution of, you know, that was what Sega's Genesis, you know, secondary controller, the optional controller had, the Saturn analog pad had that. Yeah. Like that was not a strange or inexplicable design choice. Now, this was the age of fighting games and, you know, when they were doing their planning, they had promised something that I need six. There were a lot of fighting games on N64.

You mentioned the 2D ones, but there was like fighting vipers. there was gasp, or sorry, deadly arts. Clayfighters, 63. War gods, all kinds of like... Bio-something? Bio-freaks. Bio-freaks, right.

Yeah, I mean, there were like Victorkeye and... Did you say fighting vipers? I think that was a second thing? I did, and that was not the right... That was a mistake. Sorry about that. Flying dragon, that's what I was thinking of.

Yeah, yeah. The N64 out of the gate was ready for 3D games. In Sony's case, their controller was god-awful for 3D games, and they would have to sell you a new one in a few years. for you to enter that kind of 3D world. Right, and developers still couldn't really take full advantage of it.

Yeah, that's true. Because they had to assume that you just were using the stock Sony controller. Outside of like APA skateboard, it's like, no, you have to have a dual shock. Yeah. Yeah, so like not every game would take advantage of it just because they didn't have to. Yeah, I mean, the Sony analog controller had, and then the dual shock also had a button that you had to press to turn on the analog functionality, and some games wouldn't recognize it. So it was kind of a mess. Nintendo at least, like, they didn't get it quite right,

but I feel like Sony's Dual Shock, you know, like the way that ended up, was more of a botch job than the N64's setup where every system, like every game, you knew it was going to have the same weird controller. It was also a controller that weirdly came a rumble pack ready. Yeah.

And that's very strange. Well, the onboard expansion port that you mentioned was interesting because, like, you know, the market was moving toward memory packs. Sony had, you know, a cartridge that plugged in for memory. Sony had I say Sony, I meant Sega. Saturn had the cartridge. PlayStation had the memory cards. You know, even before they had NeoGeo with its memory cards.

So this was kind of like a thing that was happening. And, you know, that expansion port I think was originally conceived for memory cards, but they didn't really need it. it because cartridges had the ability to save on card. That really irked me. I felt that was

Nintendo Nickel and Diming people where some games actually you had to have a controller pack to save things. They eventually would stop doing that. I don't think that was Nintendo nickel and diming things. Really?

You just thought they were... I think they were... No, it was the publishers, the developers who made the game. Yeah. They could have said, well, we'll pay extra for the battery backup but they wanted to, you know...

I just wonder if there was an incentive for people to use that memory pack. I doubt it. I just feel like no one really had one. and very few games of the required one explicitly. You know, you couldn't save for the cart. Right. Yeah, it was not done very often.

But it was, I think it was done by sort of skinflint publishers who wanted to save it, you know, like 20 cents or something on buying a lithium battery for their cart. So, yeah, that was weird. But it did make for, you know, the analog, not the analogue, the Rumble Pack, forced feedback, which came with Star Fox 64. That was, again, not the,

first time there had ever been forced feedback with a controller, like, you know, you could buy PC controllers that had that. But for a console, yes, that was new. And it also allowed other opportunities, like the, you know, the connectivity with the Pokemon game.

You could get the N64 transfer pack. Yeah, there was that one, I think you might have mentioned it, the connectivity. The thing that you plug into your N64 controller that you could plug a Game Boy game into, and that worked for things like Mario Golf, and you can shoot your Mario Golf person

into Mario Golf N64. Do you know what I'm talking about? I do. Does that work with anything else? It was specifically built for you to put a Game Boy game in, and I bought it just for Mario Golf, because it was like $3 by that point. What a weird accessory.

What a weird accessory. It's real. Yeah, I think it only worked with a few games. It wasn't like the Dreamcast VMU where that was built in from the story. No, no. But it was kind of a predecessor to the VMU. There was no screen.

Right, but I mean, like the concept. Yeah. the duality, the cross-platform play. What a weird beast of a console. They put an extra port in the controller

and they don't put a sound chip in the console. It's a really odd series of design choices. And there was also the extra port on the console on the front where you could put a RAM expansion. They built a connector

specifically for a RAM expansion. I don't think there's anything else you can put in there. No. But I guess RAM was more expensive to include in the system than a connector was. That kind of ruins. It's really weird. It's really strange.

I like the idea of the RAM pack or whatever, but I think it ruins the sleek design of the N64 where there's an open hole in the middle now with this red grate where the rampact went out. Yeah, there was a little thing that came out and then you put something else in there. You put the ramp back in. But I like that sucker. I'm not a big fan of splitting your market by adding a necessary per rome. referral. But at 50 bucks, for what it gave you, that sucker

was a lot of fun. Is it that expensive? Did it ship with Donkey Kong 64? Or is that just an optional? You could buy it with Donkey Kong 64. You could also buy it on its own. And if I'm correct, it was about 50 bucks when it debuted. Is that why they were able to cut the cost of the system from 250 to 200? I wonder.

Because they cut out 4 megabits of RAM or whatever? That they plan to have otherwise? I do not know. So how do you feel about the design of the N64 Jeremy? It's identical in Japan, right, for It is, yeah. I mean, I kind of like it. I like the four little feet.

I don't know how I feel about it. It's very like, it's very like, it's like a 1950s car. Like I expected to have, you know, fish tails or something. That is true, yeah. It's like no other game console ever. Like, nothing has ever had that sort of elegant, graceful flow to it. I don't know what the inspiration was for that design. It looks something between a jukebox and a child's toy.

I like it as well. Yeah, I mean, they went with kind of like a very stoic, dark gray, like a charcoal gray. And I think that's good. That made the system look a lot more serious than the Super NES. But, yeah, it's just, it's strange. I do like the front ports. Like it says, hey, here's a game system for a lot of people to hang out and play. And the ports are these gray things that stand out, these little four little divots or four little holes or whatever.

And I like, you know, the fact that it, you know, cartridges plug right in and you can see what game it is on the label. One thing, though, from working at a game store, N64 games were hell to organize because there's no, the label is only on the front. There's no marking on the side or the top. So unless you've got like a Majora's mask or a Donkey Kong 64 or whatever, you don't know what that game is. So there's no way to display them for people to look at other than just dumping them in a big giant bucket and have people like root through them, like animals. Yeah, you still live in Japan. And typically the games you buy, even secondhand in Japan, are well taken care of, often pristine. Were they in cardboard boxes in Japan as well?

I hate that. Yeah, they were in cardboard there as well. But when you find them loose, it's very common in Japan, unlike any other game I know of, to find like little Sharpie kanji written on the end there so that somebody could stack it on a shelf and identify. Interesting. See that occasionally, which is unusual. Yeah, those cartridges were pretty strange. But another weird thing is the way it didn't have the, like,

the power converter built into the system, like the cable terminates in this big chunky thing that you plug into the back of the system. Yeah. It's a weird, like, I don't know why it does that. I've never seen that on another console. I mean, now that chunky thing is just like the thing that breaks up the power cord

in every modern console, right? The big brick. Right. Yeah. I've always assumed that it's removable so that they could ask you one other question on the phone when you called in for tech support. Actually, you know what?

You know what? No, actually, now that I think about it, it's basically the reverse of the NES and super NES power adapter where you had those huge AC. I hate that thing, yeah. Like those plugs that took up space in the power socket, they took that away. They just gave you like a really simple two-prong plug for N64.

And then the conversion, you know, the AC converter is at the other end. I really hated those fed. I don't know why it's inside the system. Yeah, the fact that it just sort of plugs in there like another cartridge. Yeah. always puts that inside, well almost always, puts that inside their system. Like, PS1, PS3, PS4, I can't remember PS2, but I think PS2 also. Microsoft's is one you could just murder someone with.

Yeah, Microsoft, like, a weapon. Like, they're like these hot, bulky things that sit behind your TV. Hot bricks waiting to explode, yeah. I'm always afraid to touch with them. So the other big thing about the N64 was that it had 3D graphics. And the system was really custom built from the ground up to push 3D graphics really quickly and to give them a lot of detail. obviously it was not the first 3D capable system but the interesting thing was

when Nintendo was talking about the specs of the system and its capabilities they wouldn't give just a raw polygon number they wouldn't say like you know with PlayStation it was like here's how many polygons you can render per second without details

and here's how many it can render with textures here how many it can render gourourode shaded No, Nintendo wouldn't do that. They would just give you like the number of polygons that it could render with all effects on. They were like, well, we're not going to make just games with bare polygons. The system wasn't designed for that.

The system was optimized for, you know, giving, you know, textured graphics and detailed... Yeah, the 3D graphics co-processor that went in there with the CPU was divided into two parts. You had the signal processor that handled the base geometry, handled the base polys.

And then you had what they called the display processor. and they were really proud, at least in their marketing material, of the fact that this was going to be able to do things like Z buffering and try linear and interpolation. ZBuffering made a difference. Like if you compare N64 graphics to PS1 graphics, N64 graphics are really fuzzy, but at least they're not swimming.

Yeah. PS1 graphics, it's just like the screen is having a seizure. Tomb Raider is one of those I think of whenever I think of that. I mean, they were all like that, but Tomb Raider was like all the textured floors. You're just like walking on a waterbed. Yeah. But yeah, Z buffering, I heard that thrown around so much when this was being marketed when people are talking about it.

Like that was like a very important keynote to hit. Yep. Trilinear interpolation. Mip mapping, you'd hear anti-aliasing they talked about. And they regarded these. I think that's why they didn't like to talk about the polis as they wanted to say, well, our processor makes polis, but it also does all these other things really well.

Right. And we have a whole piece of the machine just dedicated to making all that stuff look even better. I'm guessing that's why they didn't want to talk about that. I don't think the N64 processor could actually push as many raw polygons as the PlayStation. That seemed to be the conclusion that most people came to is like, yeah, they couldn't win in the numbers game. But, you know, that's why they're just saying, like, we'll talk about, you know, real world circumstances of our system as opposed to, like, here's the theoretical number you could get if all you did was triangles with no details. So, yeah, kind of, like, they sort of talked around the system.

And despite the fact that it was a 64-bit system and therefore superior to Saturn and PlayStation, in some ways, it wasn't so superior. It was kind of like the Super NES. It was superior in some ways and defective in others. And we should probably talk about the shortcomings. Obviously, you know, kind of the big one politically was the last. low-capacity format. We talked about the cartridges

and how they loaded immediately, and that was definitely the appeal there. Nintendo liked that, and they liked the fact that they could control, you know, the means of production if you're Marxist Mackey. Jeez. I just bet it literally.

But at the same time, there was a severe limitation on what you could put in your games. And when you had a company like Square that wanted to basically go into movies, and have all this streaming video, like, no. Like, why would you want to put that into a tiny cartridge? You wanted to put that across three or four compact disks.

You had, you know, gigabits of information in a time when, you know, like, megabytes of cartridge space were very valuable. I generally approve of a lot of Nintendo's more conservative ideas in terms of reusing old hardware, sticking to the basics, not going for flashiness over game design. This feels like a real misstep, obviously, in retrospect. because in the age of multimedia, it was, they were viewed as so backwards for not embracing technologies that everyone else was.

Even if we got Mario 64 and Zelda 64 as a result, two games that are just impossibly great, I feel like it's so strange that they would make that missed up, even if it was, I mean, especially because it was totally clear that they wanted to do multimedia with the SNESCD and were just biding their time when it didn't work out. In a, in a pre-broadband world, it also made those games much easier to pirate. Yes. was a big deal.

There was a lot of piracy in the N-64. That's true. Because the games were small enough that you could transfer them over a modem, which you did not want to do with most PlayStation games. That's true.

Though in fairness, it was more difficult to play the pirated game is because in 64 emulation happened pretty quickly, but not well. Whereas PlayStation emulation happened really quickly and really well.

You know, there was the whole Connectix. Before Bleem, there was Connectix's virtual game station. That's right. Which was so good and so inexpensive that Sony, like, stepped in and really swung around some money and some legal cloud to get shut down, which is a shame because I owned it. It was, you know, like a Mac exclusive program for a while, and it was great. I was like, I'm playing Brigadine on my Mac.

It just came out this week. I actually didn't know about this. What's it called again? The Universal Game Station. Connectix Virtual Game Station. Okay. This was a Mac program that would run PlayStation 1 games. Wow.

What year? 1998, 99. Right off the disc, right? It was not perfect, but a great emulator. N64 was harder to do that with because of the complexity of the system. But, yeah, again, the cartridges did. It was easier to pass around those games, even if you couldn't do anything with the cartridge memory, the data.

And of course, there's the, again, we talked about this earlier, the cost of producing a cartridge, which, according to the figures from that period, were more than twice what it cost to produce the CD. I have a horrifying memory of my friend just, getting an N64 and we were going to Sears or something, some mall store, and he really wanted a World Combat Trilogy, and he bought it

for $80 in 1996, and I was like, that's literally over $100 today. We were just crazy kids. Like, yeah, and at the time, PlayStation games were $40, so I mean, the choice was clear, and that was not a very good port of Mortal Kombat trilogy, I'll tell you that much. No, it wasn't. They did a lot of those arcade ports

there early on, especially. I guess that was the Dream Team thing again with Medway and Spina. Yes. How many members of this dream team are now dead? So, So let's talk about that. You know, there were some very notable high-profile defections from the Nintendo camp when the N64 was kind of brewing and about to come out. Square said, we're going away.

We're putting Final Fantasy 7 on PlayStation at around the same time. Enix said, yeah, we're also going away, and we're putting Dragon Quest 7 on PlayStation. We'll see you in five years. Yeah. So, like, those were huge blows to Nintendo. I remember reading those in a magazine. I was like flipping through it at Walmart or whatever at the book section and was like, whoa, I want to play these games. And now they're not going to be on N64.

What have I done? It really gave me pause. But Nintendo did make a big deal about its dream team. There were some really great developers in there. There was rare. There was DMA, which is now Rockstar North. Well, okay, that was it. There was also.

Okay, Williams was good. They made great arcade games. Sierra Online had a good legacy but was not a console game. Was it Sierra Online? No, no. Oh, have this wrong?

Yeah, Sierra Online was making like PC games. Yeah, for some reason I thought they were on the Dream Team chart. No, they published, you know, half-life. I think they were on their last legs around the late 90s, yeah. But there was a claim.

There was Game Tech. Get out of here. Get that off your dream team. Maker's of Jeopardy or whatever. Yeah, they made board games like a television quiz show game adaptations. Yeah. There was GTE, or no, was it GTE interactive?

Did I miss type that, GTE? Help me out here. I think it might be GT interactive. I think GTE interactive, yes. And like, who did, what did they make? I'm drawing a blank. Well, not everybody finished something. I mean, what did they make before you had to at least have developed something

to be part of a dream team, correct? I guess. But Angel Studios, Paradigm, like studios that are no longer around or they were absorbed or that just, like, nothing really came from these teams. I mean, obviously, Rare was big. They made Golden Eye. They made Perfect Dark. They made Donkey Kong 64, Banjo Cazooey, Banjo-Tooey, Jet Force Gemini.

Like, you know, lots of really big games. They did BlastCore, too, right? Rare did BlasCorp, yeah. DMA didn't make a lot of games because they kind of shifted over to doing Grand Theft Auto around this time, but they made Space Station Silicon Valley. they made um body harvest yes body harvest like some really crazy off the wall experimental inventive games very cool stuff

but they were the only good parts of the dream the rest of the dream was a bad dream was dead you woke up and you realized you'd eat in your pillow or whatever it was just bad you know they there were the games touted and never released like Robotech crystal dreams oh yeah they would just show off like the same two sprites in different configurations on all these screens.

I know there's a story there, and I think it's online somewhere. I need to read it someday. But that was one of those that was like, oh, I loved Robotech. It'd be cool to play this game and never happened. Just, yeah, the whole Dream Team thing. Not good.

Again, I'm against some of these members of the Dream Team. Yeah. They seem conspicuous. I'm trying to think. We talked about how Capcom released three games. Konami did okay. They released some sports games. They released that crate.

Okay, the other RPG, we forgot, Hybrid Heaven. Right. Which was like a fighting game RPG. Two bad Castlevania games. Ah, yeah. Yeah, the game's so nice. But the Goaemon games. Goaemon was great.

Yes, Tim, Tim Turi wanted us to mention Goaemon 64. Yeah. Which is, I mean, I think it's just okay, but it's very ambitious. One of the best theme songs a game has, like the total anime, pure Japanese theme song. They kept in Japanese for the American version. Let's see, Namco, I don't know if Namco actually published anything on N64. There was Ridge Racer 64, but that was developed by Nintendo Software Technologies. I want to say that there was a, was there a Pac-Man collection?

No, actually, I don't think there was. I do not remember. Yeah, I don't think the Unco really did anything. You had publishers like Vic Tokai and, God, I can't even remember who else. Did Treasure do anything besides Sun and Publishment? They did Bon Gio, the original Bon Gio. Oh, and Mischief Makers, of course. Yeah, so they did some games.

There were a few other notable developers, but for the most part, it was, you know, Atlas, Natsume. It was kind of smaller companies. The big companies sort of took their ball and went home, and by home I mean to PlayStation and had a much better time there, I think. And it seems like, I mean, the best games, I think, were Nintendo games, but I don't even feel that Nintendo was that prolific on the Instagram. Compared to even things like the GameCube or, I mean, obviously that we had a lot of Nintendo games,

but I feel like there's like five or six Nintendo games that are just like the good ones. Am I misremembering this or what? I think there's a few more than that. I don't want to go down a long list here, but yeah. I just like that. You look at first part of Nintendo games. You've got over a dozen. Okay, yeah.

I am looking at your list. I just feel like, I mean, it just feels like they weren't all in. No. They were still making good stuff even late in the system's life, like Paper Mark. What was that 2002? It's one of the last games for the system. 2001, I guess. Early 2001.

That's a great game. Yeah. I was more thinking of like EAD and internal developers. Like what they were doing during this period. We had Mario Kart, Pilot Wings, Super Mario 64, Star Fox, Ocarina, Majoras, Paper Mario. They made some game. Well, Paper Mario was intelligent systems. Yeah, it's intelligent systems.

My theory is if it holds any water is that they were, they basically spent like four years developing or five years developing Mario 64. and Zelda 64 back to back. So they had no time for anything outside of those two games. So they got kind of a late start. I mean, they did Star Fox. Yeah. Yoshi Story and so forth.

Yuck, no. Yeah, I'm not saying it's necessarily good. Okay. I throw my theory away. Okay. Did they develop Excite bike in-house? I don't think so. I think, I can't remember who that was.

It was not in-house. I think, I want to say they're European, whoever did it. I used to know this, and I don't know. Sorry about that. I heard it was good, though. I never played it. I like that. Yeah, but they, yeah, they developed some pretty good stuff.

There was good stuff on N64. It was just, like I said, you know, a bit more sparse. Another big setback to the N64 was its lack of texture ram. And this was a pretty big deal in a sort of subtle way. Basically, you know, when you create polygons, they're just triangles. They're like colored shapes until you apply a texture. And, you know, modern systems apply like multiple layers. There's like shaders and, you know, lighting effects and things like that.

But at the very basic level, you get a triangle and then a texture. Yeah, texture is basically like a bitmap file that stretches across the triangle. Yeah. The thing about the N64's lack of texture memory is that it meant the textures themselves had to be very small, very low detail. And they would be stretched. and because of the trilinear interpolation

instead of everything being like chunky hard lines it would be softened for anti-aliasing which sounds good in theory but when you're taking a really low detail graphic and stretching it it's like taking a tiny thumbnail photo and resizing it in Photoshop

it's just like it becomes blurry like there are some in 64 games that I can't play because they're so like the textures and the contrast is so weird and bad that it gives me a headache. This was a problem even then on CRTs,

although CRT's softening effect did help some of the games. I never beat Zelda Occurion of Time on its original hardware in large part because it gave me headaches when I played. Back then. Yeah, on like a 27-inch TV. It makes it impossible now. I mean, you look at them now and just hurts the eyes. Yeah, I mean, it came along with the 3DS remake, and that's great.

It's got to the point where people have made new texture packs for Zellet's, Zelda and Mario, just be like, here, play the games now with good textures because we can do this. It's not hard to replace textures. Well, I guess it is, but some people figured it out. And that's such an odd omission because, again, when you read the early interviews where they were talking about this stuff, they were very proud of how they handled texturing before the thing came out. They seemed to place a high priority on it. And I wonder what went wrong there.

Well, I mean, it was really just the amount of memory for the textures. I think if they had had more texture memory, if they could have had bigger textures with more detail, they wouldn't have been stretch as far. And so that interpolation and anti-aliasing, it would have been good. It would have made everything look really crisp and nice. So maybe texture cash was another of those last-minute cost cutting measures. I don't know, but it just wasn't planned out that well. And it did have a huge impact.

Like when you think of N64 graphics, you think fuzz and you think fog. Like those are the two kind of defining traits of the N64 look. Everything is very soft and kind of blurry and smeary. and then the draw distance in most games is pretty poor so you get this just like Bank of Fog like Superman 64 Yeah Nintendo really figured it out that

Like Nintendo like I feel like you get a pretty long field of view in Zelda and Mario But no one else could really do that trick as well as Nintendo did Like Turok Like I said you were in Silent Hill Five feet in front of you was fog There was no story reason for it But I feel like in Zelda you could look pretty far across the field

There was not a lot of detail Because there was still like the field was there Right Yeah it was it was it was It was tough. It really, it had an impact on the game and the games they produced. And then kind of the other big technical shortcoming for the N64 was the lack of a discrete sound processor. This seems really weird.

I mean, the Super NES's sound processor was a huge deal. Like, the music chip, we talked about that in that episode. And then for them to just completely take out any kind of discrete sound processor was a strange omission. you had to allocate, you know, processor time and take away time from graphics rendering and AI and, you know, that sort of thing, like drawing the world and figuring out how the game plays in order to generate sound channels. And I read somewhere it's like each sound channel you play was like 1% of the processor time. Yeah, I read an interview with one of the old Factor 5 guys about this. And he talked about how originally Nintendo seemed to be committed to the idea that you would use the part of the graphics co-processer. do your sound. But it was also possible to loop in CPU cycles. And one of the reasons Factor 5 games

had such good sound. You think about Rogue Squadron and how the music on that was much better than others, was that they found a way to constantly keep track of whether the CPU or the graphics processor was being overloaded more, and they would make space and switch off responsibilities. They actually wrote their own sound drivers from the bottom up so that they could do that and always leave a little overhead and switch the responsibility at dynamically at different moments. It was a very elegant bit of programming with the fact you had to do that. Yeah, I forgot to mention LucasArts and Factor 5, but I think of anyone, they have the best technical grasp with the N64. Like, even more so than Nintendo, the later Star Wars games they produced, amazing.

Star Wars had such a bad start with Shadows of the Empire. But then Rogue Squadron came out and each game successively became more amazing. It was kind of wasted on episode one stuff, but, like, still... Even with Shadows of the Empire, though, they developed a strategy that involved basically streaming in a low-quality MP3 or whatever you want to call it. Like, that was literally the John Williams music recorded, but they figured out a way to, like, stream it into the game. So you weren't hearing, like, a bad MIDI version of it. Yeah, you were hearing samples, right? I think a lot of it was just pre-recorded audio.

Correct me if I'm wrong people out there. But I think they find a way to compress audio files and stream them into the game because it sounded like the action. music, albeit at a much lower sample rate. Yeah, personally, I still liked the iMuse system that they used in Dark Forces better. Like, that was MIDI, but it was really good MIDI, and it was dynamic and shifted.

Yeah. Like, yeah, it was hard to enjoy the music in shadows of the Empire after having very recently played Dark Forces. It was not reactive at all, so, yeah. It wasn't. But they came along with some great stuff. Also, a weird thing you said in that interview while we're still in the

sound, was he was very excited about how the 64D was going to include samples because you had to put your samples in the raw and they gave you a sample kit but you had to put them in the cart and the 64D was going to have hardware samples and that was going to open up so many doors for them. We really need

to talk about this. Why don't you tell us what the 64 DD is? The 64DD is a tragic a tragic child that never came to light on our Fair Continent. So we didn't have CDs and instead Nintendo decided to maybe

create a large peripheral that plugged into your N64 and allowed you to use high capacity 64 meg rewritable discs with some storage space on them for you to make your own creations. And then they said, wow, that's not a good idea at all. Let's kill this before it can grow. And it came out in Japan a little and never reached it. This was not an unprecedented idea. Yeah. The NES, the Japanese NES, the Famicom, of course, had the Famicom.

system, which included, you know, it plugged in underneath your console and gave you 640 kilobyte discets that were rewritable, and it added an extra sound channel to the hardware. So it was a natural evolution of this, except the discs now had 100 times the capacity. And we're based on zip technology, which having lost so many projects in college and Screw, use a disc. Like the click of death. I can't imagine a console based on that, but that's what they did. Yeah.

Yeah, Perrot and Dojan the Giant to play it at work, and I just admired his bravery for coming the thing on. It felt like they were promising this forever, and it released in Japan, I think literally in December of 2000, maybe December of 99, very, very late. And I feel like I could be contradicting my own research I did on the Ocreen of Time episode from last year, but I believe the original Zelda was slated for this.

But definitely Majora's mask was. considered for this. There was, not the original Zelda. I mean, oh, Aquarina? No, yeah, not the original. Orosa or whatever? There was Orza. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was going to be like the 64D expansion and that was kind of, they

just pruned that away until it became the Master Quest, which was almost nothing different. It was just like mirrored. It was basically the predecessor to Skyward Sword on Yeah, you read some of the early marketing stuff. They're like, The Legend of Zelda 4N64, 4D, and that's as far as they ever seemed to get. And it just dies.

And being a huge mother fanatic, I know, like, they kind of just rolled right from Mother 2 and a Mother 3 on D.D. So that game was in development for years and years and years. As the hardware was getting ready, it was a complete failure. It eventually came out on GBA. But they were making or they're attempting to make games for it as early as 96, 97. Yeah. I was excited about the idea of it and then just kind of felt this increasing sense of dread as IGN kept reporting like, yeah, this thing is never coming to the U.S. What's up with that?

I remember reading stuff by Pair and Craig Harris saying, yeah, Nintendo won't admit it, but this thing's dead for American release. But there were some interesting games that came out for it. I agree, yeah. Probably the most important was the original Animal Crossing, Dobutsu No Mori. Oh, that was a disc drive game.

It was a 64 DD game. Okay, wow. And Japan released really late, like 2001. Yeah. And then immediately reworked for GameCube and expanded, and that was localized. But it started out as an N-64 game, and that did get released in Japan. There was also, like you mentioned, Doshin the Giant.

That game was remade or was it a sequel for GameCube, but only in Japan. Yeah. And Europe, Europe also got it. Then there were, you know, like the Mario Creator series, which were evolutions of Mario Paint. Yep. And I'm sure you're going to mention this, but the roots of Wario Ware are buried in the game-making tool. it looks a lot like Wario where there's the same like kind of

motif and stuff like that Right yeah Like it's very much an evolution of Mario paint And the Game Boy camera Like the missing step In a way There were expansions to have zero Yeah just not not

There's like There's a Sim City for this And you can like literally go down to street view And watch horrible You know pulling on people walk around Into your city It was a neat idea But it would just would have cost so much

Probably been unreliable It was very forward thinking in a way, but I think they realized pretty early on that they were not going to sell enough of these to make back what they were going to spend on it, getting it out. For how often Nintendo just scraps ideas and buries them for

later use, I'm really surprised, honestly, they released this at all, and maybe it was like we need to make some money on this, so let's put it out. There were ten items released for 64D in Japan. We've pretty much named them all. Mario Artist Polygon Studio, Mario Artist Communication Kit,

Mario Artist's talent studio Doshin the Giant The Tinkling Toddler Tinkling Toddler Liberation Front A symbol I want to play that Japan Pro Golf Tour 64 F0X expansion kit

SimCity 64 Mario Artist Paint Studio Oh and the original Doshin the Giant There was an expansion for it also And then finally The RAND net disc The Rangnet.

Yeah that was like an online thing. I see. Objectivism. It's not a game. Right. Wait, so was the Virtual Boy Library bigger or smaller than 10 games? I had a feeling it was like 17 or 18.

No, it was bigger than that. Oh, okay, wow. I used to go into secondhand stores that had it and look at the games behind the glass and my hand would reach for my wallet and spent, no, no, walked away. Never did it, never plunged and I'm glad it didn't. For the 64D. I would say like conceivably Animal Crossing would be the killer app, but then the GameCube made it irrelevant, you know, that version is

the kind of superior version of the original release, so, yeah. And plus we couldn't I mean, if you can't read Japanese, it's no good to you, obviously, yeah. Virtual Boy was 22 games. Okay, yeah. So, it beat the 64 DVD. It's

Nintendo's second biggest failure. I don't know. Would you consider this drive the biggest failure in terms of hardware, they released? I guess, but I mean, it's not like they pinned a lot of hopes on it. They initially did, and then they realized let's just get this thing out and see what we can do. Yeah, sometimes I wonder if this was released because it already signed agreements.

You know, just we have to get it out there because there are not a lot of them, again, anecdotally, if you look around in Japan, you don't see them everywhere like you do a lot of other failed peripherals. I think, I mean, Mother is apparently more popular in Japan, I think, especially then. I feel like that would have been the killer app. And I'm really glad it didn't happen on the DD because the Game Boy Advance game is beautiful. And it's a really good format for that game. Everyone should play that game. I agree.

So I feel like we've pretty much hit all the points. It's been kind of a muted celebration. We've talked, we take the good and the bad. It's the facts of life. I think, I mean, even more so than when we originally did this episode by Wii, I mean, you guys, like, today's adults are in 64 kids. Today's people entering the working world. You are between the ages of 25 and 30, maybe a little older, if you grew up with the N64 conceivably as your first console. And that's kind of terrifying, but I think nostalgia for this thing is huge.

And I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of our more listened to episodes because people, they love this thing. I mean, I was slightly older, maybe a little more cynical, as probably we all were. But I think there's a great amount of love for the N64 that is really coming to the surface now that people are older and want their childhoods back. Yeah. The N64 kid is now a sad adult. Right. The price on N64 games is starting to get into that bubble. There are some games that are very expensive, like snowboard kids too.

is what, like $2,500 or something? Oh, sweet Lord. You can buy an actual snowboard kit for that money. You could. What's the Over Under and Beetle Adventure racing? Nah, that one hasn't really done anything. All right, there we go. I did.

It's, you know, some of these like rarities that were hardly released. Like the Indiana Jones game that was only released, a blockbuster is pretty expensive. I don't know about the racer scooter game, but... I did most of my N-64 playing, actually in the year 2001, 2002.

My friend just sold it to me for like 20 bucks, and everything was so cheap so I played everything then like I played Majora's Mask and Banjo Tui and all the other games that I didn't get a chance to play and that was a great time to play it and maybe not so much now.

Yeah, stuff like Dicatana, Concord's Bad Ferday like these are very expensive now. Conquist Ferday is not as bad as Ticatma. Just want to go back and play StarCraft on that on an N-64. That's the way to do it, right? Definitely.

Yeah, so did you want us to talk about like key games and good games? I think we have. I had like notes, you know, to say, oh, we should talk about the key games, the most important games, but we really have. What about unsung games? Sure. I did want to mention it, and Jerry probably brought it up, Blastcore.

Yeah. Which me and my friends all called BlastCorp's because we were done. And I feel like this is something that people have been demanding a sequel for, and I feel like we need the indie solution to this game because it's a very, are you familiar with the game, Jeremy? Yeah, you're like trying, there's a runaway truck full of explosives and you're basically smashing buildings out of its way to get it to safety. With different vehicles with robots, it's a very smart and inventive game that is just, like, was only done once. And I feel like with better graphics and potentially a bigger environment, you can do so many cool things with this idea of, like, the demolition puzzle game.

And I really want to see that happen. So I just wanted to throw up BlastCorp as maybe one of the more on Sun games. It's a rare game, so it's obviously still very popular. And N64 was where Winback started, right? Right. That was basically the game that invented cover shooting. Exactly, yeah. So we have never played this, really.

Neither, yeah. Wow. The cover shooting wasn't very great, but, yeah. It was developed by Omega Force back before all they did was Muso games. Oh, and there was a second game. Went back to Project Poseidon for PS2. I don't remember that one. Wow.

I think we mentioned the DMA games, those were interesting. They're not the greatest games, but they're full of neat ideas. I couldn't get very far into Body Harvest, to be fair. I like the ideas in Body Harvest, but it was a little taxing to play. And I think the same is true of Silicon Valley. Please Don't Kill Me People. I know everyone loves that game. I know, Jeremy, you're a Mega Man guy.

What do you think of Mega Man 64? What do you think of that, that interpretation of the 3D Mega Man games? I mean, I love Mega Man Legends, but I feel like Mega Man 64 is compromised. It's just, it's not as good. I agree with you. Sin and Punishment is great, though. Yeah, Sentent Punishment was one of those legendary things that I didn't play forever and ever and ever. And then when I finally did, I was like, oh, this is actually just as wonderful as everyone said.

A lot of times with import chauvinism, that's not true. I have to say, in terms of imports, I can't think of many, but I know things like Wonder Project J2 seem pretty interesting. I've never played them. But that's something I would really like to play. I know it's been fans translated. But I feel like all the good Japanese games did come over here. I can't think of any major losses that we suffered in terms of...

Bangaio, Cynabunishment. But then we eventually got Bangaio on the Dreamcast. And Cine Punishment, I guess we didn't get that. So that was one thing we lost. Well, it came out of virtual console. Oh, it did Cine, Okay, so yeah, I guess we never really lost it. They brought it over...

I guess they didn't need to translate it because it had a lot of English dialogue already. And one day I do want to play that friggin' ogre battle game. I have no idea what it's like. And it was like, oh, here's the one good RPG period. Like, that's all you get. I played it when it was a contemporary concern. And I didn't really like it very much.

Maybe I didn't have the patience, but I liked grinding, crunchy simulation and RPG-type games, and I just could not get into it despite... I don't know how much I actually like to play the original Ogre battles, so I don't know how much I would like 64, but I still want to try it.

Yeah, totally worth it. There's a lot of things here. I didn't realize there was a Shadowgate game on the N-64. Oh, yeah, Shadow Gate 64. I was researching for this. I was like, what? So I have to play this now.

I've got to find out what that was. Oh, O. O. Namco did release some N-64 games. Namco Museum 64. That's right. I thought so. Ms. Pac-Man-Maz Madness and Famista 64 in Japan.

That's a baseball game, I'm guessing, right? Family Stadium. Okay. Don't play Turok. Don't play Turok. What about Turok 3, rage wars? I want... That could be Turok, too.

Which is the one that has the Confederate General... Oh, that might... Saratops as a boss. I don't think that's an N64 one. That might be like a GameCube or PS2 one. God, yeah. Colonel, whatever. Oh, yeah.

I like the idea more now. I think it was a general, actually. Yeah. There were a lot of just, like, goofy 3D. platformers on N64. I just remember Tonic Trouble. Glover. Yeah. Oh, I remember Glover.

My girlfriend really likes Chameleon Twist. Yeah, Camelian Twist. Not to be mistaken for Camelian Kid. Nope. Different. There were also a lot of... There were a lot of ports of PC games that there's not a lot of reason to go back to now. Which at the time were interesting. He had Hexon and Duke Nukem and Quake and... Again, the first-person shooters were thick.

Yeah, and that's odd. But I can't imagine anybody wanting to go back and experience them. anything but a curio. The best thing about that is, is Duke Nukem 64 is, like, you might as well be just be playing a different game because all the things you go to Duke Nukem 4 are gone because it's totally sanitized. Like, this is not a strip club. You're now in Duke Burger. And, like, yeah.

I like Harvest Moon 64. Yes, that's kind of where Harvest Moon is interesting in a find a stranger in the Alps kind of way. That's true. It's like, how do you boulderize this game? Yes, man, they worked really hard to make that game, Swiki Clean for Nintendo. Where do you fall on Bomberman I have zero interest in the

Bomberman series. It's competitive multiplayer which I just doesn't interest me at all. Was it still, weren't these, wasn't this the area in which Barmer Man was it like a... There was Bomber Man heroes. Yeah, yeah. And a Bomber Man racing game. But he was not yet the ultimate Bomberman game.

Bomberman Act Zero. Of course, nothing compares. I still think that's a joke. It didn't actually happen. I'd like to think that anyways. He looks like an evil rock and sock-and-sock him robot. Is that that downfall offense? I think so. Yeah, that are kind of the image.

Yeah, I'm looking for any little tidbits that sneaked past me. Oh, yeah. One last game I want to mention is Star Soldier Vanishing Earth. Oh. The sequel to Hudson's long-running Star Soldier series, I think maybe the final game in the franchise. And that's probably because I remember buying a copy of it. This is Japan only, right?

No, it came out here. Really? Okay. I remember buying a copy of it. and it was like marked down and the guy at the store when I bought it told me oh hey, that game sold 60 copies

I was like this month he was like no it's like lifetime to date has sold 60 copies Your addition is numbers I don't know if he meant just like within the like EB games or whatever or what but I think it was at a Babbage's what's it sell for now?

I don't know let's look at that out that's actually fascinating. probably sells for a fair amount, not snowboard kids money, but... The funny thing is, I think Nintendo remaking things has made a lot of the previous version sort of irrelevant, like Majora's Mask, Ocarina of Time. I wouldn't say the DS version of Mario 64 makes Mario 64 irrelevant. I still think there's a lot of value to the original, and the DS one is just kind of hard to play, you know, so... Marty Sleva is going to smack me across the face.

Oh, you're going to dis... Well, I don't... I'm not crazy about banjo, but a lot of people love it. Yeah, yeah. But it's certainly an important game. And it's not my cup of tea, but probably worth mentioning. All right. Star Soldier Vanishing Earth, complete.

U.S. version sells for around 100, 125. That's it. Which is kind of the going price for sort of like a middle tier rarity in 64 game. There's a lot of, like, that's about what, you know, Conquer sells for. What you're saying is buy low right now, so you can sell high in a few years. You probably should have bought low a few years ago. When I started thinking about developing ultra64.com, it was actually pretty easy to pick up complete games. And over the course of like a year that I bought the first, say, years worth of N64 games, the prices climbed.

So by the time I got to the first Bomberman and Goimmon, Mystic Ninja, like it was starting to get pretty pricey. And I said, man, I'll tell you what, nothing will ever be cheaper than the every wrestling game ever made for that thing because, uh, well, you know, uh, EA sports games for Sega Genesis. Yeah, that too. I mean, like in the same category. When I worked at that game stop and we had them out on the floor, we had to keep most of the wrestling games in the back because they, they outnumbered everything else by like hundreds, by hundreds of times. It's like, WWF Raw's war just like a stack of Stone Cold Steve Austin just greeting you in the back room. Yeah, so. It's the worst.

I've never played Madden 64. I wonder what that's like. probably like every other Madden. Yeah, except 64. It's going to be my guess, except Smeary. It's like every, every field of condition is fog. We're playing in Seattle again. Anyway, I think that's going to do it for this issue, or this episode, this issue.

We have issues with the N64. Clearly, I have issues. So, any final thoughts on the Nintendo 64? Bob. For as little, let me rephrase that. I really wish I had more games, more games I want to play. But the games that are on it that are really good are super great. And we can never ignore the impact and influence that Mario 64 and Ocreen of Time had.

And I love Majors Mass to Death. So for as much as I wish Nintendo embraced a different format, without the cartridge format, we probably would not have these game-changing 3D games. So I feel like this is a very, very important console regardless of how it disappointed us. So that's my final take. A fine library of games, a strange beast, but a wonderful, wonderful little bit of archaeology to look at from an age when consoles were actually different from one another. It tried some new things. It succeeded in some, failed in others. I'm much more interested in a flawed experiment than I am in something that's just too glossy to even look at.

So I think the N64 is a wonderful console and had a library of things that I wanted to play. As for myself, I bought an N64 at launch. sold it about a half a year later and then about a year after that, I bought another one and kept it. It took me a while to kind of warm up to it and I still have, you know, it's still a letdown, you know,

considering how faithful I had been to Nintendo to that point, not out of like, you know, a sense of loyalty or anything, just Nintendo consoles were where I found all the games that I wanted to play. N64 gave that up, but I feel like Nintendo recovered after that. and started to build back up toward winning my affections with the GameCube. So it was kind of a difficult moment in Nintendo's history.

A very important moment in a lot of respects, some good, some bad. But, you know, like kind of like a midpoint, like a turning point for the company saying, what are we? And they'd really kind of hit that stride with Wii and DS, but I don't think they would have gotten there without the N64's complications and challenges. So, yeah, not a bad system. I don't know if I'll ever do that in Ultra-It-S64 thing or not, but if I do, please look forward to it.

So, anyway, that wraps it up for this episode. Jared, thanks for coming in to share your thoughts on the system. You have took extensive notes more so than maybe any other retronautics guest I've ever seen. You came really prepared, yeah. That's great. Well, thank you guys very much for having me. Yeah. You took this seriously.

Yeah, we don't. You can find Retronauts at Retronauts.com on U.S.gamer.net and on iTunes and, of course, on social media, because that's where you go to find things these days. Of course, we are supported by Patreon, so please consider keeping the show alive with a small contribution. It's not too bad. It's not too painful. I pay more each month for Spotify, and I don't even listen to that. What else? Oh, right.

I'm Jeremy Parrish. That's right. I'm on Twitter as GameSpotter. and I write for usgamer.net and gameboyworld.com or gameboy.org if you prefer. Jared? Where can we find you? You can find me at IGN. I make all kinds of things there. I write. I make videos. Do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And have a good time with that. You can also find a little show I do called Pockets Full of Soup, which is a tiny beacon of happiness in the dark void of the internet. What is that exactly? Pockets Full of Soup is a

interview and storytelling show. Where can we find that? Pocketsful of Soup.com. And you can also find us on other places that you find podcast, Twitter, Facebook, and stuff like that. Check it out. I am Bob Serbo on Twitter. This is Bob Mackey, by the way, and you can find my writing

at usgamer.net, something awful.com. And I do another podcast called Talking Simpsons. It's a chronological exploration of the Simpsons. That is up every Wednesday at Lasertime Podcast.com. Or just look for Talking Simpsons in your podcast machine. If you like Talking Simpsons, I'm sorry. If you like The Simpsons, you'll like Talking Simpsons and vice versa. Thank you very much.

And that wraps it up for another fine episode of Retronauts. Thanks, everyone, for listening. I love you. We'll be back next week. We're going to be able to be.