Nintendo was pushing what they envisioned as quality over quantity.
But they were also pushing carts over CDs, which had a different meaning to third parties concerned about their potential profit margins between the two different media formats.
But I was a kid still playing my SNES during that era because my parents were of the "you got one console, that's all you need" type.
Without Rare, N64 was a drought in general. Like people complain about quantity of games now, looking at the N64 in hindsight, they really had almost nothing between the really big games and some sports/racing games. It's really sad.
I think one of the big differences between now and then was money and time - this makes current game droughts feel more pronounced to me.
I only ever got games as a present on birthdays or at Christmas (so 1-3 a year) and I would play them to death before trading for another game with friends in school. I also only ever played for an hour or 2 at a time and without the Internet for guides games took ages to complete.
Nowadays I spend anywhere from £100-£300 a month on gaming and I work a 45 hour shift between Friday & Sunday so I get the rest of the week to myself and will quite often spend 12 - 18 hours gaming in a day when my wife's working.
A good example of this is Super Metroid which took me the best part of a year to complete (none of my friends knew you had to blow the glass tube to get into Meridia so we literally tried 1000s of random things until one of them smashed the glass) whereas I finished Dread in an afternoon and I'm now scratching around for something to play on my Switch.
Remember looking in the magazines of upcoming titles ( gamepro) and being like damn 99 is a year away, damn FEb 99 is 5 months way...Damn FEb is 4 months away..damn..damn... lol
and then looking at the Saturn import pages with Dragon Ball Z and X-men games and being like o sh*t, then looking at ps1 page being like oh sh*t lol
1997 was definitely not an N64 drought year: Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye 007, Diddy Kong Racing, Star Fox 64. I remember being excited for Super Mario RPG 2, Super Mario 64 2, Earthbound 64 and 64DD. Unfortunately none of them were released in their intended form.
@NintendoGamecube The size of the libraries says it all. The N64 got 393 games, the Saturn 1048 and the PS1 a whopping 4015.
That said, if all you wanted was 3-4 good games a year you'd still be fine with any of them. Given N64 cartridge prices, I wouldn't have been inclined to buy more than that anyway.
I didn't really feel the drought as back then I tended to play one game to completion then trade it in. I got my N64 in around 1998 so there was plenty of software available. Gaming was still somewhat niche back then, especially Nintendo in the UK. I could have never imagined how mainstream it has become. There was a real stigma attached to grown men playing or even making videogames which is far less common now.
@Silly_G I don't feel like 2017 was a droughtful year.
We had Botw, 1-2-Switch, Splatoon 2, ARMS, Mario Kart 8 DX, Minecraft, Mario + Rabbids, Super Mario Odyssey and Xenoblade 2.
lol came here to say just that. Its tiny library might punch above its weight, but it didn't get a lot of support in general compared to the PSX. Great companion console for the first-party stuff, but that was it.
I never noticed but I only got one or two games a year back then. Mario and Zelda took me forever to beat and 1080 was my go to racing game (I didn’t have mario kart or smash growing up. Didn’t want them beyond rentals). I think by the time I got a gamecube, the only games I owned were Mario 64, OoT, MM, 1080, Jet Force Gemini, rampage, and golden eye (and Daikatana…my only bad buy). And yet the N64 is my favorite gen for original games.
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Topic: Those N64 droughts were terrible back in 97/98/99
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