Did Nintendo lie to us? 

Certainly less impressive nowadays when you can have the equivalent of _millions_ of computers entirely within your pocket.

​@@angeldude101True

Connected to AS400 servers

@@angeldude101 No.

With less than half the IBM PC's library and variety 😉

This is either super wholesome or the N64 went on a friend killing spree.

Both the N64 and the Gamecube were the go to platforms if you wanted to enjoy your friendships (or destroy them) lol

Or cousins if you couldn't make friends 😂

WWF NO MERCY AND GOLDENEYE 007 WITH THE BOYS

N64 was the only real choice since I had two brothers and limited gaming time.

That's what a good dad does. Your dad obviously cared about your happiness. My dad hated video games. I always felt stressed out when I played my SNES games in front of him, and then he started yelling about selling my N64 as soon as my mother brought it home. She refused to sell, but the only time I could play it was when he was out. Two thumbs up for your dad not being like mine. 👍👍

@@RedPill780 That's sad,man. My dad,my mom and I were walking through downtown when I was 7 years old. The N64 had just released and I saw it through a storefront window. My dad said "you want one?" And my mom said "we're tight with money right now" and my dad said "I don't care,I get my son what he wants" and I'll never forget my dad's love for me. I have so many great memories with that N64. I wish my dad was still alive,he was the best man I ever knew.

@@ShinkuGoukiwas your dad a gamer?

@@peteyv No,just the occasional Pac Man arcade player

RIP, he was a good man bro.

Have you heard of VR

I remember Sega Genesis blowing my mind.

​@@50bricks You mean that enormous flop that was promised to us as a "world changing innovation that would unlock the metaverse" but then all the headsets were prohibitively expensive and made everyone nauseous?

When I have kids I definitely want to introduce them to gaming chronologically. Born in 1995 I started on Windows 98, but really began using computers when Windows XP was around. For my 8th birthday or something I got a second hand Nintendo 64. A friend of mine also had one, and nobody else in my friend group had a different console at the time. I played a lot of Age of Empires I and II, and the graphics and complexity of Age of Mythology blew my mind. I always lagged behind a bit on games, as I only had a N64 and my PCs were generally never good enough to play anything that just came out decently. In 2008 I was playing the first Call of Duty and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. But that was fine. I never particularly cared for graphics, though I definitely could appreciate it. But Mohaa and COD were good enough for me. Nowadays, after playing a modern game for an hour I can easily return to Perfect Dark or Mario Kart 64, but I can imagine it would be a jarring experience for anyone who's used to mosern graphics and gameplay. So yeah, I want my kids to first witness N64 graphics, early Simcity, Age of Empires I, some random puzzle or sidescroll games I played as a kid, before advancing to newer software. I hope that can make them appreciate older games more. Same with movies. If you grow up only watching the newest Marvel movies, I can imagine anything from before the 2000s will feel slow and have terrible special effects. My girlfriend is my age and falls asleep watching most pre-2000s movies because they're just a bit slower than she can handle nowadays. I want to watch stuff with my kids and make sure they can appreciate games for what they are without needing cutting edge graphics. Old games can be great fun but you need to be able to look past the sometimes quite janky graphics.

I'll never forget the first time I seen SM64. My friends and I rode our bikes further than we ever had to go see both the PS1 and 64 on demo, and I was making my choice that day which console id be getting for my birthday , and soon as I seen SM64 , Mario just playing around outside the castle I was completely blown away , it was such an incredible leap forward, I chose the 64 in about 2 minutes 😅

That was the first video game I ever played. That and DK64. Oh the nostalgia rush.

Did you work on any Saturn games? If so how did it compare to working (difficulty wise) on N64?

I loved that game as a kid.

I tried out the new hot wheels game that released recently and the 64 version beats it out of the water! You had shortcuts and cars you could collect and find mid race. It was so fun! Thank you for helping create one of my favorite childhood games that I'm proud to have kept to this day!

Oh my god I loved that game, thank you for your work!

As an autistic kid I saw it when I was in Norway on vacation and without my parents knowing I went back into a mall to play it because I couldn’t stop myself haha they were super angered when they found me haha

Same with me but with Star Fox I was blown away.

I called up to Blockbuster everyday to see if the kiosk had finally arrived.

I played a demo version of Mario64 in my local game shop when I was around 14 years old. It was different to the proper release (more primitive with bits missing), and I remember a small crowd standing around it and it felt like being on holiday.

Same here. I finally found one for sale and it’s in my game room right now. The feeling it provides walking back up to it as an adult is unmatched

It's pretty fascinating how huge the jumps in graphics were back then, and how closely tied those jumps were to evolutions in gameplay. Even jump from PS1 > PS2 was pretty huge (though obviously nothing like 2D to 3D). I feel like PS2 > PS3 was substantial as well, but has run into a wall since then. Games have increased fidelity and scope, but it feels as though most games today are just highly polished iterations of the platforms built in the PS3 era.

I completely agree, the leap from 2-D to 3-D when the PlayStation first came out and the Saturn and then later on the Nintendo 64 was truly amazing to be there as a child and get to experience firsthand!!! We have not had a leap like it since- And games today are just also so homogenized that we don’t have nearly as much variety, there’s no more magical feeling of getting something truly revolutionary and new and the amount of games that are truly worth experiencing I feel is decreasing but I am also getting older and so there is that.. When games started to go online of course they would follow the marketing practices that were set up by the smart phone and this ultimately has resulted in video games and their quality and that feel of “magic“ deteriorating- I wish it wasn’t the case..

I am not strictly disagreeing with your statement, but Gen 6 introduced Internet and Online services/connectivity which hugely influence the gaming industry. Not to mention, it was so thoroughly legitimized by that point that AAA game studios were normal and games had become productions with vast amount of resources being thrown at it. Gen 5 was definitely the dawn of the AAA game, but Gen 6 made it normal. There are some incredible heavy-hitters on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. I think that 2D to 3D is a very, very big deal, and the technology to accomplish that was very impressive, but Gen 6 made video games what we know them as today. Blockbusters worth billions of dollars with live services, online play, and many of the genres we know and love came out of that generation.

Ps2 to 3 and xbox to 360 would have to be the biggest jump especially with added players and online

​@tylerb6981 the Dawn of AAA games? I guess Nintendo, Atari, etc., just indie devs lol. Also, I highly disagree with the impact on quality with the rise of internet use. If anything, online play has retarded new ideas as everyone needs those sweet microtransactions, led to the dawn of incomplete titles cause patches and DLC, the feeling of genuine community as some tweenager drops another N-bomb on the mic, etc. Did the net impact the landscape? Yes. Do I kind of wish it didn't (looking back)? YES. Now we have the age of indies that arguably, is making it all even more terrible as they're treated with kid gloves.

Only other time my jaw dropped like that, was Halo ❤

The PC didnt have very many competetive shooters like goldeneye the year it came out.

Boy do I remember it well. Turok was a fun, albeit punishing game at that framerate. I remember being so pent up waiting for Turok II to come out. Nintendo Power magazines were hyping that one up and overpromising the hell out of it. They promised advanced enemy AI and graphics and all these bells and whistles. They were absolutely shameless trying to show all this lush scenery that was frankly far outside of the hardware's capabilities. Heck, they even made us buy that RAM upgrade for the console just to run it. Then I started playing it and it was... stark and bare. Still a fun game with the most iconic, pointlessly brutal weapons of all time, but the marketing behind it was borderline criminal.

Only impresive if you were a console peasant. On PC we already had way better graphics thanks to 3DFX and 1280x1024 resolution and unlike the N64 no washed out shit textures and no fog like everything takes place in the world of Silent Hill.

I remember Turok being $80 at best buy

ULTRAAAA COMBOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

It was the equivalent to hearing a lion roar at your local zoo. That game sang through the entire arcade.

COMBO BREAKER!!!!

“Available for your home in 1995 only on Nintendo Ultraaaaa 64” ❤

C-C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER!!!

Absolutely! So large you actually wanted to use Epona later on lol

One of the truly iconic moments in all of gaming

N64 was my first console and ocarina of time was my first game. Got them both for Christmas one year. Still remember that as the best Christmas ever.

Yeah. I though the village was big and then they show you Hyrule field and suddenly it felt like a gigantic world

​@@rotorglow6110psp better

GoldenEye and conkers bad fur Day 💯

@@LJAY95 F*ck oath mate. Perfect Dark too.

I still have my system and I agree. Some of the best memories of my child hood. Late night pizza parties and then early morning at it again!! Such a blast!!!

I gotta say my favorite game on 64 was Turok 2. Was my first FPS game and that blew my mind. Years and years and years later purchased on Steam. Man, I'd say that game was really meant to play with keyboard and mouse!

@TheRexhim Thats awesome! I loved those Turok games. The cerebral bore was fun in multi-player lol

I played so much goldeney without sleep I started seeing the red crosshairs over real life people lmfao

For sure man. I spent so much time with friends playing Goldeneye. We spent a good deal of time having 4 way brawls on WWF No mercy as well.

So many core memories unlocked by this comment. Truly the best times of my life.

Oh maaan Surge! Hahahaha!

Surge, Little Ceasars pizza, and 007 with the bros. Sigh... i wish we could go back.

@@shaun8062 every time i think of goldeneye, I can smell cat shit lol. Because we used to geek for DAYS in a row at my friends house, and his cats litter box was in his room. The crazy things we tie to our memories haha..

It’s still a party console to this day.

Games can look better than the real world sometimes now, crazy.

@@420Gold time to put down the pipe, mate

2 s's not 2 r's.

​@@kevinclark6934Dude's worn his VR headset way too long.

In a few years we were playing Unreal 1 on a 3dfx voodoo card! Pretty darn close to Jurassic Park!

😂 mmmm no we did not at that time ps1 was it

@@williamtetreault4035 ps1 was 32 bit graphics. N64 was.......64 bit.

@@williamtetreault4035Bro have you SEEN PS1 games? The PS2 was more considered the peak of graphics if anything!

@@rheokalyke367 i now use roms i got a emulator and use rom world so nice and its free not $199 what i paid for ps1 and ps2 was $259+taxt 274 no i emulate and save but ps1 and ps2 graphics weren't what they said it would be back then and the 3d launch never even made it till now ps2 ps3 promised use and never made it till end of ps4 now ps5 only close way we got was like wii style ps3 ps4 then ps5 now we need a modded system lounch were u can use make mod menus infinite ammo,moon jump,god mode, and not get band for useing it allso thats how the will get systems to sell back in the game if not its going to be rinse repeat and were sick of that even reverse engineering to play both or three games on one system has passed its time but i bet that is whats next before modded systems i just want to play my ps2 ps3 ps4 and modded game menu no ban on server but this is a lot of talking im sorry i talk alot just sayn

Actually, the super Nintendo was pivotal for me. The Nintendo 64 plain stunk going to the bad 3d graphics. At that point, just play computer games as the 3d games were better. Super Nintendo had far more fun games, the 2d was the way to go during that time.

I had already played plenty of 3d PlayStation games before playing Mario 64. It didn't matter... it was like seeing 3d again for the first time. The frame rate was noticeably higher, a true revolution in tech that I can only compare to my first time seeing Unreal, Quake 2 and Half Life. These being powered by Voodoo graphics cards.

Yea it was a big shift in what we were used to for so long, I had a gap in my love for video games because I was deeply into pc's at the time so I never ended up with an n64 and was into playstation but my friends had them.

I remember first playing it in the mall and I was blown away and thought bobombs world was the complete gamen

doom pc had 3d in 1993, ps1 was '94, n64 was '96 ... consoles always late to the party 😁

It was like experiencing another universe

Credit where it's due as well, Nintendo was willing to delay the launch of the console in order to make sure those games were as good as they could be.

I know right, it's like, games are so "normal" now, like movies and TV shows. But we were on the cusp of the next huge leap in technology; half of the hype was pure fantasy, half of it was legitimate. I guess the best way to describe it to someone who wasn't there, is like - we were being told the future is finally arriving and we're all going to get our jetpacks and hover cars now XD

Too true. I remember getting one for Christmas in '96 and having an absolute blast with it. Made it easier to come inside and thaw out after sledding in the snowstorm that started the night before.

I remember us in junior high school waiting for this Nintendo Ultra 64.😅 Wow, Mario 64 made me feel something no other console ever made me feel before. I'll never forget that dreamy feeling of awe and amazement as I made Mario jump and run in circles, and that new sensation of momentum and weight was hard to ignore.

The only marketing I can think of that even competes was the PS2 marketing. The N64 changed gaming, and I can honestly say, the N64 saved my life

It was a great time to be alive. The only info that was available to me was in the issues of the EGM magazines which made the machine that much moreb of a mystery.

Are you me!?

Haha same here, was so hyped for the Nintendo 64 and was not disapointed.

The scarcity of information in a time when Internet was not widely available sort of added charm to the experience of a console or game launch.

I think the sole reason for me to get on the internet was to watch incredibly bad resolution video footage of Mario 64 at my friend's house. I remember being astonished by the graphics quality on that video! My friend's dad got mad at me and they didn't invite me there after that because I cost so much to them in phone bills during the modem era!

same here =) read every article, reread them, loved it ...

Doom was out 3 years earlier and had better graphics.

​@@damienwarlock you are out of your mind.

@@Fidodo Doom came out in Dec 1993. Are you trying to tell me the "64 bit" N64 (it wasn't 64 bit anything) was better than a PC at the time? Because it wasn't.

I see the console vs. PC argument is still going on 30 years on. You gotta realize it’s apples and oranges.

@@damienwarlock classic Doom was great…but it’s nowhere near as impressive as Mario 64 looked. Also Doom was technically 2.5D

Even to this day TBH. People talk about the physics but the real deal is how it connects to the gameplay element and the "feel" of it. I would be hard pressed to find another game equaly good or better than Wave Race 64 in that regard.

@@RottenMuLoT They nailed the physics in that game and with such limited resources and inspiration.

Wave Race will remain one of the best of all time IMO it hasn't been topped nor replicated. Blue Storm on the Cube was alright but it didn't have the same feel as the N64 version with regards to presentation and physics. I much preferred the music and announcer of the N64 game where the Cube version attempted to have a more serious tone and I do feel the Jetskis were more difficult to control and felt worse than the N64 game I'm not sure if it was more realistic but the N64 game feels like how I would imagine it against the waves.

I remember seeing - and trying out! - Mario 64 at a kiosk in my town's game shop. My little 8-year old mind was completely blown LOL N64 and PS1 graphics may look awful now, but it's hard to explain to younger people how revolutionary they were at the time.

But Proto...!

Bro true story, I'm a 7 year old in Walmart, finally getting to try super Mario 64. Stood there for a good 3 minutes wondering why I couldn't move. Finally I used the stick instead of the D pad and my mind was blown lmao in fact I was like "you don't even use the pad?! Wowwwww" and as soon as I was able to start doing stuff, I had to go with my parents lmao but that's all it took to sell me. It was so revolutionary that when I finally got one , even my mom, who is definitely not a console player if it's not tetris and Dr Mario, helped me get the 120 ☆'s. 90s was such a fun time.

you managed to avoid all other 3d games before that? i grew uo durign that time as well. at my local gaming store they have all the systems set up. of course everyone wanted to play the new system at first but once people realized it was just a blurry mess, only new people ever played the 64, for all the locals it was back to playstation. we called it the steamhouse or the fog macine. never knew anyone there buying the thing. obviously that was a but of a anomality seems there are quite a few peple able to tolerate that.

@@messinround4810 that must have been so awesome growing up during so much technological progress in gaming

I also remember being blown away at the mall when the demo Mario was on display it just looked so real at the time

Was the clearest jump of tech in all game history

Ultra 64

Ultra 64

Did it live up to the hype? I was like 3 years old during that era lol

That was an awesome era, because each new generation of consoles reinvented gaming. Beginning of this century each new gen is pretty much same but with better looking games. Except Nintendo

​@@monsterhunter445for me, it did. Super Mario 64 was unbelievable.

It's amazing how just recently with unreal engine 5, we really don't have to fake it anymore, we can actually use real life physics and photography in 3d design.

In that regard, the tech industry hasn't changed much. Granted, Microsoft isn't regularly announcing vaporware anymore, but for how long have we've been promised self-driving cars and proper AR headsets?

90?! Gran Turismo 2000, Killzone 2. What the hell are you talking about.

It still is today, but now it's even less likely that they'll actually bring a product to market.

Mmm, like the Atari Jaguar claiming to be 64 bit when it had 2 32 bit chips instead

I had the same experience. went to toys r us when I was 16, because a friend told me they had N64 and Mario on display, there was a ton of kids there playing it to this day, almost 30 years later, no other game has given me that same sense of amazement. I wish I could share that feeling with people who weren't around to experience it, what a great time for gamers

@@joesaiditstrue Same here, Friend called me and let me know toys r us had Mario 64. I jumped on my bike. good times.

Except unreal was also out...

@@the_ure Unreal came out in 1998 : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_(1998_video_game)

I remember being about 13 years old when N64 came out. I remember a family trip to my uncle's place in August, and my cousin was in his 20s and still living at home, and so he was able to afford an N64 and Mario 64 and Pilotwings 64. My little mind was absolutely blown. I spent every moment of that family trip that I could playing one or the other, swapping between the two whenever I got anything approaching bored. Best couple of days of gaming of my life, hands down. And this was after playing a bunch of Doom and Warcraft and Rise Of The Triad and Monty Python shovelware on a friend's Pentium PC, I should add. That Christmas, my siblings and I were gifted an N64 along with Turok and Extreme G, which were far from disappointing. Then my brother got Shadows Of The Empire as a birthday present and my sister got Diddy Kong Racing as a birthday present. I forget what I even got for my birthday, because hot damn, just between just those titles and rentals, we had a really good couple of years. And then of course things blew wide open with Rogue Squadron, Ocarina Of Time, Goldeneye 007, Extreme G 2...... what a time to have been alive.

It blew us all away, man. Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, and Starfox 64 were very impactful

My first experience with the N64 was incredibly disappointing and frustrating. For weeks, we went to different stores with demo models, but lines were too long to play - or even see the TV. After long enough, I finally went to a store with an opening and had 5 minutes with Mario 64, but I couldn’t get Mario to move. I tried everything, but Mario was just standing there. Was something wrong with the controller? My time ended, an older kid took over, and he had Mario zipping around! Turned out I didn’t use the D-Pad to move Mario! I didn’t get another chance to play until Christmas. It was an agonizing wait, but so magical when I finally got to play it.

I used the internet exclusively for researching UFO's and the Ultra64 back then.

Yea the people that complain about games now or complain how low res they look now just don't understand how the graphics really made you feel. There was something to it, when we were working on CRTs in wood frames sitting on your living room floor.

@@Epic_C That's true. It really is hard to explain how it felt when 3d graphics came to major consoles. Especially the N64, because it looked a lot better than the polygons from the Playstation. There was definitely some kind of magic to it.

*Shadows of the Empire

Xmas of 96

I did watch the dude from Traveller's Tales videos about it

@@jakethreesixty Can you kindly share the channel name? Thanks!

@@FacchiniBRTVGameHut!

@@SalivatingSteve thanks a lot!

💯

Yeah, 'official' Nintendo mags were by far the worst for it, and they should have known better, frankly. I looked at those images as a teenager and thought that it looked too good to be true, and it was. I ended up by weird coincidence having both consoles (PS1 and N64) and to be fair, I put hundreds of hours into Gran Turismo 1/2 and also into Goldeneye/Perfect Dark - they both had their pros and cons, but I always preferred the N64s controllers, particularly using two controllers in Goldeneye and PD years before dual stick control methods were considered the norm for FPSs. Edit: In hindsight I suppose it's easy to look back and go "lol millions of polys per second, what a joke" but back in the day, real time antialiasing, mipmapping and the sort of things being introducted in the N64 were pretty feckin' new so I can understand why some elements of the tech press weren't that savvy about it....

Exactly. Even that $100,000 workstation couldn't do those graphics, unless you want everything to run at 30 _seconds_ per _frame_ (or worse). This part didn't hit me until MVG mentioned it, though: the N64 launched for less than it was announced for. If fewer corners had been cut- put in a bigger texture cache, plus either beef up the clock speeds or add a dedicated sound chip- some of the console's weaknesses could have been smoothed over. And still at a competitive price.

@@3dmarth Yeah people often didn't realize just how freaking *long* a render could take. I remember getting into POVRay back in the day, and could make cutscenes which blew away my old at that point N64, then with a new workstation GPU (Oxygen Labs Vx1 6MB, lol) obliterating my *Xbox*. But those 30 second renders took *all night*. Even now some of them would take me an hour to re-render.....

Even their Arcade games lied. I remember Killer Instinct and Crusin USA coming soon to the "Ultra 64", when we actually got them "Well, we didn't even get KI1, just Killer Instinct 2 rebranded as KI Gold" there was a LOT of corners cut, no videos or cut scenes like in Killer Instinct, or anything like that.

Yep. In 1994 Nintendo lead the gaming press to believe the Ultra 64 would get the same graphics like those expensive Silicone Graphics render machines that were used for movies like Jurassic Park and Terminator 2. After the first N64 games like Pilotwings 64 and Mario 64 were shown, everybody realized Nintendo was lying for years. The N64 was ahead of the Playstation, but not by much. Definitely not by 20 years.

Also s video cables if you were one of them rich kids

It only had one Zelda game in the RPG category. It was good but not good enough to for me to by the console.

The decision to stick with cartridge was the first nail in Nintend'oh's coffin!! With NO third party developers (or very little of them) and very looong wait times for the next big game was unbearable. Remember the first Star Wars game, Shadows of the Empire? It SUCKED!!! And Turok was nothing but a blur of FOG, with no draw distance. Awful!! But I loved Pilotwings (so underrated), and Wave Race.

I never met another child with an Nintendo 64. I was the only one I knew of. Everybody else had PlayStation. That's why I had to get a full set of controllers. Everybody wanted to play.

@@darek4488 kind of depended on where you lived. I was born in the late 90s on the Portuguese countryside, took me a while before I saw a N64 for the first time, most people had a PS1 and were slowly transitioning into the PS2 at the time. I guess it's also in part because Nintendo hardware just wasn't that popular here back in the day, outside of handhelds, so SEGA and Sony could dominate more easily (more Megadrives around than I could count, followed by everyone getting Playstations in the following gens, until the Wii)

@@DavidBelga Even still, in 2023 Nintendo of Poland hasn't yet been established. Nowadays the electronic shops which sell Nintendo products handle warranty repairs through third parties or through Nintendo of Germany. However in the 90's in Poland the warranty was mostly fictional. Buying Nintendo in Poland always meant you were on your own if something happened. Most people didn't even knew Nintendo 64 even existed. The only recognizable Nintendo product was the original Gameboy and Gameboy Color later on, since there was nothing like it. The piracy was also an aspect in Nintendo's popularity as literally everyone was running burned CDs on PS1. And for the price of 2 original Nintendo cartridges you could get a whole console bundle. For a long time I only had Super Mario 64 and Mario Kart 64. It wasn't until the Gamecube's release when I was able to buy many N64 games for 20% or even 10% of the price.

Oh Goldeneye, I lost so many hours to paint all mode.

People had an N64, EVERYONE had a ps1.

$250

@@brkbtjunkie No. $200, at least in the USA. I don't know if it was priced differently elsewhere.

​@@davidaitken8503$500 and the Japanese version was $700

@@davidaitken8503 It was £250 in the UK (console with 1 controller and no game, if I remember correctly).

NTSC televisions displayed roughly 640x480 pixels, if they were only capable of 320x200 pixels, there would be no point to the N64 expansion pack that enabled games to render at a higher resolution closer to/at 480i. Most console games/consoles before the Dreamcast tended to not hit that resolution, but that doesn't mean analog TVs weren't capable of more.

You are aware that white nostalgia about "simpler times" is offensive and a slap in the face to the LGTQ community and poc communities?

It and Shadows of the Empire, it really felt like the movies. Not now of course but back then with no equivalent it was all so mind blowing.

@@somehow_not_helpfulATcrap yes it was, miss those days

Agreed.

The controller wasn't great either.

Don’t know how Nintendo could f up all three of those things.

PS1 maybe sold a lot compared to N64, but N64 was still a gigantic success. People even were disappointed by the Gamecube not living up to the N64. Its laughable looking back because the GC is probably one of the best consoles ever. But again, it was squished by the PS2. But basically Nintendo was on a success train never seen. NES (10/10) - SNES (10/10) - N64 (9/10) - GC (8/10) - Wii (10/10) - Wii U (3/10). Imagine being on a roll for almost a quarter of a century. The N64 was considered a flop? The Gamecube was considered a flop? Its crazy. And after the Wii U they basically destroyed the competition with the Switch. An underpowered device that still beats devices like the PS5 just with its type and the games it has (like new Zelda).

​@@rettro6578Trying to be too different and end up hurting themselves.. Being different sometimes isn't a good thing..

They actually did that at one point with the Nintendo 64 Expansion Pack. Mostly it just unlocked (slightly) higher res textures and screen resolutions. There were some games that practically required it, though. The Resident Evil 2 port to the N64 basically required it iirc.

@@pirojfmifhghek566 Wrong. The only games that require it are Donkey Kong 64 and Perfect Dark. A bunch of other games get a higher resolution, though then all you have is a slide show since the crappy GPU can't keep up with the "high resolution". RE2 is one example, the best example is Hybrid Heaven which drops to 10 FPS.

@@ShadowAngel-lt8nw That's... why I said it practically/basically required it. I just wanted to give an example. It'll run, but not well enough to be called functional. I guess I have to be super exact with my words in a place like this where NDs run rampant.

Not even just that, the game played smoother than anything else out there.

My friends had already moved on to the PS by the time this finally dropped. One of us bought an N64 and we had fun with it, but we had grown up and moved on from Nintendo's style of games and were already getting more into PC gaming by that point thanks to LAN parties taking off.

@@frogbutts3628and to find out 20 years later it could have been even smoother with the "optimize" toggle on the C code compile. masterpiece

How was there "nothing like it", when 3d Platformers, even with polygon graphics already existed since the 80's on computers? The N64 really wasn't anything special unless you were a console peasant stuck in your parents basement and all you knew was the SNES or NES.

@@ShadowAngel-lt8nw Super mario 64 had literally no equivalent on pc. Maybe not even now. you are smoking crack over there

Crossbows are the most lethal kind of gun

wow. i had no idea. I loved that game. now I'm gonna buy the 360 version

It's still preferable to playing 4 player online with the Switch.

I actually studied Computer Science at Monash and graduated just a few years before the N64 released. good memories. congratulations on your journey to making games!

Do you wants ANTS, because that is how you get ANTS!!

@@RichV20 bro hes not saying thats a thing hes doing now its not that deep lmao plus the pizza and soda / fizzy drinks chilling with your friends is a great experience, just take the rubbish out after and you're all good. have a little fun some time lol

@@ElDisable dude was being sarcastic, hes having a little fun right then

Curious to know, did anyone of those kids had PC at that time, and some experience with PC games ?

@@a88pockets ah very difficult to tell I’ll take fault for that

Sony also made a console that was WAYYY easier to develop games for. It was so easy that Sony even had special Homebrew PS1s for making games at home. Compared to game development on other consoles of the time, the PS1 was like Baby's 1st Dev Box. Sony used to sell Net Yaroze consoles for people to make the games, and even maintained a Usenet community for it. They continued this trend (kind of) with the PS2 and PS3. They are harder to develop for than the OG PS1, but Sony supported Linux on the 2&3 so you could turn them into homebrew dev kits. Never actually saw that done, but that's the official reason for PS2&3 supporting Linux on launch. Sony just supported ALL developers for a while and it paid off for them. I don't think LSD Dream Emulator or anything like that could have released on any other console other than the PS1 because of Sony's insane dev support for the console.

@@OmegaSMG I have long suspected that Sony’s choice to use a CD and weak copy protection was intentional. Sony really needed to saturate the market with consoles and a lot of people bought into the PS1 platform because you could get cheap pirated games. The same wasn’t true for the N64 / cartridge based systems that came before it. Pirated carts had a premium and were hard to get hold of.

No, the reason was Sony gave their console "normal" margins for consumer electronics not knowing that game consoles typically had almost zero margin. Sony treated all their partners (retail, developer, etc.) well like they usually did while Nintendo, Sega were like "You're just lucky to be here."

To be fair, many companies were already fed up with working with Nintendo. Their restrictive policies started from the NES era to the 32/64 bit era, and it was what angered many third party companies. While the SNES is well remembered for it’s great catalog of games, it’s library is smaller compared to the Sega Genesis and Sony’s arrival was indeed a breath of fresh air for companies.

@@Spark010 Also Sony updated the BIOS only for the Japanese PS1 model 3000 and later with additional protection against modchip. But never put that protection in the US nor PAL consoles.

I think It was just an awkward time for 3d graphics in general. The N64, Sega Saturn and PS1 were all trying out different things, and each approach had its own limitations and compromises.

Most people are either blinded by nostalgia or haven't played on original PS1 hardware, or even didn't have any prior or other console experience at the time. They don't remember about the warping textures on all games (fixed by emulators by default), the generally very low resolution, the low poly look of many games, the loading times, etc. That is not to say the N64 didn't have any flaws, all 5th gen consoles had major flaws that characterised their graphics. Truth be told, the first console to do 3d absolutely right and make 3d games fully enjoyable was the Dreamcast and the rest of the 6th gen followed suit.

N64 only had fog because the majority of games were poorly optimised and to increase framerates fog was added to hide the limited rendering of distant objects in the poorly optimised games purely because Nintendo refused to provide developers with the chipset Microcode (the CPU command line/instruction set), it was as mysterious as the Playstation 3's assembly. The N64 did not operate like an x86, ARM or PowerPC system which are well known, you couldn't look at the compiled assembly and go "ok this looks optimised" based on a traditional understanding of coding, you had to guess purely based on the number of lines the code translated to when using the development tools, if it had less lines devs were like "well looks optimised to me" and if the game ran badly their only option was to reduce the draw distances and inject fog to hide it. The N64 had a unique chipset which used the silicon graphics architecture, which meant that the only developers, even those without access to the Microcode from Nintendo who understood the assembly were those who had worked with SGI tech before such as Rareware and Factor 5. Even Nintendo themselves didn't fully understand their own machine because even Mario 64 could of ran at a framerate 10fps higher than it ran at in the launch version if the devs optimised it, which it wasn't.

I was lucky to be 15 around this time and was able to work and buy all three. I had N64 for Nintendo games like Mario64, Golden eye, the ps1 for RPGs and grand Turismo 2 and Saturn for fighting games like X-men vs Street Fighter all unique and fun in their own way

I preferred the PS1's graphical shortcomings to the N64's graphical shortcomings. I just couldn't stand the blurriness of everything.

I remember riding one of the courses backward to unlock rideable dolphins.

I keep an old TV for my classic consoles too, and my niece and nephews love playing them

Mario64 is to Video Games what The Wizard of Oz is to movies

That's really cool - in a way, the excitement itself was it's own relic of the past to treasure, separately from the actual hardware itself.

@@Domarius64 oh, 100%. It was something that was special at the time. More details than what the official mags put in print. Some early screenshots, like when Mario Kart 64 was named Super Mario Kart R

Please, please put out video of the 64DD.

N64 games had instant loading as well.

​@@superdaveozy7863Analog controls out of the box too. People forget but the PS did not launch with analog sticks, and as such many early games for it do not support analog control. N64 was designed from the ground up to have an analog stick so even its launch titles had smooth movement control.

I remember renting Turok as a kid, and getting so nauseous from it that we had to return the game early. I had goldeneye (I think it was already out) and was fine with that, but something about the controls made me sick.

Funnily enough, a lot of FMV on PS1 where made using SGI stations like Onyx and Iris, which were used as N64 dev kits.

@@superdaveozy7863 Right, instant loading but, lot smaller games. The CD of the time could do something like 50x the average Nintendo cart. It's a real balancing act here, instant loading, or larger games with video.

Then there was the sound quality. 007 Goldeneye, I remember hearing the guns on that game and thinking holy cow that sounds like Hollywood.

Imagine if SGI bought nVidia and we were running SGI cards in our PCs now (with the awesome oldschool hypercube logo illuminated by LEDs, of course). They could have absolutely dominated the PC graphics market if they had been willing to undercut their $30k+ workstation market in exchange for selling millions/billions of sub-$1k cards, but that's not how 90s UNIX vendors thought...and why most of them went extinct with the rise of linux.

@@treelineresearch3387 All of the graphics talent left SGI after the N64. They formed ArtX which went on to design the Gamecube GPU before being bought ATi. So they basically did exactly that, just without the SGI name or incompetent leadership.

The N64 was actually quite a bit more powerful than the PS1 in terms of polygon pushing but it lagged behind the PS1 and Saturn ***HARD*** in some areas. Quite a few of the PS1’s most hardware-pushing games were actually coded in assembly not because the hardware was stronger, but because the architecture was just much better-balanced for developer needs & was much easier to optimize for. The N64 was really good at some things, and really, REALLY bad at others. The Saturn was just alien technology for the time.

The gameplay holds up incredibly, as evidenced by the amazing speedruns gamers are producing to this day

Honestly, as a PS1 kid, I always found N64 games kinda ugly. There weren't a single N64 game as vibrant looking as Spyro.

ok cool

@@InsidiousOne As a Nintendo kid, I always envied de PS for having Spyro. Because I thought it doesn't belong in that dirty ugly game library that the PS had. I thought it belonged more on the N64 because it looked so colourful and pretty.

@@alderChristianHarten can't agree there. The biggest N64 platformers never really impressed me visually. Super Mario 64 had very blocky and abstract enviroments, they felt like test levels sometimes. The Rare platformers were fun to play, but they still looked very brown and not really appealing. And PS1 had such vibrant and colorful games, like Ape Escape, Bugs Bunny: Lost in time, Tomba 2, Crash Bandicoot 2-3, and so on. Well, the only N64 game that looks on par with them is probably Conker's Bad Fur Day, this one looks great.

When played on the average television set at the time both look much better than through an emulator or a modern TV.

One of my favorite games, Digimon World, does not look the same at all without a good CRT shader. Even something simple as the text stands out as “wrong” on an LCD unaided. CRT Royale gets me about 90% of the way there. It’s quite effective, actually.

Maybe it's just me but both consoles have this weird atmosphere that can't be beat today. No other console or games on PC have it for me.

I think for PC, you could try out the Unreal Gold. That game gave me that kind of feeling that I think you might be talking about.

@@ConcavePgons I stated with Unreal Tournament. I do agree game's like Unreal and Duke 3D has that atmosphere. Man I miss the 90s. Lol

Pretty crazy to think that Goldeneye was meant to be an on-rails shooter like Time Crisis, and was eventually changed to what we know it became.

There was never a dash (-) in the name; it was just Ultra 64.

I guess they shared one gene on one chromosome because they were nothing alike outside of marketing nonsense.

I don't think anybody really believed it was going to be TOO close to an Indigo workstation. The Indigo was going for $25k in 1993 and they were looking to sell the N64 for $200. Corners were going to have to be cut. But despite all of that, Nintendo did pretty good at delivering on their promise.

by stitching textures

Yeah the load times were great. I had the Saturn, PS1 and N64. All three of those consoles had their strenghts and weaknesses Luckily, they all had great libraries of games to play (albeit Saturn was considerably smaller).

Turok 64 and SM64 were my first N64 games. Must've been the bundle my Mother bought

I think the world collectively lost years of sleep to GoldenEye at the time.

Plus it helped that Mario 64 was a very long game. It didn't take 2 days to beat like most launch games today.

I remember going to Toys'R'Us in 1996 and watching some kid trying to play Mario 64 cross-handed. The controller design just completely stumped the poor little fella... haha, he's probably a dentist or an MBA now.

the ps5 got away with it

If it was anything other than Mario, I doubt it'd be as successful. Mario 64 is still a blast to play today. Having that as a launch title was perfect. It was worth buying the console just for that game. Other great games came after that, of course, but no one was disappointed when they got "Mario 64" because it was one of the two games available at launch. It was THE game at the time.