The Nintendo 64: Nintendo’s First True Loss
“The year was 1990 and Nintendo was preparing to release the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in Japan, a year later it hit the North American market. A very capable 16-bit machine, rivaling the Sega Genesis, it really was an all-out war between the two. Only a few years later, in 1994, 16-bit was starting to become a thing of the past. With the release of the Atari Jaguar, and the 3DO in 93’, and the Saturn and newcomer PlayStation in 94’, Nintendo knew that they had to release something as to not lose market-share. They did have something up their sleeve, but they were just a little late to the party.”
The Nintendo 64 is one of my favorite consoles of all time. As a kid the first home console I played was indeed the N64, mainly playing DK64 and Smash Bros with my older brother. With this video I wanted to return to something I knew a bit more about, especially considering the last console video I did was on the PlayStation, a console I never really owned or played much of.
Considering how successful the NES, and Super Nintendo were, it was always very interesting to me that the N64 didn’t do so hot, especially in comparison to the PlayStation. Now that’s not to say the N64 did poorly. Selling over 30 million units is nothing to scoff at. Comparing it to the PlayStation with over 100 million units at the end of it’s life cycle is a different story.
One of my favorite things about each console I research is simply the power and specifications behind each one of them. After playing, researching, and making videos on the PlayStation and Saturn, two mainly 32-bit consoles, it was kind of insane seeing the power of the Nintendo 64 and Project Reality as a whole. With the combination of the regular MIPS CPU, and the Reality Signal Processor (RSP) and the Reality Display Processor (RDP) I can very much understand how complex it must’ve been to develop for the System at all.
I also never really knew how many peripherals came out for the Nintendo 64. My brother got Donkey Kong 64 on release, so I never knew the expansion pack was something that was not with the base console. We didn’t have a rumble pak, a memory pak, or a transfer pak either, so the two that are in the video are bought specifically for this video.
Considering the fact I just did a video on Pokémon Snap for the N64, this has been out for about a week, a new From The Collection is coming with a fan favorite N64 as the spotlight, and an upcoming video has a major chunk dedicated to another N64 game (No Spoilers) I guess you could say I’ve been focused on Nintendo 64 content. Maybe I’ll branch out here soon.
