My mate Dave convinced me to start cataloguing every N64 game I could get my hands on about three years ago. "You've got loads of them anyway," he said, gesturing at my slightly concerning pile of grey cartridges. "Might as well write down what's worth playing." What started as a weekend project has turned into this bizarre archaeological dig through Nintendo's 64-bit library, and honestly? I'm still finding gems I'd completely forgotten existed.
The thing about the N64 library is that it's simultaneously smaller than you think and weirder than you remember. We're talking 388 games total in North America, which sounds like loads until you remember the PlayStation had over 1,300. But here's the mad bit—nearly every N64 game tried something different. The constraint of that chunky cartridge format meant developers couldn't just throw texture after texture at a problem. They had to be clever.
Let me start with the obvious stuff, yeah? Super Mario 64 isn't just good—it's the Rosetta Stone for 3D platforming. I must've put 200 hours into that game across multiple playthroughs, and I still discover new movement tricks. The way Mario's momentum carries through long jumps, how you can chain wall kicks into impossible climbs… it's physics made playful. Ocarina of Time sits right beside it as the other tent pole, and I'll fight anyone who says the Water Temple is unfair. It's not unfair. It's just mean. There's a difference.
GoldenEye 007 gets all the multiplayer love, and deservedly so—nothing quite matched the chaos of four-player Facility with proximity mines—but Perfect Dark is the better single-player game. Rare took everything they learned from Bond and cranked it up to eleven. The laptop gun that turns into a sentry turret? Genius. The FarSight rifle that shoots through walls? Absolutely broken in the best way possible. I remember finally beating it on Perfect Agent difficulty felt like earning a degree in video game mastery.
But here's where it gets interesting: the deep cuts. Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon is this bonkers Japanese fever dream about a blue-haired thief fighting robots with a pipe. The soundtrack alone is worth the cartridge price—if you can find one for less than fifty quid these days. Sin and Punishment never made it to Europe originally, but I imported a copy from Japan and struggled through the language barrier because the gameplay was pure Treasure madness. Bullet hell meets third-person shooter with a story that makes absolutely no sense but somehow feels emotionally resonant.
Then there's stuff like Space Station Silicon Valley, where you play as a robot chip inhabiting different animals to solve puzzles. It sounds mental when I type it out, but the execution is brilliant. Each animal has unique abilities, and the level design makes you think laterally about how a electric sheep might navigate differently than a robotic dog. DMA Design (before they became Rockstar North) always had this knack for weird concepts that just worked.
Racing games on N64 were properly special. F-Zero X running at 60fps with thirty cars on track was witchcraft in 1998. The sense of speed when you hit a boost pad and suddenly you're doing 1,000 mph through a glass tube suspended in space… nothing on PlayStation felt quite like that. Wave Race 64 made water physics feel like a living thing. I spent hours just messing about in the practice mode, learning how to read wave patterns and use them to cut perfect racing lines.
The really obscure stuff gets fascinating. Tetrisphere isn't proper Tetris—it's puzzle-solving on a sphere where you clear paths by matching shapes. Sounds terrible on paper, feels amazing in practice. The music is this ambient electronic soundtrack that somehow makes mathematical problem-solving feel zen. Bomberman 64 ditched the traditional grid-based gameplay for proper 3D movement, and while purists moaned, the single-player adventure mode was surprisingly engaging.
Body Harvest is this bizarre precursor to Grand Theft Auto where you travel through time fighting alien invasions. You can steal any vehicle—cars, tanks, helicopters—and the open-world structure feels like a prototype for everything DMA would do later. It's janky as anything, but there's something compelling about driving a stolen police car through 1950s America while shooting at flying saucers.
Some games were just too weird for their own good. Glover has you playing as a sentient glove protecting a crystal ball. The physics are floaty, the camera fights you constantly, but there's something endearing about its complete commitment to being absolutely mental. Goemon's Great Adventure combines side-scrolling platforming with two-player co-op and a story involving giant robot battles. It shouldn't work, but somehow it does.
The sports games deserve mention too, even if they're obviously dated now. NBA Hangtime had that perfect arcade feel—massive dunks, players literally on fire, commentary that got properly excited about everything. NFL Blitz was American football with all the rules removed and violence turned up to maximum. FIFA 98 had that indoor five-a-side mode that was more fun than the proper outdoor matches.
Import games opened up even weirder territories. Animal Forest (the original Animal Crossing) was this life simulation where you just… lived. No objectives, no win conditions, just a virtual existence where you caught fish and decorated your house. It felt revolutionary in a library dominated by jumping, shooting, and racing. Custom Robo had you building and battling tiny robots in arena combat. The customization was mental—dozens of parts, each affecting performance differently.
What strikes me now is how many N64 games were brave enough to be completely unique. Publishers today would focus-test half these concepts out of existence. A game about a blue-haired thief? Too niche. A puzzle game on a sphere? Who's the audience? But back then, Nintendo's tight hardware control meant every cartridge that made it to market had passed some quality threshold. Not every game was brilliant, but almost every game was trying to be something specific.
Going through my collection now, I'm amazed how many still hold up. Not graphically, obviously—those chunky polygons and muddy textures are what they are. But the core gameplay ideas remain solid. The N64 controller might look like an alien artifact, but it enabled things that simply weren't possible before. Analog movement, pressure-sensitive triggers, rumble feedback—innovations we take for granted now.
That's the thing about cataloguing this library properly. You realize it wasn't just a console generation—it was an entire philosophy about what games could be. Every cartridge represents someone's bet that players would embrace something new, something different, something that hadn't existed before. Most of those bets paid off. Some spectacularly.
