Twenty years ago, the Nintendo 64 came to Europe for the first time. Though it rarely makes it onto top-ten lists of home consoles, and probably isn’t even in the top three just from Nintendo, the N64 changed my life forever.

Some might not consider the N64 to have acquired that retro status afforded to the likes of the NES (1983) or Sega Mega Drive (1988), but for those of us born in the 90s this was our first generation of home consoles: the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn (1994), and the Nintendo 64 (1997). It was a pivotal generation too, the first to really focus on 3D graphics, representing a change arguably bigger than any since. HD is great, but more pixels will never have the same effect as an extra dimension.

I’ve played video games since I was old enough to understand the concept – kneeling on a computer chair as a toddler to play educational games on DOS, wrapping my tiny hands around a Game Gear (which came out the year I turned one) – but the Nintendo 64 was the very first home console that I could call my own. I’m the oldest of eight siblings who have all loved video games to varying degrees, and when it came to consoles like our original PlayStation we had to contend with taking turns and fighting over Memory Card slots. But then I got a Nintendo 64 for my birthday, and it went in my bedroom, and with that my background interest in video games was able to develop into an obsession.



I didn’t have very many games for it – games were just as expensive then as they are today – but that didn’t really matter. While the family PlayStation sat beside piles of demo discs and titles of highly varying quality, my Nintendo 64 had a small library of games that would go on to become classics.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Before Pokémon Go, there was Pokémon Stadium. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

Most notable, of course, was Super Mario 64, which frequently appears on lists of the best games of all time, and with good reason. A world apart from the 2D side-scrollers that had defined the series until then, this was Nintendo’s way of showing what they could do with this whole new 3D world, with its collection of inventive 3D levels to explore and an innovative 3D camera to make sure the player always had the best angle. Game designers still look to Super Mario 64 for inspiration today.



Many of my friends have fond memories of formative first-person shooter GoldenEye 007, with its split-screen multiplayer for up to four players (and the cheating that inevitably came with that), but I was a little young for that. Instead, my fondest time with my N64 was probably those days I spent waking up long before I had to so that I could squeeze in some time on Pokémon Stadium before school. With a Transfer Pak attached to my controller, I could play Pokemon Blue at triple speed on Game Boy tower, racing my Pokémon through the Elite Four to evolve them and complete my Pokédex.



The N64 generation was one of experimentation. The original PlayStation might have been the first console to have a controller with two analogue sticks, but the Nintendo 64’s controller was a bold attempt to figure out how else players might like to interact with their games: analogue stick in the centre, D-pad to the left, buttons to the right. Its strange three-pronged approach might not have stuck, but I loved the way it felt and that there were multiple ways to hold it (in the Pokémon Stadium Ekans’ Hoop Hurl game, for instance, you used the D-pad with your left hand and the analogue stick with your right). It’s still a strange joy to use today.

And I know that because, of all the consoles I’ve owned in the 27 years I’ve been alive, my N64 is the oldest still in my life. I passed my original Game Boy to a younger sibling when I got a Game Boy Color. I’ve no idea what happened to our Mega Drive. So many of my other much-loved consoles have broken: my first Xbox 360, my Wii. But my N64 still works just fine. I have a friend whose Pokémon-obsessed seven-year-old likes to play a few rounds of Pokémon Stadium when he comes to visit. My N64 still very much has a place in my life, plugged into my television along with my PlayStation 4, my Xbox One, and most recently my Nintendo Switch.



Nintendo’s creations have always been so much more interesting than the black boxes of their competitors, and as the Switch puts game cartridges back in the living room, the 20-year-old Nintendo 64 is still worth celebrating.

