Email: N64 failed because of “Arrogant Nintendo”

I don’t know what sparked all the N64 emails, but I’d like to offer my two cents. I think that nearly all of the nostalgia for the N64 comes from later-stage millennials. A bunch of my family members with birthdays between 1986 and 1992 all love the N64 in the same way that I love the SNES. I like the N64 but it’s by far my least-favorite Nintendo platform. It does a a few things incredibly well, but not enough to save it from all of the things it does wrong.

Here are the things I like about the N64:
-Four controller ports. All of my favorite N64 memories involve four-player splitscreen. In an era where PC multiplayer was not quite accessible to the masses (but getting there), Nintendo made it possible for anyone to approximate that experience just by having a friend with an N64 and owning a controller. I can rattle off half a dozen games that my friends and I spent way too many hours on, with Mario Kart and Goldeneye being the winners. The GameCube gets my vote as Nintendo’s best multiplayer system, but the N64 is a very close second.
-Pioneering game design. Love or hate 3D Mario or Zelda, both of them started here and basically invented the 3D platformer and action RPG. Smash Bros. is another example of both this and a game well-served by the four controller ports.
-Rogue Squadron, which was the best Star Wars game not on PC, at least until Rogue Leader came out two years later.

And the things I don’t like:
-Throwing away 2D at the top of its game for crappy-looking 3D. The year before the N64, we got Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong Country 2, and Yoshi’s Island, which are regarded as some of the best in their genre. The indie scene is finally starting to get back up to that level of 2D quality after 20 years, but who knows what heights we’d be soaring to now, if Nintendo hadn’t detoured thanks to Miyamoto’s sick, sick obsession with 3D? On top of that, pretty much everything from the 32/64-bit era looks like absolute garbage today, as far as graphics are concerned, and is painful to replay without either graphic-enhancing emulators or HD remakes.
-Lack of library diversity. If you like Mario 64 knockoffs, Nintendo franchises, or shooters, then the N64 was right up your alley. If you wanted to play literally anything else, you needed another platform. This was of course because…
-…Arrogant Nintendo was in the driver’s seat and hellbent on alienating just about everyone. “CDs are a fad, our cartridges will cost more to make and buy. If developers and consumers don’t like that, tough.” “We’ll only share how to actually GET the most out of the system with a few ‘dream team’ developers, and if you aren’t one, then you just aren’t good enough for our platform.” “We built this awkward-ass trident controller around one game, and every other game will just have to deal with it.” “If you want to make games on our platform, you have to give us final say over all of your game’s content, and we’ll censor whatever we feel like.” Third parties and the hardcore predictably jumped ship to Sony and its “greenlight everything with zero quality control” approach. Any one of these decisions might have dealt the system a crippling blow, but all of them together were insurmountable.

I liked your email until the very end. I know the unthinking mantra of the time is to blame N64 cartridges for lack of third party support, but the Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance used cartridges and had plenty of third party support. The same is true with DS, 3DS, and the Switch.

N64 didn’t sell, except for in North America, and Nintendo had a non-competitive licensing control then.

The arrogance of the N64 is really the arrogance of Shigeru Miyamoto. Mario 64 was his baby. The N64 controller was, I believe, mostly Miyamoto’s ideas.

The improvement with the Gamecube era? Or games like Smash Brothers existing? You’d have to thank the new Nintendo Corporate Director at the time…