The Videogame Solipsist: Nintendo 64

I couldn't find a decent image of the original box, so just bear with me

Somewhere in the basement I have an old issue of some third party Nintendo 64 magazine. It came out during the first half of 1998, and reading it back then, it felt perfectly normal not to see many games I wanted coming out. Reading it after the N64 era had closed, the issue now seems like a historical document proving that things weren't going as well as I thought.

The Nintendo 64 still has a great reputation among gamers, particularly those my age or below, and I suppose it's for any number of reasons. When you're young, as I was when the Nintendo 64 came out, you only get a new game every once in awhile, so it didn't feel like the system was failing when I played all of 3 or 4 games a year. At the same time, we were all still under the spell of Nintendo. During that weird time between the end of the 16 bit generation and the domination of Sony's Playstation, Nintendo were the most obvious and safest bet. As discussed in my last entry, Sega had more or less hung themselves and by the end of 1997 they had all but given up on the Saturn in the U.S. So, we wanted to believe that the Nintendo 64 would be awesome--and really, it wasn't that bad of a system. Looking over the list of games for it, I noticed a few I had forgotten about, like Blast Corps. and Dr. Mario 64 (yeah, I had no idea they even released this).

My two main memories of the Nintendo 64 are getting it and getting fed up with it. I had a friend who got the system at launch, and shortly after, I was at his house watching him play Mario 64 for most of a day and never getting a chance to play. Another friend got it around the time of Mario Kart 64, and to be sure the 3 or 4 player matches we had were every bit as amazing as the two player experiences I had with friends or my sister on the earlier systems. Meanwhile, I finally got my N64 during the summer of 1997. I think I made a deal with my parents that if I painted the shed and our back deck, they would get me the system and Starfox 64. The hard work was worth it, because Starfox 64 and its rumble pak were revolutionary things. Not only was the N64 the first system to truly feature analog controls (meaning your character could run or walk depending on how far you pushed the stick instead of you having to hold down a button to toggle running off or on) but it was the first one to truly feature force feedback. Unfortunately, only having one game to play--and Starfox 64 of all games--gets really old after awhile, so I borrowed things like Cruis'n USA and Turok from friends. That Fall, Goldeneye came out, and with the combination of it, Mario Kart 64, Starfox 64, and Mario Party, it just kind of clicked that it would be a system for hanging out with friends and having fun.

However, the greatest flaw of the Nintendo 64 was its lack of great single player experiences. Oh, sure, there were Mario and Zelda titles for it, but by and large the system had no RPGs to speak of. Zelda games don't count as RPGs, so I could probably name the N64 RPGs on one hand, though the list would include the caustic Quest 64, who's generic title is actually the best thing about it. Hilariously enough, I very nearly bought Quest 64 to hold me over until Zelda: Ocarina of Time came out, though in the end I never got either game. In fact, I owned the Nintendo 64 for about a year and a half before Zelda, and I can't imagine waiting that long for a good single player game, let alone something that wasn't a RPG, to come out nowadays. But I did, and in my idiocy, I didn't reserve the game. This was before reserving games even entered the lingo of gamers--it just seemed inconceivable that Nintendo wouldn't release enough copies of a game. But they did, and it was the straw that broke the camel's back. I had been eyeing the library of the Playstation for some time--all the RPGs and the great single player experiences--and I finally turned my back on Nintendo.

I don't want to make this sound like I totally dropped the N64, though. I kept buying games for it, but they usually amounted to a quarter--if that--of my Playstation purchases. 1999 and 2000 weren't great years for the system, but they did see key releases, like the first Smash Brothers, Paper Mario, Perfect Dark, and Zelda: Majora's Mask. Assuming you were a two-or-three games a year kind of gamer, I'm sure the N64 was very good. But for everyone else, they were lean, sad times. It felt like a right of passage to get a Playstation and open up your eyes after being brainwashed by Nintendo propaganda for so long--the issues of Nintendo Power, the bizarre videos they created to promote the launch of the system and Starfox 64, all the shit talking about how carts were superior to CDs, etc. I feel sorry for people who stuck to Nintendo as their sole source of gaming, partially because they were missing out on so much greatness on the Playstation (and, later, the Dreamcast), but mostly because Nintendo wasn't rewarding their loyalty with much of anything. In fact, I kind of hate Majora's Mask, but that's a whole different post.

I say all of the above as a huge Nintendo fan, but it'd be hard for anyone to argue that the latter half of the 90s was anything other than the cracking of the Nintendo egg. Sega nearly did it before falling on their own sword, and Sony actually did it. At the same time, Nintendo made a series of bad business decisions, from the ill-conceived and quickly killed Virtual Boy to keeping with the expensive cart format to being arrogant with third party developers to designing a system that was difficult to program for to requiring people to buy a RAM expansion pak to play Zelda: Majora's Mask and Perfect Dark (you could play PD without one, but not to its full capacity). It's really amazing it was successful as much as it was.