One author's career and one Nintendo console's launch, forever linked in time.

Consoles like the Super Nintendo and even the Sony PlayStation were out of my reach when they first landed in 1991 and 1995, respectively, largely because of my youth and lack of free cash at both times. I'm sure I wasn't the only kid to look wistfully at consoles like those through department store windows and on the pages of Best Buy and Target Sunday circulars. "The Super Nintendo is here!" they shouted. Cold comfort for any kid whose parents made it very clear that they already had a "Nintendo."

Only one year after the PlayStation, the Nintendo 64 launched in 1996 and became the first console I could afford to buy with my own cash. This week marks exactly 20 years since that system's launch in the United States, and it's a milestone I'll never forget. My initial encounter with the N64 isn't etched in memory just because it coincided with the release of one of the greatest 3D platformers of all time or because it was the first system to ship with four-player modes as a default. For me, it marked the beginning of the rest of my life.

Say "graphics" seven times fast

Before any of my other odd jobs as a teenager (such as soda jerk and record store clerk), I got a job reviewing video games. I hadn't even become an editor of my school newspaper when the Dallas Morning News agreed to pay me $25 an article to review brand-new games (and syndicated those reviews nationally).

For the backstory: in 1996, I was a fresh-faced kid who fueled his 16-bit obsession with a year of free rentals earned from my local Blockbuster's "Video Game Championships" contest in 1993. (I won my local store's contest again in 1994; unfortunately, I also lost both years' "regional" contests.) That's right around when I saw a listing in Dallas' daily newspaper for "teenaged video game critics." I thought I was imagining things. That's a thing? That's a job? For teens? Did they also need someone my age to review pizza and cargo shorts?

I put my Brother word processor to work, on which I furiously typed a cover letter and my first sample review—Earthworm Jim 2, complete with a multi-console breakdown of how it differed on Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. (I don't have the original text anymore, but I would bet serious money that I wrote the phrase "blast processing.") I mailed those to the Dallas Morning News, then got a callback from my eventual editor, who invited me to a meeting where I picked from a giant pile of games. (The pile was mostly junk, so I picked the best-looking game on the pile: the 1996 PC version of Need for Speed.)

This sufficed as a final job test of sorts. Can you meet a deadline? Can you piece together a sentence? Can you use the word "graphics" at least seven times? Presto: you're a columnist! I could send game requests, but I was expected to play whatever crap landed in my mailbox and review roughly two to three games a month.

"I have to start plotting our next few months of coverage," the editor wrote in a contributor-wide memo roughly one week later. "Who has next-gen consoles or is buying them this holiday season?"

I e-mailed him back within seconds to plant my flag: I wanted to be the paper's N64 guy.
By then, I'd worn out a copy of Next Generation magazine with a Super Mario 64 cover feature. I had dumped about a hundred bucks into a nearby burger shop's Killer Instinct cabinet ("coming soon to the Nintendo Ultra 64," it told me countless times). I was obsessed with the dazzling water effects of Wave Race 64. I was under Nintendo's 64-bit spell. I loved the spaceship-looking controller. I beamed the first time I tested the analog joystick at a Blockbuster kiosk. I stared at those bizarre C-buttons, imagining how they'd "transform" games to come. I'd even bought into Nintendo's BS about how much better cartridges would be for games than CDs.

I'm sure I mentioned at least three-fourths of that in my plea. The editor wrote me back later that day with a simple shrug of an e-mail. Like, "Whatever, kid. Let me know when you buy your precious."

What if Lee had been my clerk?

In some cities, including Dallas, the Nintendo 64 launched a full week early thanks to a retail-embargo break by the fine folks at Babbage's (a gaming retail chain where my colleague Lee Hutchinson once worked). With the console's launch looming, I had taken to refreshing the Internet's foremost N64 news resource, N64.com, roughly 12 times a day. (This was before the site succumbed to legal pressure and changed its name to IGN64.com.) I saw news of Babbage's peculiar decision, made a store phone call to confirm, and cashed in a favor from my mother to get a ride to the mall.

I had $220 to my name, a number I'd reached solely by selling some beloved Sega Genesis games to Funcoland the prior week. I would not be able to buy a game, or an extra controller, or a memory pak. Just the $199 system and its tax, please, sir.
Why my mother didn't drive at least 90MPH back to our house, I have no idea. It felt like an eternity waiting to hook my new system up to a TV. I specifically recall the anticipation and hope I had about what would happen when I plugged this system in. Maybe there'd be a fun loading screen, like on the Famicom Disk Drive, or some sort of secret mini-game that launched if the system didn't have a cartridge. Maybe my cash-strapped desperation would reveal some incredible hidden gem.

I believe I tested about 500 button combinations on the N64 controller while staring at its no-cartridge black screen. Sigh.

https://youtu.be/Oi-Kz4Y-8Lw

Ultimately, I had to wait for the console's launch day to get my N64 gaming fix, which is when Nintendo sent me a review copy of Wave Race 64. (As it turns out, the newspaper had received a free N64 console and a copy of Super Mario 64; a grownup staffer claimed those, wrote the Mario review, and never contributed to the column again.) The Dallas Morning News' online archive system is pretty awful, so my Wave Race review is apparently lost to the cosmos, but I do recall hyperbolizing about the game's "realistic" wave system. Wave Race 64 still holds up quite well in terms of recreating the feeling of bumpy-water jet-ski races, but visually, the whole thing looks like a shiny pool of endlessly bubbling gelatin.

I can't believe someone made a game called Iggy's Reckin' Balls

The N64 years presented a particularly interesting time to get into the game-criticism world, because the combination of an analog stick and serious triangle-pushing power meant console games could finally be built and controlled in full 3D. PlayStation games like Tomb Raider and Crash Bandicoot did their best with systems like limited motion and tank controls, but a D-pad just wasn't enough. The N64 opened up a whole new design language for console players (not to mention some honest-to-goodness first-person shooters). PC games had gotten the 3D-gaming world started with huge keyboard arrays and complicated fare like MechWarrior 2. Now, Nintendo (and some awful third-party developers) were seeing what worked and what didn't with a mix of bigger virtual worlds and a reduced control scheme.

https://youtu.be/VLSKnVJMvHg

In my game-review experience, some ideas worked and many didn't. 3D creations sometimes opened up certain 2D game-design ideas, like the kooky Iggy's Reckin' Balls, which had a "2D on loops" mechanic that felt a little like Uniracers and yet entirely unique. Other games seemed to be in 3D just for the heckuvit, like the awkward, barely-Tetris-at-all Tetrisphere (though I could write about 20 articles about its amazing soundtrack if you let me).

https://youtu.be/4rp3APxN4ZY

The N64 didn't have good stuff in every genre—especially sports and RPGs, and don't fake like Quest 64 or Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside sufficed—but its platformers and adventures will be remembered for the ages. There's no shortage of remembrances for those genres, but I'm still amazed by the publishers who took chances on some of the weirdest 3D platformers ever made, including DMA Design's Space Station: Silicon Valley and Sucker Punch's Rocket: Robot On Wheels. (Those studios went on to make Grand Theft Auto and Sly Cooper, respectively.) Those two games really set the table for the kind of open-ended, physics-based challenges that topped gaming's charts in the years to come, and if you've never seen either, you at least owe it to yourself to look up a few gameplay videos.

The system's four-player capabilities were eventually exploited to great effect—but the industry was clearly just testing the local-multiplayer waters. You can count on two hands the number of franchises that really maxed out the possibilities of four-player multiplayer: Goldeneye, Smash Bros., THQ's WCW/WWF fighters, Mario Kart 64 (and its many, many clones), Mario Party, and the over-the-top action-sports genre. (Speaking of, the only major four-player game to come out in the system's launch year of 1996 was Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey, which applied the NFL Blitz formula to four-player ice contests. It was damned good and never got its due.)

Many other good four-player games came out (I'd be murdered by certain friends if I didn't mention Battletanx 2), but they all essentially hewed to that top-six list. At the time, that was a ton of variety, but in hindsight, those games only scratched the four-player surface. The N64's gems clearly inspired the past few years' indie couch-gaming renaissance, which has exploded with so many genres and styles of games. Late '90s teens and pre-teens grew up to become the indie scene's most inspired local-competition game designers, and I have to assume that Nintendo's strange, three-pronged controller played at least some part in that. (You don't have to click very far at Ars to find a few gushing write-ups from yours truly about that genre.)

https://youtu.be/S4W5zhXG2uU

Perhaps most notably, this was the last console on which Nintendo could rehash its older characters and series without fielding non-stop complaints about "sequelitis." The console's best first-party games were mostly sequels—Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, F-Zero X, even Wave Race 64 and Excitebike 64—and yet all of them felt incredibly new thanks to their steps up to fully 3D engines. Nintendo had been a purely 2D game-making company for nearly a decade, yet it somehow pulled off the transition to 3D gaming in pretty much every way that Sega flubbed its own total overhaul.

It was a remarkable thing to witness from my perspective, with tons of early review copies in hand and a good opportunity to play all of the N64's worst games (Mace: The Dark Age, NFL Quarterback Club, Forsaken 64, ughghgh). Nintendo's own games looked even better with so much garbage in their relief, and that's why I don't think I'll ever be as impressed by Nintendo ever again. Maybe next year's Nintendo NX system will contain just the right kind of hardware modifications to rekindle the company's old magic or inspire new developers, but my career-related nostalgia (and the hindsight of how well Nintendo pulled off this era) will always make the N64 Nintendo's greatest era in my eyes.

The N64 ultimately set me on my path of getting paid to care about, and write about, all things technology. Just like the N64, my work from that time period feels dated now. That was an era of newspapers bathing in the slop of high ad sales, of slow article turn-around times, of the older way of talking about technology. But that feels like an entirely different nostalgia trip to reminisce about. Instead this week, I'm just gonna have sweet dreams about Iggy's Reckin' Balls.