The N64 is 30 years old! This week, we’re running a series of articles celebrating the 64-bit machine, its industry-shaping software, and its effect on a generation of gamers.
Today, Omar remembers the wonders of carting around consoles before Nintendo added a carry handle…
Do you remember blowing the dust from a cart to try to clear the copper pins? Mistakenly thinking a translucent third-party pad that looked like a shark must be better, but then always dodging it for multiplayer GoldenEye? Re-reading game manuals in your bedroom as if they were novellas? Sort-of-fancying Linda from Snowboard Kids? Feeling betrayed when Andrew’s house got a PlayStation with Spyro and said the graphics were “better”? (With their paltry 32 bits, are you actually kidding me?)
But most of all, do you remember lending your N64 to a friend? Or carting it around to a classmate’s birthday party so everyone could laugh in hysterics at the No Mercy dick-hit ding?
This was the sharing economy of the 1990s-2000s, before consoles were as household as fridges (and Fortnite) and also because the N64 was almost exactly half as prevalent as PlayStations, at least in the UK.
Even in my family, there were two PlayStation destinations: at my Uncle Brian’s (not his real name) and my cousin Hashim had one, too (I once used my Older Cousin privilege to somehow blame him when I accidentally overwrote his FFVII save). But we had the only N64.
The N64 felt so robustly plastic, droppable, rucksack-able, portable. There wasn’t the fragility of a disc cover hinge or the worrying Posh Tech weight of a modern console. And without a CD involved, it feels happily upside-down-able, agnostic of polarity. You didn’t mind it tumbling and rotating, and even without trying I’m pretty sure it’d work even upside down. But also needs must, and I was evangelical about people playing Ocarina of Time.
Maybe I’m one of Those Guys? As in, sometimes my excitement for things so overflows that I feel the need to recount, discuss, and share very intensely. But also sincerely!
We had Sky TV (or maybe Telewest), and so I used to tape VHSes of Dragonball Z off Cartoon Network to dish out to my mate Yass periodically, a happy missionary spreading Good News. And it was Yass I also force-lent my N64 to, like a (Deku) dealer, so buoyed on the life-changing possibilities of Ocarina of Time that he just had to play it. And, soon after, get stuck on the Deku Tree web break and have to call my other mate Hass to explain it.
My friend Manish and I had many involved debates about… well, everything, I suppose. Such is the work of teens making very important and deep new intellectual discoveries. But frequently we also discussed the relative merits of bona fide Zelda vs Hype: The Time Quest, which he played on his PC.
This comparison took place only in the common ground realm of school chat, as neither of us had actually played the other game. But I’ve messaged him on Facebook to check, and he now ranks OoT as better after I (or was it Hass?) lent him the console to play it on; turns out he’s gone on to play loads of Zeldas since!
Whereas my cousin Hashim (distinct from Hass, hope that’s clear) completed OoT piecemeal when visiting ours. I say visiting, but we all readily flowed between houses, such was the way. I’m not 100% sure I knew he was playing — like a secret squatter! — and was surprised a few years ago when he said his two favourite games ever were OoT and FFVII, which feels like some kind of karmic harmony.
I don’t want to sound too nostalgic because, really, I suspect gaming may be better than ever. I love my Switch and its actual portability (it’s the TV and the console in one!) and GameChat catch-ups and digital downloads. And I still get enough rucksack action from taking my laptop to coffee shops with the heft of the power adapter.
But there was something too about consoles and games as very physical artefacts, scarce and shared, their memories entwined with the world around them. The community of physical trade and telling and You Gotta See This before there were phones to see everything on, or perhaps just before we could buy stuff ourselves.
Yass now has a four-child tribe and a very important job. And the other day he sent me a WhatsApp:
(P.S. I was playing Ocarina the other day, was in the Deku tree, and was thinking about you!)
That N64! Sometimes a digital hearth you’d crowd round, to play multiplayer Snowboard Kids or Fighters Destiny or shout at Oddjob. But also a portable portal, to a magical adventure about a child who later grows up, played at a time when we were all doing the same. And now I’m excited for the remake.
