Yeh, the N64 was saved by Pokemon Stadium, Pokemon Snap, Hey You Pikachu? Hell no. You people must have your heads up someones ass, those games were mediocre at best, Pokemon Stadium being decent. Apparently most of you forget the impact Zelda OoT and Super Smash Bros had amongst other games. Yes it lost ground to the Playstation, but it still had plenty of quality games, even if you can't name them. As for the 32X, no killer app+$200=no sale. $20 with lots of clearence software=yes please.
Someone said releasing the 32X in japan was a bad idea cuz the MD had a small market share there, so I second that. No doubt pal, but heres a concept: who gives a crap? Dont you remember those days? anything that had the words pokemon on it, no matter how shitty it was, got buyed by every kid ages 5-to-12. Thats the problem with trends: people follow those no matter how bad it may be.
Yeh, Pokemon was damn popular but it was a quality title (GameBoy models only). In fact I went and bought Pokemon Diamond from amazon last week and am awaiting it. But to dismiss the n64 as having been carried on by Pokemon titles is just ignorant. I can't imagine them having sold anywhere near the amount that Goldeneye or Perfect Dark did. You might make a case that Pokemon helped keep Nintendo afloat except for the fact the Gameboy was damn popular to start out with and the GBA continues to be.
I hate it when people bash the n64 because of its limited library of games - nintendo isn't all about pokemon, as APE says. Even on the GB/GBA/DS there are tons of other quality titles that extend beyond pokemon, and although pokemon has been a significant money-fountain, the forementioned consoles would have succeeded anyway. I have yet to find the enjoyment and the type of games I played on the n64 on other systems by the way. For me, the Saturn for example offered some special games that I couldnt get anywhere else, but the n64 was a real master-piece imo. the top quality games on the n64 felt very polished and satisfying, much more than even most top-tier Saturn or PS games. Too bad the GC felt like a promise that never materialized, oh well..rant mode off
Look guys saying pokemon didnt help N64 sales at all is as dumb as saying that Sonic didnt had anything to do with the Genesis success. For the better or the worst, for a massive part of the market at the time the Pokemon games were the killer apts for all nintendo consoles. And BTW both Mario64 and Starfox64, even SW:SotE were bigger system sellers than PD or GE.
comparing the sonic/megadrive connection to the pokemon/n64 connection is just daft. Sonic was to the MD what Mario64 and Zelda were to N64. Pokemon stadium isn't even a complete "game" so to speak - it's mostly a battle tool for people who own the GB versions of the games - i sure didnt get a lot out of it back in the day, since i didn't have the time to invest in the GB pokemon titles. Pokemon titles are killer apps only when it comes to portables. To date, NO pokemon title on a home console has gotten the critical acclaim of the deep and engaging portable RPGs. Pokemon on consoles have an "after-market" value only for those who own the portable titles. Pokemon games on nintendo home consoles are not system sellers or even considered killer apps. There are much more important and bigger titles to assist that purpose.
Not even comparable. The pokemon games on the 64 were afterthoughts, and not REAL pokemon games. I don't know anyone who rushed out to buy an N64 for pokemon snap or stadium. The sonic games are what sparked the popularity of the Genesis, and the pokemon games did nothing comparable for the N64 This statement is just plain ridiculous. GE was one of the biggest system sellers for the 64. It sold 8 million copies, how is that not a system seller? It's up there with Mario 64 and Zelda:OOT. I didn't know anyone back in the N64 days who didn't have the game, or at least played it. To be honest, Golden Eye was the reason I bought an N64. BTW, the top 5 selling games for the N64 were: Mario 64 - 11 million Mario Kart 64 - 8.47 million Golden Eye 007 - 8 million Zelda:OOT - 7.6 million Super Smash Bros. - 4.89 million Star Fox 64 and SW:SotE sold 2.74 and 1.98 million respectively. As you can see, they don't even compare to Golden Eye.
To credit the Pokemon games to the N64 sucess is to say the Oddworld games were system sellers. They weren't. Pokemon Stadium was basically a poor attempt at allowing 3d battles, entertaining but hardly a system seller. Pokemon Snap let you take pictures of Pokemon in 3d, interesting but not a system seller. Pikmin probably sold more systems than PS did.
I can't speak for the western market since I wasn't there but in Japan Pokemon sold 1000's of N64 units. EVERY kid loved it and owned a N64 due to Pokemon alone ! Yeah, the games are shite but we are talking about kids who'll buy shite because they know no better. To the Japanese kids Zelda wasn't even a contender. Every kid I knew had a N64 with at least one Pokemon game. Pokemon was bigger to Nintendo (at least in the east) than people realize. The second most popular was the Mario in this, mario in that series including Smash Brothers. Golden Eye, Perfect Dark and other good games were mostly bought by the older generation and I'm sure you can guess how small that market was with PlayStation and saturn also battling for the market share. Yakumo
Saturn was dirt cheap to make games for, and sega put out ANYTHING, and I mean anything, for saturn in those days, unlike sega usa.
THATS what I was talking about... I'm not trying to defend the pokemon games guys, I'm just saying kids were crazy over the franchise and hence would buy those games. And AW, were did you get those numbers? are those real? cuz I just cant believe Mario Kart 64 is the 2nd best selling N64 game...
back to 32x, 32x / mars was supposed to keep the cheap and popular genesis market alive, with the saturn being the high end system. Sort of like sony still selling the psone and the ps2 at the same time. However, they got wind of the psx capability, and basically added a second cpu to saturn. From what I read it was supposed to be single cpu. Once the early psx was shown it was pretty much game over for anything old and they just pulled the plug on 32x. No one in their right mind was going to play 32x after seeing ridge racer.
N64 game sales here. You can check all the references if you don't trust the source. Pokemon Stadium is down in 9th, selling less than 1/3rd as many copies as MK64 or GE. So, a popular game, but not a system seller by any means. Case closed. EDIT: shit, just noticed Jamtex's other thread. Never mind!
The figures don't lie, but sadly most people can't get past the fact Nintendo became synonymous with Pokemon for a generation, which didn't help when it came to shifting "mature" games like GoldenEye or Perfect Dark. By the release of the GameCube, this so-called kiddie image had been solidified to the point where most developers stopped bothering to produce anything even remotely outside the all ages mould. Even today with the DS and Wii, it's hard to imagine how diverse (or larger) the upcoming list of titles may be had Nintendo taken a different course of action back in the immediate post-SNES days, when there was a lot more variety than there is now. Yet, despite all this, Nintendo seems to be doing quite well shifting massive amounts of a limited number of units - you'd never have seen Microsoft, Sony or Sega being to brave as to place all their proverbial eggs in so few baskets!
If you want to whine / talk about Nintendo, Pokemon, The N64 then go here.... http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13750 As for the 32X, the point of the machine was that it was cheap and available, the Sony Playstation and Saturn would have been a lot more money so it would have filled in the gap quite nicely. Although Ridge Racer was the game that really pushed the machine, the Playstation really didn't have much else that really couldn't have been done on other machines, ditto the Saturn with it's flickery mess that Virtua Fighter was. The 32X lacked a killer app as well as proper support from Sega of Japan, Virtua Fighter on release would have made the 32X a lot more popular.
Yeah the infamous T-rex demo. For what I know the Saturn was (before that) built pretty much like a System32 but with some added 3D capabilities, but in its core it was a 2D machine. About the 32X, well the best way to describe it is too little, too late: with both Saturn and PSX already out in Japan, launching the 32X was a huge mistake. I know it was supposed to be cheap, but hell, I bet it would've had a lot of success if it was released before summer 94 at $200 rather than in november that year at $150. BTW, does anyone here has the pics from the 32X Daytona?
That final "lemon" demo was using a voxel engine and looked great. Why did voxel engines never take off :-( It was perfect for the days of low resolution gaming where you could feasibly do much nicer looking 3d than the very basic polygon-based engines at that time.
I think you're right, after seeing what potential real 32bit systems had, anything less no one was interested in. And you can't really blame them, compare pretty much any 3D PSX game to even the impressive demo video and it blows away the 32X. It's just such a waste though now. The 32X wasn't horribly flawwed it was just the wrong time for something like that. Still I wish we could have seen what the best developers could have gotten out of the system.
It's easier to be harsh on the 32x now after everything was said and done. But from my perspective as a gamer in 1995, all I wanted was a low-cost way to play DOOM (after experiencing the PC version firsthand). For $159.99, I got a 32X and a copy of DOOM packed-in that was reasonably close to the source material (minus a save feature..a big oversight if there ever was one). You couldn't beat that deal, and the prospects for future games looked somewhat bright at the time. I guess I fit Sega's demographic for the product and was reasonably happy with this low cost solution. People go and buy $400-$600 system nowadays to play a few games without even thinking about it. For me, the 32X was worth the money just to be able to play a decent Doom and Virtua Racing title without having to shell out $300-$400 and I'm sure others felt the same.
I wanted something newer than the Genesis. Instead of the N64, I got a Sega32x ($30 with Doom) and I loved it.
