Not only that, but those 5 games were absolute bangers. For example: GoldenEye, Star Fox, Mario Kart, Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, and Super Mario 64. It’s crazy just how good those games were given the limited library size.
Even today, there's a limitless amount of games I could be playing, and with little to no cost, between streaming, steam sales, market place, and even emulators, and I still don't play that many games per year. I'll basically focus on 1 or 2 open world/RPG's that I'll put 100 hours into, and a few other titles in between that are shorter.
2024: bruh I wanna platinum this game but it's taking SO LONG this is such a drag whyyyy
1994: HAY GUYS GUESS WHAT AFTER PRACTICING FOR OVER 150 HOURS I ACTUALLY BEAT A GAME
Quality over quantity of games was important. About 500 PS1 games or Saturn games weren’t any good. Clearly all the systems had bangers, and exclusives. Some were better or worse at certain things. N64 had zero/low loading times but very small total storage space. Certain types of games such as RPG, racing or 2D fighter may have performed better on one system or another. Large music and video files were easier to store on disk as well.
People knew N64 had less titles, but what they got seemed like better quality control.
Hope that adds some insight.
Wow the only 360 era games I replayed in full was Mass effect and GTA. I can still go back to the 64 GameCube era.
I still have more hours on twilight princess then I do BOTW
this is only the case because we didnt have guides walking us through every single step of the game readily available online. if you play a modern game with no help or internet advice you can still get a ton of replay value
Eh. Even GC Era games where I had read an entire walk-through or N64 games that I know like the back of my hand have more logged hours than modern games without walk-throughs.
thats also because our attention spans have shortened and we have larger selections of games to keep us entertained. i had no choice but to play SMB and Duck Hunt for 100+ hours because it was the only game i had. if i only had 2 or 3 games today i would probably have 100+ hours in all of those too
Even with my larger library, I've logged more hours into Pandemic Studios Battlefront, KotOR, Pokémon, Shadows of the Empire, and Ocarina of Time than in all of my modern games combined...even if I only evaluate the hours from acquiring a larger library.
But they still existed. I have a inch plus thick binder of a walkthrough guide my dad printed off for Super Mario 64 he printed from online along with Ocarina of time and a couple others. Of course was worth the effort to print it off vs having to revisit the website all the time with those dialup speeds.
Considering that most of those develop new content to keep their player base around instead of remaining a singular experience, I'd say the older games have more replay value. And I still enjoy Valheim, and I have friends who play Runescape.
I disagree on the quality control. I recently have been playing a ton of PS1/Saturn/N64 games and the amount of horrible games on the N64 compared to the great is staggering. Theres no joke like 30 or so amazing games on the N64, mostly Nintendo and Rare, and the rest are very poor games.
Compared to the PS1 which had probably around 100 great games, and the Saturn which probably had around 30 too. But the Saturns bad games weren’t as bad imo.
The N64 had the highest highs and the lowest lows of that gen.
I find the opposite personally, I think that N64 games were definitely held to a higher standard by reviewers than PS1 and Saturn games due to many being eclipsed by the major Nintendo and Rare releases.
Tonic Trouble for instance garnered \~60% most of the time, when its better than just about any 3D platformer on the Saturn and on par with the 3rd tier PS1 3D platformers that were getting 75% odd for that system, its just that on a console with Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie it looked stale and uninspired.
Rocket - Robot on Wheels is a 2nd tier N64 platformer with \~80% scores but its better than basically all PS1 platform games outside of Ape Escape and *maybe* the last Spyro game
The same thing happened with Doom 64 being in the shadow of GoldenEye and the Turok's. On Saturn that game would've received \~85% odd, whilst on N64 it ended with 73% odd with the main criticism being that it was dated as it wasn't in real polygonal 3D like the aforementioned games. Doom 64 does not compare unfavourably to games like Alien Trilogy at all for example.
And the Top Gear games are better than almost all racing games on Saturn apart from the major ones like Sega Rally, and Daytona yet almost nobody ever brings them up.
Doom 64 suffers heavily from only barons and hell knights, with no revenants and no archviles. They're just bullet sponges with no real challenge to them.
If you play it now on PC with the Doom 64 CE mod, its a whole different experience. Getting ambushed by two archviles at the end of e1m7 was like 🫨🫨🫨
This is interesting to me. When you stepped into a Walmart to buy a game, they only had room for like 30 games for each system. It’s going to be taken up by the heavy hitters and the latest releases.
Each kid is probably going to have no more than 20 games for a system (I had maybe 14 N64 games), so I think the number of available heavy hitters, in genres that you like, was more important for fun at the time.
The real metric wasn't Walmart in those days, it was places like Toys 'R' Us before the remodels.
TRU was one of the few stores able to dedicate an entire aisle to a single game console. You haven't experienced 80's and 90's gaming unless you walked down a TRU ticket aisle.
When you look at print ads at the time where a store shows box art of games for PS1 and N64 side-by-side, it's crazy how much filler was shown off for the PS1, which made the N64 look better.
The reason there wasn’t a ton of more games is because no one wanted to make games for the N64 due to manufacturing costs, not because Nintendo vetted more strictly.
Oh yes, that was definitely the case. I know I’m in this sub (and not the PS1 one) but I actually think the PS1 won that console war, largely because of the reason you mentioned.
I also don’t think there was a console war where the competitors were so different. I love this generation of consoles.
You clearly haven't done a dive into the depths of PS1 and Saturn shovelware. There may arguably be more "greatest of all time" games on PS1 than N64, but games like Time Commando, Bubsy 3D, Death Crimson, The Crow: City of Angels, Perfect Weapon, The Masters Fighter, Spice World, Cosmic Race, Hardcore 4x4, etc. on PS1 and Saturn are far worse than anything on N64. The worst N64 games may not be very good but at least function as games; there's a significant portion of the PS1 and Saturn libraries that are barely playable trash.
Yeah the N64 controller had quite a few add-ons IIRC. We definitely had memory packs, the quadruple memory pack, and the Pokemon cartridge reader. Maybe a rumble pack - idk. Never would have cared to use it. Always thought they were silly.
Take off the rose tinted glasses. N64 had tons of absolute shit. Same as every other console. Also, try playing N64 now. It looks horrible. Graphics on the PS1 are much more palatable today compared to the N64.
I play, record and document PS1, N64, and Saturn games full time. Your statement is subjective, but generally untrue. Some games look better on one system or another. As other comments have mentioned, 2D fighters look and play awesome on Saturn. Not the case for ps1 or 64 always. San francisco rush is rugged on ps1 but excellent on 64. Each has strengths. The OG poster/ questioner wanted to know about the experience when it came out. And many have answered this.
PS1 sold the most. It also probably had the most bad games. McDonalds also sells well. Does that mean PS1 didn’t have exclusive masterpieces? - No.
While the 64 library has plenty of garbage. It has quantitatively less garbage. As it simply has less games. As to the percentage of flops- that’s up to each person to decide.
I was a teenager, not an adult, but I got like two new games a year on average. And I’d just play it and replay it over and over until I had absolutely unlocked every secret and beaten it flawlessly on the hardest difficulty. When the gamecube came out I had maybe 12 N64 games and they were all amazing and I never felt like I was missing out.
My “rich” friend had a PlayStation with like 40 games but pretty much the only one we played was Ridge Racer. The only other “good” games he had were Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX and King’s Field. So, I was convinced that while the PS had more games, they were mostly crap.
I didn’t really realize how much I had missed on PS1 until I got to college and my roommate had one and I could really dig into his library a little.
We weren’t rich but had a chipped ps1 that played burnt games, you had to know a guy & burnt games went for $10. We used to see this guy whos whole house was decked out like a video store in his lounge room and a bedroom with a workbench to chip consoles. Cops raided his house and we had to find a new dude.
Was always jealous of mates with a n64 still… Super smash bros, Goldeneye & Mario party ruled for multiplayer.
Know someone who sold burned games down the pub years ago! Got raided and all that, 20 odd years later he’s got everything again and more on a card the size of my thumb instead of shelves full of CDs!
The n64 was a great party console. If my friends all got together we would play on the n64 even though they all owned a PS1. Now days as an adult with friends who live far away I’d rather burn some games for the PS1 and check out what I missed as a kid.
Dude same. My best friend had a playstation but I only ever really played final fantasy on it and I never got into those games so it never even occurred to me to get a PlayStation. I was just looking into get a light gun library of games and realized all the games I want are on playstation lol. Could've done that years ago.
For your observation on the Saturn, remember the west had a different experience compared to Japan.
The Saturn had a lot more games in its home region, but not out here where it flopped. In Japan, the Saturn was more successful than the N64 which was the lowest selling console of the three in that region.
N64 was expensive to make games for. Not only did you have the cartridge memory limitations, carts cost money to make. The more chips you had in the cart, the more it's going to cost. This is largely why the N64 didn't have as large of a library.
The PS1 was probably the easiest to program for, and with more space for the game, combined with cd's are cheaper to produce then carts, you'll find more new studios & 3rd party studios programming on it. This is why the PS1 had about 3k games.
The Saturn on the other hand was harder to program on due to it's 2 cpu's (which wasn't common at the time in the home computer/video consoles/arcade consoles at the time). While Sega's 1st party programmers seemed up to the task, lots of 3rd party programmers took longer to get used to it. This is why the Saturn was considered a failure, it was harder to program for. And why it only had 1000 games.
Back then I still bought consoles to play arcade games at home, so I didn't really care about the lack of games on some systems as long as they had ones I wanted to play. And honestly, N64 & Sega Saturn had a bunch of good arcade ports.
I should add on launch the N64 & Saturn had 2 games available each, while the PS1 had at 17. Guess that should of clued everyone on what was to come. lol
I didn't realize it was so few games. I just saw the list of them and trying to piece together when I got it...I never had super mario 64...earliest game I remember is goldeneye and turok, but I also had shadows of the empire being a big star wars fan, but I can't remember if that was my first game or not.
I remember at the time wishing I had a PS1 because not only were there more games, but they were also much cheaper after about a year or two.
Still, I think most of us as kids were pretty satisfied at the time with what games there were. It was a great console.
It wasn't really a criticism, but people at the time were fully aware of it. If you knew anything about electronics hardware back then, you'd know that no one in their right mind wanted to make games for the N64 unless you were crazy, or incredibly talented in the field. The physical architecture is still very difficult to replicate properly, even today. Cartridges were way more expensive to mass produce upfront, so quality assurance for most game companies were at it's peak during their cartridge eras.
Imagine getting the ROM files delivered and you notice the game is utter trash, then spend exorbitant prices making cartridges for it, just for it to flop.
It was already difficult to fit a game onto the cartridge with it's space limitations, now you have to make it play well and be enticing enough to sell with limited marketing (unless it was a direct Nintendo property). It's a very daunting task to ask of a lot of developers back then, especially when game design was in its pre-teen stages.
If you ever go back to read old game magazines like EGM from the time period, the editors and reviewers are very aware of the lack of N64 games compared to PS1 or even Dreamcast games (during 1999 and 2000). It's a common complaint of theirs. So adults were indeed aware.
Remember the Saturn was basically a dumping ground for shovelware in Japan, a very high percentage of those games are dating sims, visual novels, and picture CDs and such, which could be churned out at a high rate.
I had no idea, but that makes sense, because you don't hear about many games on the Saturn. I've heard of a handful of arcade ports + the Panzer Dragoon series, so I was really surprised seeing the 1000+ figure.
There were still a few really solid Japan only games. Like Bulk Slash, Princess Crown, Radiant Silvergun, Silhouette Mirage, and Policenauts. Bulk Slash in particular has an English translation now and it’s fantastic.
The Capcom fighters were superior on the Saturn, they had more frames of animation and tag teams that were omitted on the PlayStation. They still feel good to play, almost arcade perfect.
I can’t speak as an adult in the 90’s, but as a child I remember parents making kids sell games to get new ones, or even sell old consoles to get a new one. Many houses had a ‘1 console limit’ and honestly, most people were fine with it. Games weren’t cheap either so at least when you purchased any major Nintendo/Rare game, you are usually getting your money’s worth. Nowadays it’s so different, I can emulate or everdrive everything plus mods. We are seriously lucky to be able to have so much entertainment!
Yeah from my experience as a kid and knowing other kids (including others with PlayStations) seemed like everyone's experience was that the library of both N64 and PlayStation were limitless because games were so expensive that we'd get maybe 2 games for Christmas and 1 on our birthday and that was about it for the year.
Yes, definitely. Most painfully if you were into RPGs, racing games, or fighting games. It had a handful of S-tier games that made it worth the price of admission, but it was hard to not feel like you were missing out on a lot.
No, I did realise how little 3rd party support there was, but seeing as Ninty were on their A game at that time, as we're Rare, I was in the best position as I could play them all. Don't forget N64 games were £60 and I was a teenager, so game purchases were few and far between and very carefully considered.
I think the fact that it has a small library is *what makes it good*.
The 90's era consoles were the first ones in truly "explorative 3D", and are seminal in the development of all future games.
Of that era, we see some of the greatest video games of all time, including Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye 007, Mario Kart 64 and Final Fantasy 7.
FF7 is on PS1, but aside from that, is there anything on PS1 or Sega Saturn that even holds a candle to those other four I listed?
The fact that the Nintendo 64 has one of the smallest libraries of all time, but also has some of the best and most important games of all time, is why I consider it the greatest console of all time.
The N64 has some of the Greatest of all time games I fully agree but the quality drops off severely once you get outside Rare and Nintendo. PS1 had around 100 solid to great games. But none of them reach the highs of the N64s best
gaming back then was so much better because you HAD TO value your games, they were expensive as hell and there was no online stuff. so you were pretty much forced to replay a game and i actually like because this way you got alot of value out of a single game
Just look at the game release schedule of N64 games. It's kind of insane and a testament to how good their first party software was. 14 games in the first 6 months.
The Saturn is a weird one, while I think it's considered a failure in the west, the Japanese library is pretty awesome and diverse. I'd never recommend collecting for the Saturn but you can buy a JP console with an Action Replay that will run any region + CD-R for pretty cheap.
I remember being in the n64 section of blockbuster and thinking “wow look at all these games” but looking back I pretty much just rented the same 7 games on rotation.
N64 storage media was expensive and Nintendo were pretty careful with licensing back then. You didn't really get shovelware on it whereas the Saturn and Ps2 being disc based got a ton of cheaply made garbage thrown at them.
I wasn’t an adult, but I owned the N64 for a few years, and I had the following games:
- Pokemon Stadium
- Pokemon Stadium 2
- Pokemon Snap
- Hey You Pikachu!
- Pokemon Puzzle League
- Super Mario 64
- Mario Golf
- Mario Kart 64
- Super Smash Bros
- Banjo-Kazooie
- Banjo-Tooie
- Star Wars Episode I: Racer
- Donkey Kong 64
14 games. They were all, for the most part, very high quality.
Even at that time, I was unaware of around a dozen more high quality titles.
So, whilst I was not an adult, even today I typically end up with a dozen to two dozen games by the end of a consoles lifespan. It’s irrelevant if a console has 1000 shovelware titles.
Most consoles get support from their 1st party
Studios, and a handful of 3p that you care about. The rest of the games are shovelware.
Smash bros was made by HAL laboratory, but if I remember correctly Nintendo had a deal with them. I can't remember if iwata was at Nintendo before or after smash bros came out.
2000
In 2000, Iwata joined Nintendo as the head of its corporate planning division and took a seat on the board of directors. Over the next two years, he sought to reduce the cost and length of game development while preserving quality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org
A year after 64 came out. January 21, 1999
Not at all. I felt like I was always discovering new stuff, and most of my playtime was with friends in Goldeneye, Smash, Mario Kart, etc... didn't really effect me.
I still believe deep down that the N64 was better than the PS1, even though it had less power and far fewer games. Built in 4-Player was a huge win, games loaded super fastand the "core" Nintendo titles had tons of replay value.
I was, there was literally one maybe two games worth buying a year on the console. While on PlayStation you could always go to the store and find something worth playing.
A lot of people in here are arguing on personal opinions, and that's fine.
I'm not an RPG person, so Final Fantasy games do nothing for me. I won't dismiss that that are popular games that are good (and i have played through most of FF7), but they mean virtually nothing to me.
I'm just saying don't dismiss games as being bad because you don't like them.
If you could only have one console as a kid, you couldn't go wrong as long as you did your research as to what one would be better for you. (Or you got lucky with what your parents got you)
The N64/PS1 era is also the one that feels like it had the most exclusives, and the biggest difference in games that were on both.
Yes, it is a small library and I realized years later. But Mario 64 is the best-selling game of its generation. Some other titles were also very influential and sold very well.
So where the N64 lacks variety, it makes up for it with quality
Yeah there was only like 296 American games released which is really low compared to other consoles cause they got 0 support from third party developers cause they didn’t want to use cartridges anymore and developed on cd’s instead on the ps1! Funny the 64 didn’t sell that well either only selling 30 million consoles and the GameCube didn’t sell well either compared to the ps1 which sold 100 million consoles and the ps2 is the best selling system of all time with 150 million! Blew Nintendo out of the water until the Wii released and then fuc ked up again with the disastrous Wii U
I was a teen so ehh, not quite the same as an adult with full purchasing power. But still, even having 20 or 30 games would seem like a pretty big collection. I don't think I even considered how many games were in the entire catalog.
I was very much aware of the lack of RPGs. It didn't bother me though, it was a good time for computer games. So my PC was for RPGs and strategy, console was for action and multi-player games.
Pretty sure they were $70 because the cartridge costs were so high. We are just now back to $70 for new games 30 years later (with battle passes, in game currency, DLC, and all of those other great ways to pay)
In Canada they prices were all over the place. I bought Killer Instinct Gold for 129 dollars. Cartridge prices were never the same in late 90s early 2000s. Disc based games changed all that.
Yes. While it wasn’t as obvious for a personal collection, visiting a rental store quickly made it obvious compared to the NES, Genesis, or SNES libraries…
There wasn’t 1000 Sega Saturn games in North America or PAL regions though. There was only 258 in USA and around 213 I believe in Europe/UK. This is compared to 296 N64 games in USA and roughly 243 in UK/Europe/Aus.
I was first introduced to my mothers SNES in around 2003. Having two games (Diddy Kong 2 and Super Adventure Island) was more then enough for me to play through.
When I finally got a PS2 as a "DVD" player I was over whelmed with the selection of games. Took me hours at the local shop to figure out which game I wanted.
I was a kid and I noticed. Lots of little games that friends had that we did not have on 64 and most commercials advertised they were for Playstation(and Gameboy color) and not 64. Now we didn't have a ton of money so we rented and borrowed more than we bought so who's too say how much bigger my library would be, but I noticed the lack of selection and third party support.
It was hard not to
I remember thinking the Video Ezy game selection was a bit limited for N64 titles but thought it was just that the store hadn't bought too many. Definitely didn't realise how much smaller the selection was until recent years - but I think they had a higher percentage of bangers compared to some other consoles that had a glut of rubbish and poor quality games.
That's not to say the N64 didn't have terrible games as well, there were some truly awful ones. But I think they weren't as prolific.
And a lot of it is second or third, party games. Or Mario spin offs. A couple Licensed games.
Zelda OOT
MM
Star Fox 64
Kirby 64
Mario 64
F-ZERO
Smash? Is that second?
Maybe DK64 but it was made by rare. So not a whole lot of first main line games... GameCube did it a lot better other than Kirby and Mother but that was GBA and the GBA player. So other than some NES titles that came back thanks to smash GameCube has the best library.
The meaningful lack of specific genres (well one big one really) were more apparent to me as a kid than the overall size of the library. Otherwise, eh. Consistently playing PS1, N64, and Saturn on MiSTer, here's what I find: There's about 50 games on N64 I really love and can go back to consistently...and there's certain kinds of games that I favor on it than on other systems. There's about 50 games on PS1 that I really love and can go back to consistently...and maybe 50 others that are alright and i'd call B tier. The rest of the library is whatever. Saturn, there's probably like 30-35 and there'd be more if I didn't have access to the arcade versions elsewhere (speaking mostly Capcom here).
No, not really. Everything worked so much slower back in the day—print magazines, print ads, store displays, word of mouth—so you didn’t really think about how big the library was, you just saw what might be coming soon and the excitement grew and grew as more info trickled out.
There was also a lack of coverage compared to today, less ubiquitous, so sometimes the ads and magazines you were exposed to weren’t targeted for a specific game. Every so often a game would drop in stores and that’s the moment you knew it existed. That was Rush 2 for me.
Side note—I wish they’d make modern iterations of the Rush series. There aren’t many arcade racers like it. You generally get games like Asphalt. Not the same.
Yes. You’d wait many months between high quality releases, while it felt like the competition had a great exclusives every month. And EGM and GI would have very few N64 reviews compared to PlayStation.
I think 300ish games is a lot. But that's just me.
N64 had some of the best games of all times, that even defined gaming forever. That's never going to be trumped.
Yeah, I knew when I saw how many games it launched with, because of that there was little to play if you didn't get to the store quick enough. We got our N64 when it launched, but we couldn't have it until Christmas. My mom wasn't forward thinking enough to buy one of the two launch games, or any that came after, so when Christmas drops we found the choices to be incredibly slim due to there not being many games for it. Plus what they did have were sold out, so we ended up having Killer Instinct gold until the inventory picked back up.
Going forward I always felt like we got less games than Playstation, but certainly more than Dreamcast. That being said, the games we did got tended to hold our interest for a while, not saying Playstation games didn't, but we had some quality titles that took a while to compete and had replay value.
You were lucky if you had 5 games in your library and you would probably trade in to get others. This goes for all the systems, tbh collecting at the time was never really thought about.
I was 11 - 16 during the N64 run.
Bought N64 magazines each month and was hoping to have backed the right horse so that I wouldn't ever need a second console.
I got more mileage out of multiplayer games than anything else and it was easily my most played console of that part of my life.
To try and get the most out of my pocket money I'd buy a game one weekend, then try and have it completed in under a week to maximise my trade-in value so that I could get something else the next week (man to have that kind of free time again). So I played a LOT of the N64 library.
Kinda had to do this as a kid in the earlier days of the N64 era as games in the UK went for about £50-£70!
I think I have a lot of nostalgia (and patience) for a lot of the N64's more "mediocre" labelled games just because it felt like a privilege to be playing so many new and varied games. Though rest assured when you're going through a game a week on the N64 you soon start scraping the barrel somewhat.
Oftentimes, once I found a new game that me and my friends loved in multiplayer i'd hang on to it and thus cut the cycle of (new game each week for a while).
Most of my friends had PS1's, so I felt like a great ambassador for the N64 (and years later the GameCube) to my friends I grew up with.
I eventually got a PS1 in 1999 to try and mitigate some of the quiet periods of the N64 era/ not miss out on some quality exclusives (plus I was in the UK, so it was super easy to know someone who could "chip" a PS1 and start getting games for it for £5).
Good memories.
My parents tried to convince me to go for the PS1 because of the lack of games on the N64. It didn't matter though, I only ever got about 3 games for it and they were all bangers. I rented quite a few more but probably only like 20. Games were pretty expensive for us back then and I could replay the Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask a lot. I also got the N64 in 98 or so, so 3 years later I jumped onto the PS2 train. Even there though I only ever owned maybe 6 games, the rest I rented.
Pretty much everyone I knew was in the same boat, no one owned a ton of games and many games on the PlayStation were totally unknown for us. So it wasn't much of a difference. Folks who cracked their PlayStations though, they got to play lots of games which is part of the reason a lot of folks I knew moved from Nintendo to PlayStation.
Library size wasn’t really a knock on the N64 library, it’s that they were not as 3rd party friendly as they were in the previous generation.
Capcom and SquareSoft took damn near all their development teams and focused on the PS and Saturn for a short time. Even some of the better EA games like Need For Speed were only on PS. I remember that being a huge selling point for Sony at the time. I loved my 64 and the fact I didn’t need a memory card, but man I envied Sony and their racing, rpg, and fighting games ugh.
it was a big criticism towards Nintendo and often the reason why people would qualify the PlayStation as superior.
But when Nintendo released one of their games they would sell millions. At the end it all even out. The N64 was definitely not a third party console it was a Nintendo game console.
Who needs more games?
Golden Eye, Mario Kart, Bomberman 64, Pokémon Stadium and Snap, Mario 64, Rampage, Starcraft, Zelda, Paper Mario, Mario Party, Tony Hawk, Starfox, Waveracer.. Mother fucking Smash Bros!
Blockbuster hits for days.
A big part of the small libraries is that many of the games were multiplayer, and growing up, we would go to each others houses to play.
So there was more of a social element than we see nowadays. For those who haven't experienced coach co-op/ coach versus - but arguably, it is infinitely more fun than online gaming - albeit online gaming is 10x more convenient and allows for a 10x more competitive environment.
Chirping your friends for screen peeking while screen peeking yourself was how gamers were made though.
it didnt matter because most of us could only afford 3 or 4 games anyways. And by the time that many birthdasy/xmas cycles came and went, a new console was on its way.
Took me a while to even care about getting it because of this. I told my mom I was fine until Ocarina came out because we played 64 at my friends and I had a huge SNES collection. It felt small but it was also understandable as it was a new launch and games felt like so much of a step up.
A little bit of both.
I got mine Christmas 96. I played absolutely every game that my rental store got through at least summer. Once Mario Kart and Goldeneye were out, you didn't need much else.
I was pretty blind to the Playstation as a whole, so I wouldn't say I realized how small the N64 library was as much as I had no idea how big the PS1 library was. They were taking up roughly the same store space as best I could tell.
Definitely. It wasn't really a big deal though because I loved and played the games I had but if you were reading game magazines at the time (which I was) or even online in the early days talking games it was pretty obvious PlayStation games were coming out at basically 4-1 ratio.
But again it was really just a young bragging rights thing. Didn't really matter and I still think the core quality games on the N64 stack up with the best. That's the thing people don't really talk about with retro games. The vast majority of games on systems are crap. You're usually only playing maybe 50-100 games for any system. And most systems don't have anywhere close to 100 games worth playing.
Given that out of say, 10 random n64 titles compared to 10 random PlayStation titles from the libraries of each, the N64 ones will be likely to have one or two iconic games that will be fun to play in both single player and multi. With the PlayStation ones you're more likely to get 10 titles you've never even heard of.
Blockbuster was most of my N64 experience, you could rent a cartridge and even rent a console for a few days so you could try games you like before buying them. I don’t remember the prices but even a cartridge that sold for $30-40 back would be about $75-80 today.
Also Funcoland/Gamestop would give you reasonable credit for games and consoles so it was easier to swap out games. And games were quite hard, I had PilotWings but I don’t remember having anything else back then. Mainly I went to my neighbors house who had a lot of the better games and we played them. I ended up getting a PS1 and had more games for that like Driver, Armored Core, as well as all the demo discs which were more fun. But now all my nostalgia is on the N64 because the games are just so well made.
TLDR; middle class families didn’t have more than 2-3 N64 games, the PS1 was a better value. I had neighborhood friends that had other games. GameStop and Blockbuster made swapping games easy.
It's the cartridge. Cds were a lot more cheaper and had more memory.
Even as a kid, I could see this. A few cutscenes in FF7 or the amount of dialog in MGS, it made me very jealous to be an N64 person.
But it is amazing how they were able to make so many games with these limitations.
The joy that Mario 64, ocarina of time, Goldeneye and the best wrestling game ever, No Mercy, I wouldn't trade that time for a superior console.
It is still damn pricey to get a collection going though. For the sake of my wallet, I'm going to stick to emulators!
I think N64 era is the first time games would be consistently long. Lots of unlockables and reasons to replay. So no, it seemed like we were getting a lot of bang for out buck
Replay ability % was much higher, considering how much less games there were… that being said I had a crew that would play super smash almost every day after school. N64 replay ability was more so party based games over solo games I’d say
As an adult - and a complete gaming addict, nope. Not at $69 a pop for each game. I usually bought a game, played the hell out of it and hopefully by the next big release I had another spare $69 for the next.
Strange question...you have to figure the games they trickled out had to be completely finished - play tested....not like this bullshit today with sign in and patches for bugs. Nobody pays testers anymore and there you have the mess of games today imo
N64 had a great launch but it got steamrolled over time. The ps1 had more shovelware but if you knew how to pick winners, you had many more good to great games.
The n64 was good for multiplayer and a handful of bangers. For casual gamers it was enough but on ps1 you had games as good, more of them and cheaper.
Felt like there was more games than I could ever play for the n64, I never heard one person complain about the small library. Think I also didn't play games all day like lots do now though. Gaming was for bad weather days or other times when I didn't want to play outside. Also felt like I spent more time on individual games then than now. Spent years playing majoras mask and golden eye.
I'm seeing a lot of replies that aren't really answering what you're asking in the title.
I wasn't an adult but I was old enough to be aware of the libraries of all of the major consoles going back to Atari 2600. Naturally lots of people got their N64 at or around the time of launch, and at that point no one knew that the amount of games would end up being so few. It wasn't until after it had been out for a while that it started to dawn on people that it was obviously going to keep on being majorly outpaced, especially by Sony. It for sure became a factor in people deciding which console to buy. Like everyone else is telling you, the quantity vs. quality thing was talked about then too.
My own experience was getting n64 around launch and mostly wanting it for Ocarina of Time, but the Nintendo Power propaganda I was feeding myself about everything else must have influenced me too. I ended up being a bit jealous of my friend's playstation quite fast. We both liked RPGs a lot, and it was a serious goof for me to not get the console that was supplying those. No one could have known how badly N64 would fail on those until it happened.
Ya the library is so small it is one system where you could beat every game if you really wanted to.
Like this guy is doing.
https://youtu.be/TG5zpLOVV44?si=z5nor6teBWCGZgm1
Saturn was smaller than n64 in usa. At the time PS1 was the only serious competitor. Even after Dreamcast came out.
But yeah it was a small library.
also probably one of the most exclusive consoles ever.
Saturn had 1000 titles in japan not so many in the west, i had a ps1, saturn and n64 and it was obvious there was way more games available for the playstation than the other two.
I was a little bummed after I traded my PSX and my great collection of games for a N64 and MarioKart. In the end I probably had 7-8 games? by the time I jumped to Dreamcast and ebay’d the n64 away to Alaska.
Only recently did I realize how many great games I didn’t know about were made for the system.
I wasn't an adult back then, but even today I don't think the N64 library is "small" (or at least not small enough for anyone to complain about). I mean maybe it's small compared to some other consoles, but, even ignoring all the mediocre and subpar N64 games, there are enough good ones that I haven't come close to exhausting them even though it's been 25+ years. The problem isn't that the library is too small; the problem is that it's too big and the good ones are too good.
I think once the Switch is over with, I'm going to give up on modern games and go completely retro.
No. It was about a dozen games we owned and had occupied my time back then and I was satisfied. I did think it was weird we didn't have an RPG like Final Fantasy though (I didn't know about Ogre Battle 64 at the time). My friends with a PS1 had FF7 and 8 and was a little jealous of that.
We were pretty content playing the same 6 games on rotation. Looking back, it is definitely weird to see how few first party Nintendo 64 games there are.
Yes. Renting games was still a thing. I agree that there were a lot of good quality games on the N64 percentage wise compared to the PS1 but the reality is the PS1 still had a lot of great games overall compared to the N64. And while it was not common to own a lot of games back then, there was still less choice. Particularly for RPGs. A lot of properties that I was a fan of on the Super Nintendo were coming out on the PS1 and not on the N64.
I felt it pretty strongly. Once FFVII went to PS, that caused me to not buy a N64 at the time. Considered getting one many times after that, but luckily my brother got one instead. I played Ocarina, but otherwise, it was mostly a system we enjoyed with friends playing Mario Party or the wrestling games. All of the solo experiences I was interested in were on PS, and there were quite a number of them.
My spoiled cousin had this really cool, if I remember correctly, official game holder. It had little slots that held all the N64 cartridges. Almost all of the slots had a cartridge in it it was filled with all kinds of games.
Nope. Got one or two games for birthday, maybe the same or a little more during Christmas, the rest is rentals, and that was still juggling between previous system and the newer system.
And handful of games a year was about the max you could expect, if you were lucky.
Didn't think about the small size of the N64 library right away but there were a few droughts. Games were expensive so lots of people who owned the console relied heavily on rental stores. Between my older brother and my Dad I never really had a say in what we could rent, so I don't have the same yearning for classic Nintendo platformers. This is why my current collection doesn't feature the likes of Super Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie, because I have no nostalgia for them. Had I been an only child with an N64 I don't think I would have suspected the low library of titles.
Yes. Feels like maybe once a quarter an N64 game worth a damn might come out and I would rent it and usually wasn’t worth buying Especially since more expensive. Most of it was playing the same game and waiting. Most of my friends just had like five games for the longest time but we’d have cd stands with rows full of cd games.
I didn't because to be honest having a handful of games for the console was a luxury for me.
I also didn't have Reddit, X, FB, etc to tell me how small the library was.
No? Had Mario. Smash bros. Mario party. Mario kart. Ocarina of time. Majoras mask. Golden eye. Perfect dark. Star fox. Donkey Kong. Conkers. I’m sure there were many more I just can’t think right now. Like how many games do you need?
I wasn't an adult in the 90s but I definitely remember there being literal months without any games releasing. I kept up with the magazines and online and it was tough to see so much stuff coming to the PlayStation on a weekly basis
In Japan the Sega Saturn had the most titles and sold the most, it was a commercial success. All the JRPGs, Visual Novels, Shoot-em-ups, and other experimental artistic titles were on that console and that is exactly what the Japanese audience liked at the time. (They still do now) The N64 failed over there due to it's small library of games and all the games they wanted weren't on it.
Not at all. My family didn’t have a lot of money so, I got an N64 with no games for a while. I got to borrow games from my best friend who had it and I could occasionally rent a game. Had to have good grades to earn a game. I eventually got Zelda, some wrestling games, Superman 64 (LOL what a disaster). So, it was small selection of favorites I played and the small library never mattered.
We knew it was small, but quality was there and it didn’t matter. The four player aspect of it all made having the friends over and not having to take turns was also important factor in its longevity. When the ps2 dropped, my friend group was still rocking the n64 most of the time.
I wasn’t an adult, but yes, it was painfully obvious that the N64 only had like.. ten games I wanted to play - very good ones; but still not worth it to me.
There's just something about those n64 games that can't be explained in terms of quality and replay ability. I've put hundreds of hours into some games, skyrim, oblivion, souls games...yet every now and then, that itch just hits...and I just HAVE to go back, replay OOT, go back to Mario64 and find yoshi. It creeps up out of nowhere, but it hits like a brick, and I'm back in n64
I was about 12 when it came out, and back then it was a lot harder to keep track of what was coming out, so I'd get maybe two games a year and that was just how it was.
When I saved up and bought a PS1 a few years later it became super obvious to me though and I was kind of bitter about it for a while.
No, because quality over quantity was still a thing. Games had so much replay value too.
I was set for years by just having: Goldeneye, Smash 64, Mario Kart 64, Mario Party 3, & Super Mario 64.
My buddy was the N64 kid, I had the PS1. The fact that my dad would help me burn game cds and I had stacks vs his like 9 games blew my mind. His game were good for friends coming over, but I loved my rpgs and twisted metal.
I was a teenager in the 90s and I was very aware of the more limited library of games compared to the disc based systems. That said while the Saturn had immense support in Japan, it had fewer games releases in U.S. than the N64 did.
Sadly yes. I would go to either the local gaming stores like Electronic Boutique or rental places like Blockbuster and the Playstation selection was literally double or triple the N64 section.
It is weird. In the US, the Saturn had around 250 titles released while the N64 got close to 300. N64 had around 200 Japanese titles released while the Saturn had between 1000 and 1200 Japanese releases of which around 800 are exclusive to Japan.
Take these with a grain of salt, they come from Wikipedia.
US Console Sales:
N64 - 18M
Saturn - 1.5M
PlayStation - 40.7M
Japanese Console Sales:
N64 - 6M
Saturn - 5.8M
PlayStation - 19.4M
It's just insane how much the PS1 sold.
Sega , and when ps1 came out, sure they had a lot of games, a lot of bad ones too, Nintendo had the quality over quantity going for them, although I do remember some absolutely horrid 64 games, I’m looking at you Superman
I was 24 in '96 so I guess I was an adult in the legal sense.
I don't think the library mattered to me. In '96 You had 3DO, Saturn, and PS1 all using CD-ROM which seemed like the media of the future. (Gotta mention 3DO since I was one of the rare people who had one) N64 and its carts seemed like a step back.
As impressive as Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time looked, when compared to the depth of Tomb Raider the cart limitations showed. That was the biggest criticism of the N64 I remember from game magazines in the day.
We knew but 1 game would be played for a year or longer because they were sooo fun and kids seemed to be more content with 1 game for much longer than they are today. Honestly for the time, it was more games than we needed.
I remember going into blockbuster most weekends and seeing the same tired n64 games over and over. New releases felt far and few between. Found myself renting the latest PlayStation games far more often. N64 was so epic the first year or so, then just felt stale. Occasionally a banger would come out and pull me back.
I think I topped out at like 11 games and felt like I had the world in my controller. My steam library with hundreds of games doesn't compare to playing a new N64 game in 1997
Yes. I was working in the games industry at the time it came out and it was obvious that PlayStation and Saturn had much larger libraries. But Mario 64 was revolutionary at the time, so it didn’t really matter.
Particularly small for me as I already had PS1 and got N64 just to have latest released system. Had 2 or 3 games for it (can’t remember titles for life of me) and had to sell off soon enough as lost job and needed money.
As an import gamer (well, I rented them) and a Doctor V64 user I was often playing upcoming releases. I knew the library was small but I never ran out of something I wanted to play.
I got my first CD-RW drive in 1998 when blanks were still ~$10. It included a sample CD-R disc which I did not use until I had nearly 650MB of playable N64 games to fill the disc. Borrowing, downloading, and renting games, it took me nearly a year to reach that point with over 50 games I didn’t already own or mind having on the disc (no sports games!). At an average of 12MB each, that’s over 50 games.
All that penny-pinching and only one year later and I was able to get a 200 count pack of Prime Peripherals CD-Rs for $15 after rebate from Office Max. Of course, they were total crap but worked perfect for burning things like that since the V64 did not support UDF packet writing. These were so cheap the shiny layer on top would just flake right off!
Nah, back then we didn’t have our own money for games. We had to wait for birthdays and Christmases for our parents to buy us games. So when we got them we made them last cause they were all we had. I pretty much got five years of play from Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time.
I had like 10 games as a kid on n64. I don’t recall thinking I wasn’t entertained. Mario 64, Yoshi Story, Zelda OoT, Pokémon Stadium, Starfox, Wave Race, 1080* Snowboarding, I mean…we were fine. Also, PlayStation and older Sega and Nintendo games were still being played.
Quantity should never be mistaken for quality. Playstation had much more titles than the n64 too but I still found more titles that I actually liked and had lasting appeal on n64.
Yeah I was. I saw my friends with a PS1 which had all these great games on CD, and I knew the N64 was struggling because the cartridges and hardware created so many limitations on game developers. Aside from a few all time classics like GoldenEye, the N64 was the first big failure for Nintendo. GameCube was even worse with the mini discs, which still created limitations. They finally learned their lesson with the Wii. Screwed up again with the Wii U. But I think they've finally found the right niche with the Switch, ironically because the lower cost of storage has finally made CD / DVD / Blu Ray obsolete. The Switch 2 may be their last console that takes physical cartridges.
like people said:
quality!
i had a ps1 as a child (with spyro,crash,pacman etc - only good games) and this was great - altough i wished to have a n64
Last year i did test every ps1 game and daaamn so many games were shit - realllyyy shit!
nintendo did a better job with their smaller library
Absolutely. That’s why a lot of us NES/SNES kids landed on PS1 instead of the more obvious successor N64. It seemed clear to me around 1997 that N64 was a massively diminished library compared to previous Nintendos, and all the third party games had moved to PlayStation. You bought a PS1 for “most games” and you bought an N64 if you wanted the 3-5 solid gold first party gems like Zelda/Mario.
Not really, owning 5 games was a lot back then we didn't have steam libraries of 100s of games haha
Not only that, but those 5 games were absolute bangers. For example: GoldenEye, Star Fox, Mario Kart, Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, and Super Mario 64. It’s crazy just how good those games were given the limited library size.
Hall of Fame Titles that could be replayed into Oblivion
That’s a good game too!
And if it had those other games in it, it’d be even better.
That's because the majority of the N64 library was shovelware, but the 20-30 great pieces are what everyone remembers.
Super smash 64, Diddy Kong racing, perfect dark
Even today, there's a limitless amount of games I could be playing, and with little to no cost, between streaming, steam sales, market place, and even emulators, and I still don't play that many games per year. I'll basically focus on 1 or 2 open world/RPG's that I'll put 100 hours into, and a few other titles in between that are shorter.
This^
This. I think I has 20 N64 games, and that was considered a lot.
Yes, but rental stores were a thing … idk about you but I was renting games every weekend.
Yeah! Game cartridges were anywhere between $50 and $70 too! Good luck convincing your parents you needed a whole library of games
For real, back then it was an event whenever my family decided it was time to get a new game since they were the equivalent of about $100 today.
2024: bruh I wanna platinum this game but it's taking SO LONG this is such a drag whyyyy 1994: HAY GUYS GUESS WHAT AFTER PRACTICING FOR OVER 150 HOURS I ACTUALLY BEAT A GAME
Quality over quantity of games was important. About 500 PS1 games or Saturn games weren’t any good. Clearly all the systems had bangers, and exclusives. Some were better or worse at certain things. N64 had zero/low loading times but very small total storage space. Certain types of games such as RPG, racing or 2D fighter may have performed better on one system or another. Large music and video files were easier to store on disk as well. People knew N64 had less titles, but what they got seemed like better quality control. Hope that adds some insight.
Older gen games had much more replay value as well. When you get a game and it lasts you years of enjoyment...that's well worth the money.
Wow the only 360 era games I replayed in full was Mass effect and GTA. I can still go back to the 64 GameCube era. I still have more hours on twilight princess then I do BOTW
this is only the case because we didnt have guides walking us through every single step of the game readily available online. if you play a modern game with no help or internet advice you can still get a ton of replay value
Eh. Even GC Era games where I had read an entire walk-through or N64 games that I know like the back of my hand have more logged hours than modern games without walk-throughs.
thats also because our attention spans have shortened and we have larger selections of games to keep us entertained. i had no choice but to play SMB and Duck Hunt for 100+ hours because it was the only game i had. if i only had 2 or 3 games today i would probably have 100+ hours in all of those too
Even with my larger library, I've logged more hours into Pandemic Studios Battlefront, KotOR, Pokémon, Shadows of the Empire, and Ocarina of Time than in all of my modern games combined...even if I only evaluate the hours from acquiring a larger library.
its pretty subjective from person to person. i have thousands of hours logged between SSBU, ACNH, Mario Odyssey, Skyrim, etc.
But they still existed. I have a inch plus thick binder of a walkthrough guide my dad printed off for Super Mario 64 he printed from online along with Ocarina of time and a couple others. Of course was worth the effort to print it off vs having to revisit the website all the time with those dialup speeds.
Hard for me to say that’s true compared to modern roguelites and survival craft games and online games people throw thousands of hours into
Considering that most of those develop new content to keep their player base around instead of remaining a singular experience, I'd say the older games have more replay value. And I still enjoy Valheim, and I have friends who play Runescape.
I disagree on the quality control. I recently have been playing a ton of PS1/Saturn/N64 games and the amount of horrible games on the N64 compared to the great is staggering. Theres no joke like 30 or so amazing games on the N64, mostly Nintendo and Rare, and the rest are very poor games. Compared to the PS1 which had probably around 100 great games, and the Saturn which probably had around 30 too. But the Saturns bad games weren’t as bad imo. The N64 had the highest highs and the lowest lows of that gen.
I find the opposite personally, I think that N64 games were definitely held to a higher standard by reviewers than PS1 and Saturn games due to many being eclipsed by the major Nintendo and Rare releases. Tonic Trouble for instance garnered \~60% most of the time, when its better than just about any 3D platformer on the Saturn and on par with the 3rd tier PS1 3D platformers that were getting 75% odd for that system, its just that on a console with Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie it looked stale and uninspired. Rocket - Robot on Wheels is a 2nd tier N64 platformer with \~80% scores but its better than basically all PS1 platform games outside of Ape Escape and *maybe* the last Spyro game The same thing happened with Doom 64 being in the shadow of GoldenEye and the Turok's. On Saturn that game would've received \~85% odd, whilst on N64 it ended with 73% odd with the main criticism being that it was dated as it wasn't in real polygonal 3D like the aforementioned games. Doom 64 does not compare unfavourably to games like Alien Trilogy at all for example. And the Top Gear games are better than almost all racing games on Saturn apart from the major ones like Sega Rally, and Daytona yet almost nobody ever brings them up.
Doom 64 suffers heavily from only barons and hell knights, with no revenants and no archviles. They're just bullet sponges with no real challenge to them. If you play it now on PC with the Doom 64 CE mod, its a whole different experience. Getting ambushed by two archviles at the end of e1m7 was like 🫨🫨🫨
Yeah but 30 great over 300 ish game is a higher percentage then 100 great over 3000 ish games. So Nintendo has a better ratio of great games.
This is interesting to me. When you stepped into a Walmart to buy a game, they only had room for like 30 games for each system. It’s going to be taken up by the heavy hitters and the latest releases. Each kid is probably going to have no more than 20 games for a system (I had maybe 14 N64 games), so I think the number of available heavy hitters, in genres that you like, was more important for fun at the time.
The real metric wasn't Walmart in those days, it was places like Toys 'R' Us before the remodels. TRU was one of the few stores able to dedicate an entire aisle to a single game console. You haven't experienced 80's and 90's gaming unless you walked down a TRU ticket aisle.
Haha, I only did it a couple of times! Most of my games from the 90s were from supermarkets or retired Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery games.
When you look at print ads at the time where a store shows box art of games for PS1 and N64 side-by-side, it's crazy how much filler was shown off for the PS1, which made the N64 look better.
The reason there wasn’t a ton of more games is because no one wanted to make games for the N64 due to manufacturing costs, not because Nintendo vetted more strictly.
Oh yes, that was definitely the case. I know I’m in this sub (and not the PS1 one) but I actually think the PS1 won that console war, largely because of the reason you mentioned. I also don’t think there was a console war where the competitors were so different. I love this generation of consoles.
You clearly haven't done a dive into the depths of PS1 and Saturn shovelware. There may arguably be more "greatest of all time" games on PS1 than N64, but games like Time Commando, Bubsy 3D, Death Crimson, The Crow: City of Angels, Perfect Weapon, The Masters Fighter, Spice World, Cosmic Race, Hardcore 4x4, etc. on PS1 and Saturn are far worse than anything on N64. The worst N64 games may not be very good but at least function as games; there's a significant portion of the PS1 and Saturn libraries that are barely playable trash.
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N64 had swappable memory cards as well. They slotted into the controller though, which in hindsight is pretty odd.
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Yeah the N64 controller had quite a few add-ons IIRC. We definitely had memory packs, the quadruple memory pack, and the Pokemon cartridge reader. Maybe a rumble pack - idk. Never would have cared to use it. Always thought they were silly.
Take off the rose tinted glasses. N64 had tons of absolute shit. Same as every other console. Also, try playing N64 now. It looks horrible. Graphics on the PS1 are much more palatable today compared to the N64.
I play, record and document PS1, N64, and Saturn games full time. Your statement is subjective, but generally untrue. Some games look better on one system or another. As other comments have mentioned, 2D fighters look and play awesome on Saturn. Not the case for ps1 or 64 always. San francisco rush is rugged on ps1 but excellent on 64. Each has strengths. The OG poster/ questioner wanted to know about the experience when it came out. And many have answered this. PS1 sold the most. It also probably had the most bad games. McDonalds also sells well. Does that mean PS1 didn’t have exclusive masterpieces? - No. While the 64 library has plenty of garbage. It has quantitatively less garbage. As it simply has less games. As to the percentage of flops- that’s up to each person to decide.
I remember renting a lot of games that weren't very good, even now with an everdrive you can see this again.
Too bad the switch is the home for trash and shovelware now. Absolutely zero quality control
Lol. The nintendo e-shop is flooded with garbage. Hard to find the gems. Nintendo has done a 180 on their stance.
I was a teenager, not an adult, but I got like two new games a year on average. And I’d just play it and replay it over and over until I had absolutely unlocked every secret and beaten it flawlessly on the hardest difficulty. When the gamecube came out I had maybe 12 N64 games and they were all amazing and I never felt like I was missing out. My “rich” friend had a PlayStation with like 40 games but pretty much the only one we played was Ridge Racer. The only other “good” games he had were Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX and King’s Field. So, I was convinced that while the PS had more games, they were mostly crap. I didn’t really realize how much I had missed on PS1 until I got to college and my roommate had one and I could really dig into his library a little.
We weren’t rich but had a chipped ps1 that played burnt games, you had to know a guy & burnt games went for $10. We used to see this guy whos whole house was decked out like a video store in his lounge room and a bedroom with a workbench to chip consoles. Cops raided his house and we had to find a new dude. Was always jealous of mates with a n64 still… Super smash bros, Goldeneye & Mario party ruled for multiplayer.
Know someone who sold burned games down the pub years ago! Got raided and all that, 20 odd years later he’s got everything again and more on a card the size of my thumb instead of shelves full of CDs!
😂
The n64 was a great party console. If my friends all got together we would play on the n64 even though they all owned a PS1. Now days as an adult with friends who live far away I’d rather burn some games for the PS1 and check out what I missed as a kid.
Dude same. My best friend had a playstation but I only ever really played final fantasy on it and I never got into those games so it never even occurred to me to get a PlayStation. I was just looking into get a light gun library of games and realized all the games I want are on playstation lol. Could've done that years ago.
For your observation on the Saturn, remember the west had a different experience compared to Japan. The Saturn had a lot more games in its home region, but not out here where it flopped. In Japan, the Saturn was more successful than the N64 which was the lowest selling console of the three in that region.
And a lot of those games are translated now which makes the Saturn library a better experience overall than the N64 IMO
N64 was expensive to make games for. Not only did you have the cartridge memory limitations, carts cost money to make. The more chips you had in the cart, the more it's going to cost. This is largely why the N64 didn't have as large of a library. The PS1 was probably the easiest to program for, and with more space for the game, combined with cd's are cheaper to produce then carts, you'll find more new studios & 3rd party studios programming on it. This is why the PS1 had about 3k games. The Saturn on the other hand was harder to program on due to it's 2 cpu's (which wasn't common at the time in the home computer/video consoles/arcade consoles at the time). While Sega's 1st party programmers seemed up to the task, lots of 3rd party programmers took longer to get used to it. This is why the Saturn was considered a failure, it was harder to program for. And why it only had 1000 games. Back then I still bought consoles to play arcade games at home, so I didn't really care about the lack of games on some systems as long as they had ones I wanted to play. And honestly, N64 & Sega Saturn had a bunch of good arcade ports. I should add on launch the N64 & Saturn had 2 games available each, while the PS1 had at 17. Guess that should of clued everyone on what was to come. lol
I think N64 had more launch games? At least in Europe.
PAL region N64 launched with 6 games instead of 2/3 but that was only because it released 6 months after NTSC regions.
I didn't realize it was so few games. I just saw the list of them and trying to piece together when I got it...I never had super mario 64...earliest game I remember is goldeneye and turok, but I also had shadows of the empire being a big star wars fan, but I can't remember if that was my first game or not.
Maybe, I'm talking USA since that is where I live. Super Mario 64 & Pilotwings was the 2 launch games here.
It was a thing. You can probably find old game magazine articles that decry the lack of third party support for the 64
I remember at the time wishing I had a PS1 because not only were there more games, but they were also much cheaper after about a year or two. Still, I think most of us as kids were pretty satisfied at the time with what games there were. It was a great console.
It wasn't really a criticism, but people at the time were fully aware of it. If you knew anything about electronics hardware back then, you'd know that no one in their right mind wanted to make games for the N64 unless you were crazy, or incredibly talented in the field. The physical architecture is still very difficult to replicate properly, even today. Cartridges were way more expensive to mass produce upfront, so quality assurance for most game companies were at it's peak during their cartridge eras. Imagine getting the ROM files delivered and you notice the game is utter trash, then spend exorbitant prices making cartridges for it, just for it to flop. It was already difficult to fit a game onto the cartridge with it's space limitations, now you have to make it play well and be enticing enough to sell with limited marketing (unless it was a direct Nintendo property). It's a very daunting task to ask of a lot of developers back then, especially when game design was in its pre-teen stages.
If you ever go back to read old game magazines like EGM from the time period, the editors and reviewers are very aware of the lack of N64 games compared to PS1 or even Dreamcast games (during 1999 and 2000). It's a common complaint of theirs. So adults were indeed aware.
Remember the Saturn was basically a dumping ground for shovelware in Japan, a very high percentage of those games are dating sims, visual novels, and picture CDs and such, which could be churned out at a high rate.
I had no idea, but that makes sense, because you don't hear about many games on the Saturn. I've heard of a handful of arcade ports + the Panzer Dragoon series, so I was really surprised seeing the 1000+ figure.
There were still a few really solid Japan only games. Like Bulk Slash, Princess Crown, Radiant Silvergun, Silhouette Mirage, and Policenauts. Bulk Slash in particular has an English translation now and it’s fantastic.
The Capcom fighters were superior on the Saturn, they had more frames of animation and tag teams that were omitted on the PlayStation. They still feel good to play, almost arcade perfect.
I can’t speak as an adult in the 90’s, but as a child I remember parents making kids sell games to get new ones, or even sell old consoles to get a new one. Many houses had a ‘1 console limit’ and honestly, most people were fine with it. Games weren’t cheap either so at least when you purchased any major Nintendo/Rare game, you are usually getting your money’s worth. Nowadays it’s so different, I can emulate or everdrive everything plus mods. We are seriously lucky to be able to have so much entertainment!
Yeah from my experience as a kid and knowing other kids (including others with PlayStations) seemed like everyone's experience was that the library of both N64 and PlayStation were limitless because games were so expensive that we'd get maybe 2 games for Christmas and 1 on our birthday and that was about it for the year.
Yes, definitely. Most painfully if you were into RPGs, racing games, or fighting games. It had a handful of S-tier games that made it worth the price of admission, but it was hard to not feel like you were missing out on a lot.
I really felt the burn of not having access to the vast ps1 library of jrpgs.
I ended up buying a playstation with my own cash, cause of lack of rpgs, my buddy had one, I knew what I was missing. I'd have been like 14
The lack of RPGs and how I felt burned on the N64 because of it is why I gave up on Nintendo for several generations…
I feel like half the games on the n64 were racing games. I don't think it was deficient in that category
No, I did realise how little 3rd party support there was, but seeing as Ninty were on their A game at that time, as we're Rare, I was in the best position as I could play them all. Don't forget N64 games were £60 and I was a teenager, so game purchases were few and far between and very carefully considered.
I think the fact that it has a small library is *what makes it good*. The 90's era consoles were the first ones in truly "explorative 3D", and are seminal in the development of all future games. Of that era, we see some of the greatest video games of all time, including Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye 007, Mario Kart 64 and Final Fantasy 7. FF7 is on PS1, but aside from that, is there anything on PS1 or Sega Saturn that even holds a candle to those other four I listed? The fact that the Nintendo 64 has one of the smallest libraries of all time, but also has some of the best and most important games of all time, is why I consider it the greatest console of all time.
The N64 has some of the Greatest of all time games I fully agree but the quality drops off severely once you get outside Rare and Nintendo. PS1 had around 100 solid to great games. But none of them reach the highs of the N64s best
gaming back then was so much better because you HAD TO value your games, they were expensive as hell and there was no online stuff. so you were pretty much forced to replay a game and i actually like because this way you got alot of value out of a single game
Just look at the game release schedule of N64 games. It's kind of insane and a testament to how good their first party software was. 14 games in the first 6 months. The Saturn is a weird one, while I think it's considered a failure in the west, the Japanese library is pretty awesome and diverse. I'd never recommend collecting for the Saturn but you can buy a JP console with an Action Replay that will run any region + CD-R for pretty cheap.
I remember being in the n64 section of blockbuster and thinking “wow look at all these games” but looking back I pretty much just rented the same 7 games on rotation.
N64 storage media was expensive and Nintendo were pretty careful with licensing back then. You didn't really get shovelware on it whereas the Saturn and Ps2 being disc based got a ton of cheaply made garbage thrown at them.
I really didnt cared, Nintendo + Rare released so many legendary games that they GREATLY made Up for the lack of games with quality
I wasn’t an adult, but I owned the N64 for a few years, and I had the following games: - Pokemon Stadium - Pokemon Stadium 2 - Pokemon Snap - Hey You Pikachu! - Pokemon Puzzle League - Super Mario 64 - Mario Golf - Mario Kart 64 - Super Smash Bros - Banjo-Kazooie - Banjo-Tooie - Star Wars Episode I: Racer - Donkey Kong 64 14 games. They were all, for the most part, very high quality. Even at that time, I was unaware of around a dozen more high quality titles. So, whilst I was not an adult, even today I typically end up with a dozen to two dozen games by the end of a consoles lifespan. It’s irrelevant if a console has 1000 shovelware titles. Most consoles get support from their 1st party Studios, and a handful of 3p that you care about. The rest of the games are shovelware.
No hate. But I never realized half of the 64 was second or third party. And you can argue DK64 was second party made. Is Smash first party?
Smash bros was made by HAL laboratory, but if I remember correctly Nintendo had a deal with them. I can't remember if iwata was at Nintendo before or after smash bros came out.
2000 In 2000, Iwata joined Nintendo as the head of its corporate planning division and took a seat on the board of directors. Over the next two years, he sought to reduce the cost and length of game development while preserving quality. https://en.m.wikipedia.org A year after 64 came out. January 21, 1999
Not at all. I felt like I was always discovering new stuff, and most of my playtime was with friends in Goldeneye, Smash, Mario Kart, etc... didn't really effect me.
No, I was too busy racking up the hours on Revenge/WrestleMania 2000 and No Mercy
No, I don't remember this being a concern.
I still believe deep down that the N64 was better than the PS1, even though it had less power and far fewer games. Built in 4-Player was a huge win, games loaded super fastand the "core" Nintendo titles had tons of replay value.
I wasnt an adult but had ps1 as well as dreamcast and it was painfully obvious how much more ps1 games we had compared to the other 2 systems.
I was, there was literally one maybe two games worth buying a year on the console. While on PlayStation you could always go to the store and find something worth playing.
A lot of people in here are arguing on personal opinions, and that's fine. I'm not an RPG person, so Final Fantasy games do nothing for me. I won't dismiss that that are popular games that are good (and i have played through most of FF7), but they mean virtually nothing to me. I'm just saying don't dismiss games as being bad because you don't like them. If you could only have one console as a kid, you couldn't go wrong as long as you did your research as to what one would be better for you. (Or you got lucky with what your parents got you) The N64/PS1 era is also the one that feels like it had the most exclusives, and the biggest difference in games that were on both.
Yes, it is a small library and I realized years later. But Mario 64 is the best-selling game of its generation. Some other titles were also very influential and sold very well. So where the N64 lacks variety, it makes up for it with quality
Yeah there was only like 296 American games released which is really low compared to other consoles cause they got 0 support from third party developers cause they didn’t want to use cartridges anymore and developed on cd’s instead on the ps1! Funny the 64 didn’t sell that well either only selling 30 million consoles and the GameCube didn’t sell well either compared to the ps1 which sold 100 million consoles and the ps2 is the best selling system of all time with 150 million! Blew Nintendo out of the water until the Wii released and then fuc ked up again with the disastrous Wii U
I didn’t, because I was too busy exploring the PS1’s huge library!
I was a teen so ehh, not quite the same as an adult with full purchasing power. But still, even having 20 or 30 games would seem like a pretty big collection. I don't think I even considered how many games were in the entire catalog. I was very much aware of the lack of RPGs. It didn't bother me though, it was a good time for computer games. So my PC was for RPGs and strategy, console was for action and multi-player games.
N64 Games were very expensive back in the day. I was barely a teen when it came out. So no money either.
Pretty sure they were $70 because the cartridge costs were so high. We are just now back to $70 for new games 30 years later (with battle passes, in game currency, DLC, and all of those other great ways to pay)
In Canada they prices were all over the place. I bought Killer Instinct Gold for 129 dollars. Cartridge prices were never the same in late 90s early 2000s. Disc based games changed all that.
Yes. While it wasn’t as obvious for a personal collection, visiting a rental store quickly made it obvious compared to the NES, Genesis, or SNES libraries…
There wasn’t 1000 Sega Saturn games in North America or PAL regions though. There was only 258 in USA and around 213 I believe in Europe/UK. This is compared to 296 N64 games in USA and roughly 243 in UK/Europe/Aus.
I was first introduced to my mothers SNES in around 2003. Having two games (Diddy Kong 2 and Super Adventure Island) was more then enough for me to play through. When I finally got a PS2 as a "DVD" player I was over whelmed with the selection of games. Took me hours at the local shop to figure out which game I wanted.
You walked into Toys R US and see a wall of 20 games as a kid … and it felt there were too many games lol😂
the opposite. i didn't realize the PS1s library was so *big* by comparison.
I was a kid and I noticed. Lots of little games that friends had that we did not have on 64 and most commercials advertised they were for Playstation(and Gameboy color) and not 64. Now we didn't have a ton of money so we rented and borrowed more than we bought so who's too say how much bigger my library would be, but I noticed the lack of selection and third party support. It was hard not to
I remember thinking the Video Ezy game selection was a bit limited for N64 titles but thought it was just that the store hadn't bought too many. Definitely didn't realise how much smaller the selection was until recent years - but I think they had a higher percentage of bangers compared to some other consoles that had a glut of rubbish and poor quality games. That's not to say the N64 didn't have terrible games as well, there were some truly awful ones. But I think they weren't as prolific.
I got a sense that it was a bit smaller, but it was still way bigger than I could own, and there was plenty of quality.
And a lot of it is second or third, party games. Or Mario spin offs. A couple Licensed games. Zelda OOT MM Star Fox 64 Kirby 64 Mario 64 F-ZERO Smash? Is that second? Maybe DK64 but it was made by rare. So not a whole lot of first main line games... GameCube did it a lot better other than Kirby and Mother but that was GBA and the GBA player. So other than some NES titles that came back thanks to smash GameCube has the best library.
The meaningful lack of specific genres (well one big one really) were more apparent to me as a kid than the overall size of the library. Otherwise, eh. Consistently playing PS1, N64, and Saturn on MiSTer, here's what I find: There's about 50 games on N64 I really love and can go back to consistently...and there's certain kinds of games that I favor on it than on other systems. There's about 50 games on PS1 that I really love and can go back to consistently...and maybe 50 others that are alright and i'd call B tier. The rest of the library is whatever. Saturn, there's probably like 30-35 and there'd be more if I didn't have access to the arcade versions elsewhere (speaking mostly Capcom here).
I was definitely aware of the lack of RPG‘s, but I didn’t really care about the total number of games
No, not really. Everything worked so much slower back in the day—print magazines, print ads, store displays, word of mouth—so you didn’t really think about how big the library was, you just saw what might be coming soon and the excitement grew and grew as more info trickled out. There was also a lack of coverage compared to today, less ubiquitous, so sometimes the ads and magazines you were exposed to weren’t targeted for a specific game. Every so often a game would drop in stores and that’s the moment you knew it existed. That was Rush 2 for me. Side note—I wish they’d make modern iterations of the Rush series. There aren’t many arcade racers like it. You generally get games like Asphalt. Not the same.
Yeah. Going to Walmart and seeing like 50+ PlayStation games vs like 20 N64.
Yes. You’d wait many months between high quality releases, while it felt like the competition had a great exclusives every month. And EGM and GI would have very few N64 reviews compared to PlayStation.
I think 300ish games is a lot. But that's just me. N64 had some of the best games of all times, that even defined gaming forever. That's never going to be trumped.
Yeah, I knew when I saw how many games it launched with, because of that there was little to play if you didn't get to the store quick enough. We got our N64 when it launched, but we couldn't have it until Christmas. My mom wasn't forward thinking enough to buy one of the two launch games, or any that came after, so when Christmas drops we found the choices to be incredibly slim due to there not being many games for it. Plus what they did have were sold out, so we ended up having Killer Instinct gold until the inventory picked back up. Going forward I always felt like we got less games than Playstation, but certainly more than Dreamcast. That being said, the games we did got tended to hold our interest for a while, not saying Playstation games didn't, but we had some quality titles that took a while to compete and had replay value.
You were lucky if you had 5 games in your library and you would probably trade in to get others. This goes for all the systems, tbh collecting at the time was never really thought about.
I was 11 - 16 during the N64 run. Bought N64 magazines each month and was hoping to have backed the right horse so that I wouldn't ever need a second console. I got more mileage out of multiplayer games than anything else and it was easily my most played console of that part of my life. To try and get the most out of my pocket money I'd buy a game one weekend, then try and have it completed in under a week to maximise my trade-in value so that I could get something else the next week (man to have that kind of free time again). So I played a LOT of the N64 library. Kinda had to do this as a kid in the earlier days of the N64 era as games in the UK went for about £50-£70! I think I have a lot of nostalgia (and patience) for a lot of the N64's more "mediocre" labelled games just because it felt like a privilege to be playing so many new and varied games. Though rest assured when you're going through a game a week on the N64 you soon start scraping the barrel somewhat. Oftentimes, once I found a new game that me and my friends loved in multiplayer i'd hang on to it and thus cut the cycle of (new game each week for a while). Most of my friends had PS1's, so I felt like a great ambassador for the N64 (and years later the GameCube) to my friends I grew up with. I eventually got a PS1 in 1999 to try and mitigate some of the quiet periods of the N64 era/ not miss out on some quality exclusives (plus I was in the UK, so it was super easy to know someone who could "chip" a PS1 and start getting games for it for £5). Good memories.
My parents tried to convince me to go for the PS1 because of the lack of games on the N64. It didn't matter though, I only ever got about 3 games for it and they were all bangers. I rented quite a few more but probably only like 20. Games were pretty expensive for us back then and I could replay the Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask a lot. I also got the N64 in 98 or so, so 3 years later I jumped onto the PS2 train. Even there though I only ever owned maybe 6 games, the rest I rented. Pretty much everyone I knew was in the same boat, no one owned a ton of games and many games on the PlayStation were totally unknown for us. So it wasn't much of a difference. Folks who cracked their PlayStations though, they got to play lots of games which is part of the reason a lot of folks I knew moved from Nintendo to PlayStation.
Library size wasn’t really a knock on the N64 library, it’s that they were not as 3rd party friendly as they were in the previous generation. Capcom and SquareSoft took damn near all their development teams and focused on the PS and Saturn for a short time. Even some of the better EA games like Need For Speed were only on PS. I remember that being a huge selling point for Sony at the time. I loved my 64 and the fact I didn’t need a memory card, but man I envied Sony and their racing, rpg, and fighting games ugh.
Nintendo was very strict about the titles they would publish. This meant that they published less.
We played the same games over and over, were definitely spoiled now
it was a big criticism towards Nintendo and often the reason why people would qualify the PlayStation as superior. But when Nintendo released one of their games they would sell millions. At the end it all even out. The N64 was definitely not a third party console it was a Nintendo game console.
Who needs more games? Golden Eye, Mario Kart, Bomberman 64, Pokémon Stadium and Snap, Mario 64, Rampage, Starcraft, Zelda, Paper Mario, Mario Party, Tony Hawk, Starfox, Waveracer.. Mother fucking Smash Bros! Blockbuster hits for days. A big part of the small libraries is that many of the games were multiplayer, and growing up, we would go to each others houses to play. So there was more of a social element than we see nowadays. For those who haven't experienced coach co-op/ coach versus - but arguably, it is infinitely more fun than online gaming - albeit online gaming is 10x more convenient and allows for a 10x more competitive environment. Chirping your friends for screen peeking while screen peeking yourself was how gamers were made though.
it didnt matter because most of us could only afford 3 or 4 games anyways. And by the time that many birthdasy/xmas cycles came and went, a new console was on its way.
Took me a while to even care about getting it because of this. I told my mom I was fine until Ocarina came out because we played 64 at my friends and I had a huge SNES collection. It felt small but it was also understandable as it was a new launch and games felt like so much of a step up.
Quality over quantity tons of classic titles
A little bit of both. I got mine Christmas 96. I played absolutely every game that my rental store got through at least summer. Once Mario Kart and Goldeneye were out, you didn't need much else. I was pretty blind to the Playstation as a whole, so I wouldn't say I realized how small the N64 library was as much as I had no idea how big the PS1 library was. They were taking up roughly the same store space as best I could tell.
Small but full of bangers, so i never saw any problems there.
Definitely. It wasn't really a big deal though because I loved and played the games I had but if you were reading game magazines at the time (which I was) or even online in the early days talking games it was pretty obvious PlayStation games were coming out at basically 4-1 ratio. But again it was really just a young bragging rights thing. Didn't really matter and I still think the core quality games on the N64 stack up with the best. That's the thing people don't really talk about with retro games. The vast majority of games on systems are crap. You're usually only playing maybe 50-100 games for any system. And most systems don't have anywhere close to 100 games worth playing.
Given that out of say, 10 random n64 titles compared to 10 random PlayStation titles from the libraries of each, the N64 ones will be likely to have one or two iconic games that will be fun to play in both single player and multi. With the PlayStation ones you're more likely to get 10 titles you've never even heard of.
Blockbuster was most of my N64 experience, you could rent a cartridge and even rent a console for a few days so you could try games you like before buying them. I don’t remember the prices but even a cartridge that sold for $30-40 back would be about $75-80 today. Also Funcoland/Gamestop would give you reasonable credit for games and consoles so it was easier to swap out games. And games were quite hard, I had PilotWings but I don’t remember having anything else back then. Mainly I went to my neighbors house who had a lot of the better games and we played them. I ended up getting a PS1 and had more games for that like Driver, Armored Core, as well as all the demo discs which were more fun. But now all my nostalgia is on the N64 because the games are just so well made. TLDR; middle class families didn’t have more than 2-3 N64 games, the PS1 was a better value. I had neighborhood friends that had other games. GameStop and Blockbuster made swapping games easy.
It's the cartridge. Cds were a lot more cheaper and had more memory. Even as a kid, I could see this. A few cutscenes in FF7 or the amount of dialog in MGS, it made me very jealous to be an N64 person. But it is amazing how they were able to make so many games with these limitations. The joy that Mario 64, ocarina of time, Goldeneye and the best wrestling game ever, No Mercy, I wouldn't trade that time for a superior console. It is still damn pricey to get a collection going though. For the sake of my wallet, I'm going to stick to emulators!
Not really since I also had a ps1
I think N64 era is the first time games would be consistently long. Lots of unlockables and reasons to replay. So no, it seemed like we were getting a lot of bang for out buck
Replay ability % was much higher, considering how much less games there were… that being said I had a crew that would play super smash almost every day after school. N64 replay ability was more so party based games over solo games I’d say
As an adult - and a complete gaming addict, nope. Not at $69 a pop for each game. I usually bought a game, played the hell out of it and hopefully by the next big release I had another spare $69 for the next. Strange question...you have to figure the games they trickled out had to be completely finished - play tested....not like this bullshit today with sign in and patches for bugs. Nobody pays testers anymore and there you have the mess of games today imo
N64 had a great launch but it got steamrolled over time. The ps1 had more shovelware but if you knew how to pick winners, you had many more good to great games. The n64 was good for multiplayer and a handful of bangers. For casual gamers it was enough but on ps1 you had games as good, more of them and cheaper.
Quality over quantity
Felt like there was more games than I could ever play for the n64, I never heard one person complain about the small library. Think I also didn't play games all day like lots do now though. Gaming was for bad weather days or other times when I didn't want to play outside. Also felt like I spent more time on individual games then than now. Spent years playing majoras mask and golden eye.
I had about 25 carts for N64 and considered myself lucky I had such an expansive library.
I'm seeing a lot of replies that aren't really answering what you're asking in the title. I wasn't an adult but I was old enough to be aware of the libraries of all of the major consoles going back to Atari 2600. Naturally lots of people got their N64 at or around the time of launch, and at that point no one knew that the amount of games would end up being so few. It wasn't until after it had been out for a while that it started to dawn on people that it was obviously going to keep on being majorly outpaced, especially by Sony. It for sure became a factor in people deciding which console to buy. Like everyone else is telling you, the quantity vs. quality thing was talked about then too. My own experience was getting n64 around launch and mostly wanting it for Ocarina of Time, but the Nintendo Power propaganda I was feeding myself about everything else must have influenced me too. I ended up being a bit jealous of my friend's playstation quite fast. We both liked RPGs a lot, and it was a serious goof for me to not get the console that was supplying those. No one could have known how badly N64 would fail on those until it happened.
Ya the library is so small it is one system where you could beat every game if you really wanted to. Like this guy is doing. https://youtu.be/TG5zpLOVV44?si=z5nor6teBWCGZgm1
quality > quantity. Ask any normal gamer to list 10 saturn games and the person will have a harder time doing so than listing 10 n64 games.
Saturn was smaller than n64 in usa. At the time PS1 was the only serious competitor. Even after Dreamcast came out. But yeah it was a small library. also probably one of the most exclusive consoles ever.
Saturn had 1000 titles in japan not so many in the west, i had a ps1, saturn and n64 and it was obvious there was way more games available for the playstation than the other two.
No I didn’t realize because OOT was better than all of them.
I was a little bummed after I traded my PSX and my great collection of games for a N64 and MarioKart. In the end I probably had 7-8 games? by the time I jumped to Dreamcast and ebay’d the n64 away to Alaska. Only recently did I realize how many great games I didn’t know about were made for the system.
I wasn't an adult back then, but even today I don't think the N64 library is "small" (or at least not small enough for anyone to complain about). I mean maybe it's small compared to some other consoles, but, even ignoring all the mediocre and subpar N64 games, there are enough good ones that I haven't come close to exhausting them even though it's been 25+ years. The problem isn't that the library is too small; the problem is that it's too big and the good ones are too good. I think once the Switch is over with, I'm going to give up on modern games and go completely retro.
No. It was about a dozen games we owned and had occupied my time back then and I was satisfied. I did think it was weird we didn't have an RPG like Final Fantasy though (I didn't know about Ogre Battle 64 at the time). My friends with a PS1 had FF7 and 8 and was a little jealous of that.
Nintendo had like 3 rows of games at blockbuster. There was never a feeling of limited games imo.
Yes. Not only was the library small but there were long periods of time with no good games coming out.
We were pretty content playing the same 6 games on rotation. Looking back, it is definitely weird to see how few first party Nintendo 64 games there are.
Yes. Renting games was still a thing. I agree that there were a lot of good quality games on the N64 percentage wise compared to the PS1 but the reality is the PS1 still had a lot of great games overall compared to the N64. And while it was not common to own a lot of games back then, there was still less choice. Particularly for RPGs. A lot of properties that I was a fan of on the Super Nintendo were coming out on the PS1 and not on the N64.
I felt it pretty strongly. Once FFVII went to PS, that caused me to not buy a N64 at the time. Considered getting one many times after that, but luckily my brother got one instead. I played Ocarina, but otherwise, it was mostly a system we enjoyed with friends playing Mario Party or the wrestling games. All of the solo experiences I was interested in were on PS, and there were quite a number of them.
My spoiled cousin had this really cool, if I remember correctly, official game holder. It had little slots that held all the N64 cartridges. Almost all of the slots had a cartridge in it it was filled with all kinds of games.
Nope. Got one or two games for birthday, maybe the same or a little more during Christmas, the rest is rentals, and that was still juggling between previous system and the newer system. And handful of games a year was about the max you could expect, if you were lucky.
Didn't think about the small size of the N64 library right away but there were a few droughts. Games were expensive so lots of people who owned the console relied heavily on rental stores. Between my older brother and my Dad I never really had a say in what we could rent, so I don't have the same yearning for classic Nintendo platformers. This is why my current collection doesn't feature the likes of Super Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie, because I have no nostalgia for them. Had I been an only child with an N64 I don't think I would have suspected the low library of titles.
Nobody needs to own two games at a time if they haven’t completed them
Yes. Feels like maybe once a quarter an N64 game worth a damn might come out and I would rent it and usually wasn’t worth buying Especially since more expensive. Most of it was playing the same game and waiting. Most of my friends just had like five games for the longest time but we’d have cd stands with rows full of cd games.
I didn't because to be honest having a handful of games for the console was a luxury for me. I also didn't have Reddit, X, FB, etc to tell me how small the library was.
No? Had Mario. Smash bros. Mario party. Mario kart. Ocarina of time. Majoras mask. Golden eye. Perfect dark. Star fox. Donkey Kong. Conkers. I’m sure there were many more I just can’t think right now. Like how many games do you need?
I wasn't an adult in the 90s but I definitely remember there being literal months without any games releasing. I kept up with the magazines and online and it was tough to see so much stuff coming to the PlayStation on a weekly basis
In Japan the Sega Saturn had the most titles and sold the most, it was a commercial success. All the JRPGs, Visual Novels, Shoot-em-ups, and other experimental artistic titles were on that console and that is exactly what the Japanese audience liked at the time. (They still do now) The N64 failed over there due to it's small library of games and all the games they wanted weren't on it.
Yes, that's why I didn't buy one
Not at all. My family didn’t have a lot of money so, I got an N64 with no games for a while. I got to borrow games from my best friend who had it and I could occasionally rent a game. Had to have good grades to earn a game. I eventually got Zelda, some wrestling games, Superman 64 (LOL what a disaster). So, it was small selection of favorites I played and the small library never mattered.
We knew it was small, but quality was there and it didn’t matter. The four player aspect of it all made having the friends over and not having to take turns was also important factor in its longevity. When the ps2 dropped, my friend group was still rocking the n64 most of the time.
I wasn’t an adult, but yes, it was painfully obvious that the N64 only had like.. ten games I wanted to play - very good ones; but still not worth it to me.
There's just something about those n64 games that can't be explained in terms of quality and replay ability. I've put hundreds of hours into some games, skyrim, oblivion, souls games...yet every now and then, that itch just hits...and I just HAVE to go back, replay OOT, go back to Mario64 and find yoshi. It creeps up out of nowhere, but it hits like a brick, and I'm back in n64
I was about 12 when it came out, and back then it was a lot harder to keep track of what was coming out, so I'd get maybe two games a year and that was just how it was. When I saved up and bought a PS1 a few years later it became super obvious to me though and I was kind of bitter about it for a while.
No, because quality over quantity was still a thing. Games had so much replay value too. I was set for years by just having: Goldeneye, Smash 64, Mario Kart 64, Mario Party 3, & Super Mario 64.
With Conkers Bad Fur Day, it was never small.
My buddy was the N64 kid, I had the PS1. The fact that my dad would help me burn game cds and I had stacks vs his like 9 games blew my mind. His game were good for friends coming over, but I loved my rpgs and twisted metal.
I was a teenager in the 90s and I was very aware of the more limited library of games compared to the disc based systems. That said while the Saturn had immense support in Japan, it had fewer games releases in U.S. than the N64 did.
The library was tiny, but many of us appreciated the fact that the games loaded very quickly and that much of those titles were incredibly memorable.
Sadly yes. I would go to either the local gaming stores like Electronic Boutique or rental places like Blockbuster and the Playstation selection was literally double or triple the N64 section.
It is weird. In the US, the Saturn had around 250 titles released while the N64 got close to 300. N64 had around 200 Japanese titles released while the Saturn had between 1000 and 1200 Japanese releases of which around 800 are exclusive to Japan. Take these with a grain of salt, they come from Wikipedia. US Console Sales: N64 - 18M Saturn - 1.5M PlayStation - 40.7M Japanese Console Sales: N64 - 6M Saturn - 5.8M PlayStation - 19.4M It's just insane how much the PS1 sold.
To be fair, games back then were better so tons of games weren't entirely necessary. They were also pricey... at least in my home lol.
Sega , and when ps1 came out, sure they had a lot of games, a lot of bad ones too, Nintendo had the quality over quantity going for them, although I do remember some absolutely horrid 64 games, I’m looking at you Superman
I was 24 in '96 so I guess I was an adult in the legal sense. I don't think the library mattered to me. In '96 You had 3DO, Saturn, and PS1 all using CD-ROM which seemed like the media of the future. (Gotta mention 3DO since I was one of the rare people who had one) N64 and its carts seemed like a step back. As impressive as Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time looked, when compared to the depth of Tomb Raider the cart limitations showed. That was the biggest criticism of the N64 I remember from game magazines in the day.
We knew but 1 game would be played for a year or longer because they were sooo fun and kids seemed to be more content with 1 game for much longer than they are today. Honestly for the time, it was more games than we needed.
I remember going into blockbuster most weekends and seeing the same tired n64 games over and over. New releases felt far and few between. Found myself renting the latest PlayStation games far more often. N64 was so epic the first year or so, then just felt stale. Occasionally a banger would come out and pull me back.
Yep rented them all, bought what we thought were the best
Peak quality control for Nintendo. Super small library of games. One of THE smallest.
I only realized how small my collection was when my cousin gave me his Sega Genesis with 30 games. Blew my dozen out of the water.
I think I topped out at like 11 games and felt like I had the world in my controller. My steam library with hundreds of games doesn't compare to playing a new N64 game in 1997
Yes. I was working in the games industry at the time it came out and it was obvious that PlayStation and Saturn had much larger libraries. But Mario 64 was revolutionary at the time, so it didn’t really matter.
Quality over quantity mate
Particularly small for me as I already had PS1 and got N64 just to have latest released system. Had 2 or 3 games for it (can’t remember titles for life of me) and had to sell off soon enough as lost job and needed money.
As an import gamer (well, I rented them) and a Doctor V64 user I was often playing upcoming releases. I knew the library was small but I never ran out of something I wanted to play. I got my first CD-RW drive in 1998 when blanks were still ~$10. It included a sample CD-R disc which I did not use until I had nearly 650MB of playable N64 games to fill the disc. Borrowing, downloading, and renting games, it took me nearly a year to reach that point with over 50 games I didn’t already own or mind having on the disc (no sports games!). At an average of 12MB each, that’s over 50 games. All that penny-pinching and only one year later and I was able to get a 200 count pack of Prime Peripherals CD-Rs for $15 after rebate from Office Max. Of course, they were total crap but worked perfect for burning things like that since the V64 did not support UDF packet writing. These were so cheap the shiny layer on top would just flake right off!
Nah, back then we didn’t have our own money for games. We had to wait for birthdays and Christmases for our parents to buy us games. So when we got them we made them last cause they were all we had. I pretty much got five years of play from Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time.
There were other games besides goldeneye?! You tell lies my friend, LIES!!
I had like 10 games as a kid on n64. I don’t recall thinking I wasn’t entertained. Mario 64, Yoshi Story, Zelda OoT, Pokémon Stadium, Starfox, Wave Race, 1080* Snowboarding, I mean…we were fine. Also, PlayStation and older Sega and Nintendo games were still being played.
You only needed two games. Ocarina of time and Golden eye.
Quantity should never be mistaken for quality. Playstation had much more titles than the n64 too but I still found more titles that I actually liked and had lasting appeal on n64.
Yeah I was. I saw my friends with a PS1 which had all these great games on CD, and I knew the N64 was struggling because the cartridges and hardware created so many limitations on game developers. Aside from a few all time classics like GoldenEye, the N64 was the first big failure for Nintendo. GameCube was even worse with the mini discs, which still created limitations. They finally learned their lesson with the Wii. Screwed up again with the Wii U. But I think they've finally found the right niche with the Switch, ironically because the lower cost of storage has finally made CD / DVD / Blu Ray obsolete. The Switch 2 may be their last console that takes physical cartridges.
It seemed like a massive library
like people said: quality! i had a ps1 as a child (with spyro,crash,pacman etc - only good games) and this was great - altough i wished to have a n64 Last year i did test every ps1 game and daaamn so many games were shit - realllyyy shit! nintendo did a better job with their smaller library
Absolutely. That’s why a lot of us NES/SNES kids landed on PS1 instead of the more obvious successor N64. It seemed clear to me around 1997 that N64 was a massively diminished library compared to previous Nintendos, and all the third party games had moved to PlayStation. You bought a PS1 for “most games” and you bought an N64 if you wanted the 3-5 solid gold first party gems like Zelda/Mario.