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The Eternal Appeal of Nintendo 64

I still remember the look of confusion and disappointment on my father’s face when he caught me packing up my Nintendo 64 for college.

“Didn’t I buy that for you when you were 9?” he asked, bewildered.

“Uh, yeah. But we still play it sometimes,” I answered.

Now — 10 year later, and more than 20 years since the system’s initial release — the Nintendo 64 is arguably more popular than ever.

The fact that the Nintendo 64 remains as popular as it does is, on its face, wholly irrational. It’s an old, boxy looking system that looks frumpy next to the sleek, sharp-edged aesthetic of modern-day systems. The controller has a wonky, three-handle design that’s sure to baffle and feel uncomfortable to those new to the system, and its graphics are crude at best — it was the first gaming console to use a 64-bit processor, but modern-day systems have four times the processing capacity and require an ultra-HD, 4K monitor to enjoy their graphical capabilities to the fullest extent. Similarly, N64 games come on cartridges that have a fraction of the data capacity discs do, and look like archaeological relics in an era of streamed gaming.

In fact, many mark the 64 as the beginning of the end of Nintendo among hardcore gamers, who would flock to Sony and Microsoft’s next-gen consoles in subsequent years, leaving Nintendo to focus on family-friendly products like the Wii.

But no other system is as endlessly appealing and replayable as the Nintendo 64. Its continued success defies the very nature of video-game consoles, which are, by their very design, fleeting. We purchase them and their games knowing (and hoping) they will be rendered obsolete by more robust subsequent versions.

The Nintendo 64, however, is timeless.

MEL asked 10 Nintendo 64 fanatics to discuss their personal history with the gaming system, and what makes it so endlessly enjoyable. The panel (the full listing of which is below) included a mix of casual gamers, hardcore collectors and self-proclaimed video-game historians. What we found is that the aspects to N64 that seem antiquated — the controller, the four-port local multiplayer, the boxy design — are what give the system its lasting charm and have allowed it to stand the test of time.

The common knock on Nintendo is that it produces consoles for children and families, and not serious gamers. But this actually works in the Nintendo 64’s favor. A large part of the Nintendo 64’s continued popularity is its simplicity, especially compared to modern consoles that require a significant amount of tech savvy and technical skill to set up and play.

Harmon: As I’ve gotten older and started earning more money, I find myself spending it on N64 games. There’s something so satisfying about that gray cartridge — you just pop it in and play. I have a daughter who’s 4 months, and I’m looking forward to her being able to easily play N64 in a few years.

Harmon: I got N64 for my 8th birthday, and I can still remember pulling it out of the box for the first time and firing up Mario 64. Setting foot in that 3-D world blew me away.

Van Court: It was like there were no limits on what you could do. I was used to the limitations of most games: You can’t go here. You can’t do that. But with Mario, it felt like truly anything was possible.

O’Toole: The snow, the sand, the floating islands — it was like playing a storybook.

Saridakis: You were actually there, in the game.

Holland: As child, I couldn’t comprehend the limits of the games. The worlds that N64 produced felt immense, infinite even. Obviously, that’s not true, but those limitations actually help the N64. A lot of games today put almost no limits on what can be done, and in doing so, they lose their identity. They try to be too many things at once.

O’Toole: Ocarina was the first time I experienced a game as an immersive work of art — the storyline, the music, the gameplay. Putting hours into a game and not getting bored was new to me. It’s still my favorite game, and it cemented my love for the system.

Van Court: Last year, a blind man managed to beat Ocarina of Time using nothing but auditory cues. It took him five years. People are that committed to the game. It’s amazing.

Holland: Ocarina began the era of narrative-driven gameplay, it made you actually feel like you were on epic quest.

O’Toole: The game was complicated and the internet was just becoming a Thing, so everything about it spread through word-of-mouth. I remember having to call around and ask my friends, “Hey, how’d you get past this spot?” But that was part of the fun, having to figure things out on your own and telling your friends about it at school the next day.

Harmon: Now, when a new game comes out, all of the secrets are dumped on the internet within 24 hours. With Ocarina, there always was the possibility that even though you played the game 1,000 times, there was going to be a hidden secret you might find.

Van Court: I remember we eventually got a Gateway computer — you know, in the cow box. I was the only one who knew how to use the internet. On a whim, I searched for Zelda, and it was a game changer. I found tips, secrets, Zelda fan-fiction.

O’Toole: I took up piano and guitar later in life, and two of the first songs I learned were the themes to Mario and Ocarina of Time. That music just gets ingrained in your mind from playing so much. You’ll hear them and instantly be taken back.

Influential as the above titles may be, the staying power of the Nintendo 64 lies in its multiplayer functionality. It was the first system with four local controller ports, and thus, the first system to allow for 2-on-2, four-person free-for-all — and in the case of certain Mario Party minigames, even 3-on-1 gameplay.

Every panel member cites multiplayer as the Nintendo 64’s most endearing feature. Four friends, in the same room, playing together simultaneously, fostered a sense of camaraderie (and shit-talking) that was unprecedented in video games, and defied the notion that video games were only for sad, lonely losers. With the N64, they were a bonding ritual.

Van Court: It has what a lot of modern games lack, which is local, four-player multiplayer, and a ton of games that supported four players. It made for a social experience, and people still use it in that sense. Mario Party is essentially a board game in video game form.

Holland: The N64 is a party machine. You’d betray your friends in Mario Party and take your frustrations out on them in Goldeneye.

O’Toole: I went to Miami University in Ohio, and of course I played Drunk Driving. It’s a great drinking game because anyone can play it. It’s just “A” to go, and you don’t even have to use the brakes if you don’t want to. You can play hitting just one button. And it’s designed to make things fair and fun — if someone is way out ahead, the computer gives everyone else a chance to catch up.

Saridakis: We’d play Mario Kart for hours in college, talking shit, drinking beers. Sometimes we’d drink so much we’d never even make it out. We added our own wrinkle to the game called Drink ’Til You Drop. If you fell off a ledge, you had to drink until the game put you back on the racetrack.

Modern systems allow for multiplayer, too, of course — and on a much grander scale. Gamers can now participate in all-out wars with hundreds of other online players. But the anonymity of those interactions is, ironically, what makes the Nintendo 64 so appealing today. In a world of faceless internet gaming, the Nintendo 64 forces players to occupy the same space when competing against one another, facilitating a sense of camaraderie that doesn’t exist in modern gaming.

O’Toole: The first time I played Super Smash Bros., I was at my friend’s lakehouse. And whenever I play that game today, I’m taken back there. I can’t imagine anyone remembers the random person they played Call of Duty against eight years ago on Xbox Live.

Nintendo 64 wouldn’t still be popular if the system itself didn’t work, and after 20 years, the Nintendo 64 has proven itself to be borderline unbreakable.

Van Court: Apart from the joystick, the N64 is a very robust piece of hardware. I’ve had my hands on many, many N64 consoles, and I’ve never encountered one that didn’t work. They’re made of iron, man. You have to go out of your way to physically destroy an N64 to make it not work. It’s a solid piece of equipment.

Nintendo’s decision to use cartridges for the N64 instead of discs, which were gaining prominence in the gaming industry, was met with derision, and is often cited as the reason Nintendo fell behind Sony when the latter released the PlayStation 2. But N64’s cartridges have a physical advantage in terms of longevity. Discs scratch, rendering them unusable. Cartridges, however, just get dusty.

Van Court: Nothing inside the N64 moves at all. Nothing inside is subject to the wear and tear of motion, whereas a CD drive has all these tiny moving gears.

ZadocPaet: It’s the best controller ever made for a three-handed person.

O’Toole: We had a PlayStation at same the time we bought our N64, but I wasn’t interested in it. The physical PlayStation system was sterile and off-putting. It had these sharp corners and the controllers were a drab gray. The N64 is so much more inviting. It had this strange controller that felt so different and with all these different colored buttons. They’re bright and vibrant and accessible. The buttons are huge, and you can say, “Press the blue one!” instead of “Hit the ‘A’ button,” which can be confusing.

There’s a simple economic explanation for the N64 resurgence: The people who grew up playing the system are now at an age and level of professional success that they can afford to spend money on a gaming system that’s been out of production for 14 years.

Hurst: After N64, I moved onto PlayStation 2, and then PC gaming. But six years ago, I got back into retro gaming. You can’t have every game growing up, and I felt there were games I missed out on as a kid. So I set out to buy all 296 Nintendo 64 games in existence. I completed my collection eight months ago. It took me five and a half years.

I know people who saw this coming and bought up every copy of Super Mario and Super Smash Bros. they could get their hands on. And they’re making a killing.

Van Court: The generation of gamers who grew up on the N64 is the same generation that grew up with the internet. That’s why there’s such a thriving online community for it.

Hurst: All the time nowadays, I’ll catch people online or in game stores saying, “I’m going to pick up an N64, and get some beers and play with my friends.”

ZadocPaet: In the past three years, the r/N64 subreddit has tripled in size. Being a moderator isn’t a lot of work because the community is so active.

Saridakis: When you’re at a party, and there’s an N64, certain people will gravitate toward it. And you’ll know you have this common interest with them, and that you share this deep emotional connection to the system.

Hurst: Part of the reason I love the N64 is that it’s the loser console of that generation. It didn’t fit with the zeitgeist of the era, and the PlayStation 2 tripled it in sales. But everyone loves an underdog, right?

Van Court: I still play it. I just recently picked up some obscure Japanese N64 games.

Harmon: It harkens back to this simpler time when not everything was leaked on the internet, and there was this feeling that you were the one discovering things about these games. Obviously that’s not true when you play N64 now, but maybe it wakens that child in you.

Cruz: I came from a poor family. The PlayStation 2 was expensive, so my older brother got the N64 instead. And occasionally my brother and I will be like, “Ay, let’s get a round of Smash Bros.”

O’Toole: My brothers graduated to the PlayStation 2 after N64, and after that, we didn’t buy any other systems. But nowadays, we play the N64 at holidays when everyone’s home. The PS2? We haven’t played that in eight years.

Pinckard: I played N64 with my dad a lot when he was still alive. We only had one controller, so we couldn’t play multiplayer. Instead we’d play single player and switch off at checkpoints.

I recently replayed Ocarina of Time. The game is very pixelated, but it still has this charm other classic games don’t. It brought me back to how things used to be. Playing N64 doesn’t make me sad — it brings back happy memories. I have a lot of things to remember my dad by, and N64 is a big one.

A Nintendo 64 Classic also appears to be in the works. Earlier this summer, Nintendo submitted a series of trademark claims to the European Union Intellectual Property Office that included a drawing of the N64’s unmistakable three-handle controller, suggesting that N64 zealots will soon be able to buy the system again.

That is, if they’re not playing their old one already.

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