Welcome to your dirty thirties, N64.

The venerable console and its three-prong controller released in Japan thirty years ago today (June 23) and immediately changed the world. Launching alongside - but not including - Super Mario 64, the console also represents the high point of Nintendo’s pre-”Switch is selling all of the copies” western third party support at the expense of Japanese third parties who balked at cartridge format’s costs and lower storage capacities. Hi, Squaresoft.

As a result, only 296 games were released in North America during the N64’s life. And in celebration of the N64’s birthday, Circana (previously known as NPD) analyst Mat Piscatella posted a thread earlier counting down the 200 best selling games for the N64 in its strongest market - the United States. Since NPD started tracking game sales alongside the PlayStation launch in 1995, they’d have the numbers. Of course, numbers were not provided, just the ranking, but we take what we can get without shelling out all of the human monies or the cost of a Steam Machine.

So let’s run down the list and see what interesting nuggets we can find here.

Notable Omissions

• Not present on the top 200 but in an N64 Classics app near you: Iggy’s Reckin’ Balls, Tonic Trouble - both of which were probably throw-ins for more relevant games like Extreme G (78th) and Rayman 2 (90th). This is obviously not counting the originally Japan-exclusive Sin and Punishment.
• The first game in chronological release order to fall outside the top 200 for North America was FIFA Soccer 64 (March 27, 1997)
• Personally upsetting to me is International Superstar Soccer (aka Winning Eleven and eFootball) not appearing on the list at all.

And now, some snappy commentary on various parts of the list:

• Shoutout to mediocre racing game California Speed for bringing up the rear at 200.
• Buck Bumble at 199 makes sense, unfortunately the only people who bought it are people who enjoy the opening theme unironically.
• The “power” of Atlus before the Persona 4 Endurance Run: Snowboard Kids is the lowest ranked snowboarding game on the list at 178 and Jackpot James Jones’s Ogre Battle 64 is nowhere to be found.
• …but Snowboard Kids is BARELY beaten out by Body Harvest at 177. I thought this was proto-GTA?
• Of the eight games in the launch Nintendo Classics library that released in North America, WinBack is the lowest at 170 which honestly I would not have bet on making the list at all.
• Nice to see WCW Nitro as the lowest ranked licensed wrestling game on the list at 165. That game was the Dino Bravo of wrestling games on N64: it was the WORST. (ECW even beat WCW at something since Hardcore Revolution is 162.)
• Mischief Makers in the top half of sellers on the N64 in the US (130 of 296)? There’s hope yet.
• Mortal Kombat Mythologies is still too high at 110, but it’s the lowest ranked MK game at least. If only we got “Street Fighter Alpha 2 without load times” on N64, because the six face button arrangement is a godsend for SF-style fighters.
• Honestly, Dr Mario at 107 feels like an upset (complimentary) given what it came out between (Pokemon Stadium 2 and a Mario Party before Nintendo cut everything off).
• If you wondered why Pokemon Puzzle League died as a concept in the N64 era, a Pokemon game at 100 has to be a massive disappointment for Big Pikachu.
• Quest 64 beat Doom 64 95 - 96. And yet Doom got the re-release in 2020.
• Doom into Quest into Blast Corps into Beetle Adventure Racing is a bit of a Murderer’s Row.
• Resident Evil 2 at 91 if you wondered how really expensive miracle ports did.
• 2001 release alert: Madden 2002 at 89.
• Conker’s Bad Fur Day at 69? Either somebody fudged the numbers for that ranking or it’s kismet. Either way, leave your jokes in the Talkback or on our Discord (please keep them SFW).
• Another funny number: Mortal Kombat 4 at 67.
• Another ironic ranking: Pilotwings 64 at the coveted rank 64.
• Somehow I doubt Tony Hawk 3 would make the cut, but at least 2 popped in at 63. (The original was 18th.)
• Killer Instinct Gold (59th) getting beaten by Paper Mario (58th) is kind of based.
• John’s beloved Army Men top out at rank 51 with Sarge’s Heroes.
• Top 50 ranking for Glover? Really now?
• Hey You! Pikachu at 39 means a lot of people got a crap microphone.
• Three WWF games in five slots - and WCW Revenge at 13 - shows what the Monday Night Wars meant for N64 adoption.
• So much violence in the low 20s - Turok 2, WCW/NWO World Tour, Mario Party 2… and look at Yoshi’s Story splitting the list at 23.
• Impressive that Majora’s Mask was 14th despite coming out in North America the same day as the PlayStation 2, though that system was also incredibly undershipped at launch and Majora’s was the sequel to the best non-Fata Morgana game of all time.

Lastly, unfiltered commentary on the top 10:

#10: Pokemon Snap - Does Circana/NPD track sales to rental places? I once rented the game at about 2:30 in the afternoon and was done by dinner time.

#9: Donkey Kong 64 - You might as well have bought it to go along with the Expansion Pack, but the fact that the EP had to be packed in because of a memory leak Rare was either unwilling or unable to fix made this a harbinger of the modern “known shippable” culture of games.

#8: Star Fox 64 - The originator of force feedback controllers and a relatively replayable game.

#7: Diddy Kong Racing - I know it was the holiday game for 1997, but the fact that this outsold Star Fox 64 is kind of shocking. Also the first of two residents of the top 10 that aren’t in the Nintendo Classics as of press time.

#6: Pokemon Stadium - I put about 150 hours into the game and got to the point that I could 1v1 round 2 Mewtwo with Jolteon thanks to fixing some of the bugs in the first generation battle system. But I never mastered Clefairy Says.

#5: Super Smash Bros - The other non Nintendo Classics entry, and the best crossover party game you could get on the N64.

#4: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Still my favourite 3D Zelda game. Yeah, I said it. The holiday 1998 game, and part of an insane North American big four with Pokemon Red/Blue, Half-Life, and Metal Gear Solid: I prefer 1995 as the best year ever but I’ll at least hear the arguments for 1998.

#3: Mario Kart 64 - The codifier of so many Mario Kart tropes we still have today (including the blue shell) and the only N64 game someone in my family stayed up until 4 a.m. playing. And it wasn’t me: it was my MOTHER.

#2: Goldeneye 007 - Honestly, this position on the chart makes me wonder if it made more money than the film it’s based on in the US. Not the best FPS of its era, but certainly one of the most important since it held the crown as the big console FPS until Halo came around four years later.

#1: Super Mario 64 - Quelle surprise. The N64 was the first system to not come with a pack-in game and for the first couple of years of the system if you were buying a N64 it was for Super Mario 64. It says a lot that in the summer between the Japanese and NA launches of the N64 I spent more than a few weeks of allowance playing Mario 64 five minutes at a time at the local Microplay.