↑6♥3C0
Copyright: nintendo 64
The Nintendo 64 (abbreviated as N64, and referred to as the Ultra 64 before release), is Nintendo's third game console after the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, released in Japan, the United States, and Brazil in 1996, and in Europe and Australia in 1997. After the success of the Super Nintendo, Nintendo needed to create another game system for the next generation of consoles, as the SNES looked primitive compared to the new 3D Graphics of the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn. So Nintendo worked with Silicon Graphics, the makers of the SGI workstations used to make digital effects for movies such as Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and Jurassic Park. However, this ended up making the console release a year afterwards, but Nintendo made sure to tell the consumers that it would be worth the wait. The most (in)famous part of the system is that it still used cartridges while the rest of the consoles used CD-ROMs for games. Nintendo argued that the popularity of Plug & Play consoles and the lack of load times made cartridges preferable to CDs. However, this came at the expense of storage space and production costs. At most, a cartridge at the time could hold up to 64MB of space, compared to 900MB for CDs. Production costs were higher too, costing about $35 per cartridge to manufacture, compared to $5 per CD. On top of that, music wasn't of high quality of CDs due to not having the same audio format. This led to developers such as Konami, Capcom, Namco, and Square moving to the PlayStation. Regardless of cartridges, the system sold over 33 million units worldwide, and had a bunch of highly acclaimed video games, such as Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, Goldeneye 007, and the highest rated game of all time, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The system was discontinued in April 2002, with the last release being Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. The system is looked back upon as one of Nintendo's best, but the decision to use cartridges is regarded as one of Nintendo's worst moves. Speaking of which, it was the last major console to use cartridges up until 2017 with the Nintendo Switch.
Nintendo consoles
Nintendo handhelds
The following tags are aliased to this tag: n64 (learn more).
This tag implicates nintendo (learn more).
The following tags implicate this tag: n64_controller, n64_console (learn more).
