On June 23, 1996, the Nintendo 64 went on sale in Japan. The console is now 25 years old. Twenty five! Can you believe it?
The console, which would launch in September in North America, would house iconic and groundbreaking games like Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye 007, Star Fox 64, Mario Kart 64, Paper Mario, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, Perfect Dark and more.
Work on the console began in 1993 under the name “Project Reality”, although the name “Nintendo 64” was apparently devised by editor Shigesato Itoi, designer of the Earthbound games and star of the game. My neighbor Totoro.
Not only were the 3D graphics state of the art, but the console also had new features such as four controller ports, as well as a really good controller, a joystick and all.
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In addition, Nintendo continued to use cartridges. VSthe artridges are cool.
In a recent Eurogamer interview, Kyoto based game designer Gilles Goddard, who was at Nintendo during the development of the N64, recalled:
Almost the entire technical side of things did – things like lighting, reverse kinematics, and skinning, that was all tech designed to work on the N64. We hadn’t had final hardware for a long time, so what we did was we had a huge Onyx supercomputer in Nintendo’s backroom that basically mimicked what the hardware ultimately would be. It was a very good system, because they were just updating the hardware virtually. And we got to test on a virtual N64, which was really cool.
Nintendo would finally shut down the console in 2002, after worldwide sales reached 32.93 million. 388 the games were released on the Nintendo 64, the biggest seller being Super Mario 64 11.62 m copies.
“You can tell SNES games, you can tell an N64 game – you can’t really tell what a Switch game is anymore,” Goddard said. “You can’t tell what the new games are anymore. But it was one of the first consoles where you could see clear differences.
Happy birthday, Nintendo 64! Thanks for all the memories.
