Somehow, WinBack made the list and other revelations.
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
And now, some snappy commentary on various parts of the list:
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.
Of course Ogre Battle 64 isn't on the list - I own the only English-language copy.
