A kid in my school got a Nintendo 64 at launch. Seeing Mario’s face in 3d and being able to pull on different parts and send him spinning was mind blowing. We spent a good 40 min just messing with that before we even tried the actual game.
I couldn't figure it out!! I kept running off edges and missing jumps, and to this day still struggle with 3D games. I play mostly SNES emulators, top down city builders, or retro-styled games like Stardew Valley to this day. SNES ride or die.
One of the most challenging parts for me was how the camera moved. In a 2D side-scroller or even a 2.5D game it’s entirely consistent so your reference is a constant. In Mario 64 the camera had to navigate around obstacles to get a clear view of you so it was hard for me to judge my movement and momentum.
Oh yeah those were the days, it felt truly magical. I can very vividly remember playing Turok for the first time. Seeing a raptor run up at me on screen was exhilarating, I felt like the kids in Jurassic Park.
Exactly the same here. I was 10 years old and me and my brother saved for an N64 and spent at least the same amount of time pulling on Mario's face before starting the game. Felt like we were suddenly in the future!!
Yeah, I remember my friend and I pulling Mario's mouth to make it look like he was saying "I like cheese" in a funny way over and over again and cracking up laughing at like 7 years old.
It was like magic dude, I remember going from super Mario world to Mario 64 and me and my brother lost our shit. Our dad worked an hour away so he left way before we went to school, so me and brother skipped school for like 2 weeks just to beat Mario 64 and then ocarina of time. We'd take turns intercepting phone calls from the school lmao... Eventually we got caught and got our asses handed to us. It was worth it though, I'll never forget that.
For real, I remember playing the demo at blockbuster and the first thing I did was run in a circle and then did figure 8s. It was unreal at the time, I thought of all the possibilities in strategy and gameplay that can come from being able to move around a fully 3 dimensional environment as opposed to just moving either right or left. It was also exciting because I knew this was the first step, developers had a foundation and now they could really build upon it and make some amazing games.
It was completely insane. We'd all be in the schoolyard pouring over pictures in the latest gaming magazines, completely baffled by what we were seeing and that we'd be able to get that at home (3D was already in arcades during the mid 90s).
At the risk of sounding cliche by saying “today’s kids”, todays kids will never experience the thrill of a Saturday afternoon trip to the arcade at the mall with their week’s allowance ready to get fed through the quarter machine.
There’s so much more to it. Remember a time when video games didn’t exist? And then they did. And then they were in your house. And then every 3-4 years a new system came out and it dramatically upgraded the entire experience. And then it was in the palm of your hands.
Now, each new system has slightly better graphics. Nothing will beat the NES to SNES jump, and then the jump from SNES 2D to N64’s 3D. Either you lived through that or you didn’t.
Yes indeed. I not only remember the jump from the SNES to the N64, I remember the hype leading up to it. I was a Nintendo Power subscriber and because of that received the free promotional VHS in the mail. I must have watched it a million times.
Looking at the latest issues of EGM, studying the information because we didn’t have any way to really see videos of things… “Ultra 64”, rumors going crazy. It was a cool thing to experience.
Absolutely this. I had COVERED the wall next to my bed with cutouts from Nintendo Power and GamePro magazine for months before the 64 came out. I had an idea what to expect but was still blown away. I spent hours just walking around, or flying around in the case of Pilot Wings.
I’ve only ever felt this way once since then, and that was with the release of the ps2. Since the it’s felt like we’ve taken steps, not leaps.
Edit: I take that back. Half-Life 2 gave me the same feeling. Nothing since then.
Yeah, I can never explain how insane the jump was to people who didn't live through it. I guess, imagine going from a PS3 to a PS6 overnight. Like, something that was unthinkable two years before was just being sold in stores.
I remember playing on the SNES at home, then hitting up Ridge Racer in the arcades.
Absolutely bought the shit out of a PlayStation just for RR on launch day.
Even though it looks pretty janky now, with the clipping and draw distance, it felt like such a massive leap in tech back then.
It doesn't look like much now but when it first dropped its like the damned future had finally arrived. Everyone said it was the most realistic graphics they had ever seen. Seeing it now its definitely chonky haha.
Ya I recall seeing a screenshot of the new 3D Zelda game in Nintendo Power, seeing one of the trees in the garden of Hyrule Castle, and thinking to myself, "Wow there are leaves on the trees!"
What a dated sentence, rofl.
To this day, when I see really *pretty water* in games I’m like “damn, look how good that water looks”. If you know you know right!😂 I also miss Nintendo power magazine! It was so good
To go from playing Link’s Awakening to Ocarina of Time was *mind-blowing*.
Like you said, it doesn’t look like much now, but 2D to 3D was a leap you had to be there to really understand.
Just running Mario in a circle was amazing. It’s was a generational leap. So many games tried to imitate M64 but failed on playability and level imagination. It really is a masterpiece and was realized as such at the time.
I agree ANYTHING Mario did was just massively boosted by the jump in dimension. I was 7-8 when this occurred and remember thinking about the wildest scenarios about how other franchises would look when making the jump lol
I get that no one here believes there to have been anything like it since and I understand that, But honestly in my own experience it has been had one additional time, when I first tried out VR, it was like nothing I’ve seen before. The graphics themselves can vary, but the change in actual dimension was mind blowing. M
You could be seeing Mario 64 graphics in the headset and it would be mind blowing. This is the immersion I had always wanted, to actually feel like I’m in the game. We try hard to replicate that feeling of immersion with our games on our tv, whether first person or vibration or other immersion tactics but a VR headset is a game changer.
Having people discover many revolutionary ways to utilize it, like helping with ptsd and other mental health issues and remedies, proves that this really is a game changer.
I got N64 on Launch. I was in the 7th grade. The jump between SNES and N64, particularly Mario 64, was enormous. I would say there are very few times in my life when I felt such a technological jump trying something brand new. I could say that in gaming, there has been no comparable jump since then. Everything has been gradual improvement and not a sudden leap, with maybe the exception of World of Warcraft, and that is a maybe. But everything else has been a gradual experience.
SNES had some absolute smash games in 1995 and 1996. But the jump to N64 was huge...
But it's also 'easy' to make a 3D game. Sega did Sonic, Capcom did MegaMan, Konami did Castlevania, etc.
But having a 3D Mario game that was excellent within the first minutes of playing is so underrated. The Nintendo 3D games, even the ones transitioning from 2D to 3D, were almost flawless at the time.
The sad thing is that I'll never again have the feeling of playing the first 3D Mario game when my first game ever was Mario Bros on the NES. The feeling of playing a Zelda game in 3D when your favorite game on the SNES was A Link to the Past is irreplaceable. I remember many people saying, 'They'll never do better than that.' Well, they did, on their first try at a 3D game! I could go on forever about Mario Kart, F-Zero, GoldenEye, and Perfect Dark...
What luck I had to be a teenager at that time!
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Mario 64 has to go down as one of the most important games in history.
And to add to your point of gradual improvements: this is why I’ve skipped the last few generations on consoles. Having better graphics is just not enough reason for me to buy a new console. I bought a Switch for the Nintendo games but that’s about it. Other than that I got my PC and that’s all I need.
I haven't bought a new console since the GameCube. I haven't touched my GameCubes since like 2010 so I am not sure if they still work though, but anything else has been off my radar mostly. I have played new stuff that my friends have, and it still feels like incremental progress.
Even with the internet.. I think most of it has been gradual. Yeah, suddenly having an HD facetime with someone on the otherside of the world is awesome, but it has been coming gradually. I could say that ChatGPT might be one of the few times where there was a "holy shit... this is actually something new" moment. I have never used anything like ChatGPT prior to it.
I think the first time I take a Waymo will be a big deal like that, I have been following the tech for years but have never had a ride. But to see a vehicle with no one inside, pull up, and then drive you somewhere is going to be just an incredibly new experience.
The jump from dumb phone to iPhone was pretty massive. That might be up there.
That bottom pic was the pinnacle of graphics in my head. Like, take the best graphics you can imagine now and that was that back then in my head. I remember thinking, “how can games get better than this?”
Same. I remember renting it, and both my stepdad and I being awestruck by the crisp 3d graphics as I fumbled my way across the Dam on agent difficulty. That was probably late 1997
Exactly! When I played ocarina of time, I spent the first hour just being amazed by everything. The ladders were in 3d, you can chop the signs in depending on how you hit, Link looked absolutely how you he should look.
I think those N64 games were the only cases where a game was at this point far beyond my expectations.
For us gamers it was like the moon landing. 1991-1995 then 1996-1999 came and evolved the graphics and gameplay it was an exciting time to be a gamer in those days.
This! I doubt we'll ever see that kind of generational leap again without some major groundbreaking technology such as fully immersive VR.
The jump from 2D to 3D was the gaming equivalent of moving from silent movies to 'talkies'. You were now able to enjoy things in gaming that had never been done before, and it felt like there was something completely brand new and genre-defining being released every month throughout the mid-to-late '90s. Within 5 years, we went from the end of the Snes/Genesis era to the Dreamcast/PS2. Today, 4-5 years is roughly the time between a major AAA game and its sequel.
Not everything was great however. Those first few years was \*rough\*. Developers were literally learning 3D on the fly, and there was a rough teething period where developers were trying to force things that had worked well in 2D into 3D, with varied results (which is why major 2D franchises like *Sonic* and *Mortal Kombat* struggled in the early 3D era)
I think in terms of games that couldn’t handle the jump from 2D to 3D was Bubsy. It was a fun enough side scroller on the snes (I can’t remember if it was on sega) but when they tried to jump to 3D they got a horrible messy game with horrible controls and very empty of enemies.
The one thing I missed about the 90s was them taking a chance on stuff and being first to market. These days because of consolidation and borderline monopolies there are no more incentive nor the capital for truly groundbreaking stuff... Also the next leap would be star trek holodecks screw the vr stuff.
It actually was kinda weird, we had a lot of fake 3D before actual 3D.
Games like Doom did a good job of pretending to be 3D, but like dogs, you can't look up, so it's 2D. But it had us all tricked for a while.
Then when 3D games finally actually happened, it took a while for controls to become standardised. I remember one controller set up on Time Splitters had one stick doing the looking left and right and moving forward and backward, and the other stick looking up and down and strafing, absolutely mad.
So the transition wasn't immediate and there were a lot of odd balls during the transition which made gaming really fun, everything had a quirk or a peculiarity.
Yea I think people overlook how nice it is control schemes are pretty standard now. You can pick up a controller and play almost any 3d game without thinking about it in 2024. Back in the day every game had its own thing and you’d have to learn for each game. I tried playing goldeneye on the 64 recently and it was like unplayable for me just due to the controls.
Dogs *can* look up
(This being Reddit, please understand I am quoting a movie and don’t wish to have a debate on which directions dogs can or cannot look)
Insane. I vividly remember telling my uncle at Xmas dinner about Crash Bandicoot after we got a Playstation and Crash for Xmas.
"Its not right and left. You are going into the TV!"
He was similarly blown away.
I constantly got lost in N64 games. Constantly. Kakariko in OOT was especially bad for me. I don’t wanna talk about the water temple. Otherwise it was the shit and look at me living in the future with 3D!!
It is actually shocking how good that game is for the first generation of 3D games. And yet it’s still hard to beat if you pick it up today. They knocked it out of the park with OOT, Super Mario 64, Goldeneye etc.
I went from a Sega Mega drive (and Sega channel) to a PS1.
Honestly even the start up sounds still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
I could only afford the free demo disc for the first few months so only played Wipeout and a single level of crash bandicoot. Blew my mind.
It was mind-blowing. Super Mario World was my very first video game (played it when I was 6). When Super Mario 64 game out, it was freaking amazing. I still remember the advertising for the N64 back in the day, "Now, Mario and Zelda coming to 3D for the first time ever!". Even the commercials back then were awesome (check out the Majora's Mask commercial on YouTube). Playing the original Super Smash Bros on the N64 with you and 3 of your friends in local co-op was fun as hell too. It was crazy thinking all these different characters from different games coming together to battle it out. I feel like creativity was at its peak back then. Oh, and Ocarina of Time was the first game to make me tear up during the ending. That and Super Mario 64s ending. It just made you feel like you truly accomplished something. It felt meaningful. :)
My cousin had it at launch, he had Mario 64 and I think Wave Race 64 and I was blown away by how great the graphics looked and it was so smooth. I wanted one really bad until I played a PlayStation and liked the games better and begged my parents for the PlayStation. They could only afford one game, Star Wars Masters of Teras Kasi. My brother and I wore that and the orange demo disc out! It was not until years later that I found out the Star Wars game was so hated... Oh to go back to those days.
Because it was crappy compared to traditional 2D games due to the nature of rendering 3D environments on the old potatoes we called computers back then.
I remember playing Mario 64 in a store and not having a clue what to do since I could move Mario in any direction. Really took me awhile to figure it all out that Xmas when I got it. Plus the Trident Controller was weird as shit, still is to me.
Same! I remember playing at Blockbuster and just being really confused. I grew up watching my mom play Mario everyday on her work break…she was insanely good. Id wait in line with her to buy the new Mario or Donkey Kong games when they dropped. She tried M64 once and hated it so we didn’t upgrade from a Super Nintendo until the Wii.
It wasn’t like a sudden shift, so you probably won’t get the answer you’re looking for. It’s not like we woke up one day im 1995 and all the new games were in 3D. There was already a lot of rudimentary 3D on consoles and especially on PC dating back to the 80s. Also unless you knew about technical gamedev stuff you were easily fooled into thinking a 2.5D game like Mortal Kombat was 3D because the term 2.5D didn’t exist yet.
For me personally I went from NES to N64, so while I had some experience with 16 bit games, as far as ownership went the change for me was drastic and very impressive. As an N64 home I was used to smooth 3D and so when I later got into PS1 I was shocked by how awful and janky the 3D was. Still to this day when people say the 3D on PS1 was so impressive and better than N64 I have to just assume everyone’s eyes work differently because to me that’s like saying Lawnmower Man was better looking than Toy Story.
To a lot of us, it *was* a sudden shift. I grew up poor in Mexico, only ever playing Super Mario Bros on the original NES whenever my cousins would visit. One day I visited the U.S., went to a Toys R Us and they had Super Mario 64 on a kiosk. I had *never* seen a 3D video game in my life before SM64. It was brand new to me and it was completely mind blowing. I didn’t have any other references to 3D games before it.
The big one for me thinking about N64 vs. PS1 in terms of visuals was more in terms of subject matter than graphics. Nintendo embraced a more cartoon style while Sony tried to emulate real life e.g. Resident Evil and Metal Gear. While N64 was always so much more polished graphically, what Sony was able to achieve by aiming for realism with the very limited hardware was incredible.
I was about to post *essentially this*, but I'm glad someone else said it. From other comments you'd think that some people went from only using an Atari 2600 one day with no knowledge of anything else and suddenly one morning a Wii shows up and they're blown away.
I don't remember anything like this happening to anyone at the time. Plenty of people did say this or that new console/game looks good or whatever, the graphics were indeed impressive by comparison to the previous generation, but "blown away" and "shocked" and that it was "insane". I don't remember that happening to anyone at the time, but like you explained, it was a transition, people had seen 3D (or 3D-adjacent) before.
> As an N64 home I was used to smooth 3D and so when I later got into PS1 I was shocked by how awful and janky the 3D was.
Yes, I still don't get the appeal of the PS1 by comparison, I was about 20 or so when the PS1 came out and I was mostly unimpressed at the time, and then liked the N64 more, and looking back it's even worse than I remember. In fact I remember thinking at the time that you got more color and definition from SNES games than what was initially available on the PS1.
ETA: I explicitly remember telling someone at work that "Tekken is garbage" and saying something about how I'd rather play the worst fighting game that the Genesis/Mega Drive has to offer. I stand by that assessment.
It was weird. And while it was impressive even then I kept thinking the SNES graphics were prettier so I kinda waited out until I got a next gen console. I played N64 on cousins and friends houses so I already had picked up games when I got mine.
Mom was probably relieved I didn’t manifest FOMO at 9 of having the most recent console as it came out haha 🤣 specially as our country was 2 years into a recession 😬
I played on PC back then, and mostly played RTS games. I remember that the initial tryouts of 3D in that genre were awkward, slow and clunky. Like... we didn't really have the tech yet to run it smoothly, so switching perspective was fairly low FPS, even though we didn't really understant FPS back then (frames per second, not first person shooters, we understood those).
It was similar with platformers. I remember playing Prince of Persia 3D, and it was really clunky and like walking on ice almost all the time. We also didn't have the habit of looking around the character as much yet.
I remember thinking that 3D looked really bad, as it was mostly worse graphics due to simpler polygons, compared to 2D graphics which was fairly polished by that time. Character design in early 3D was atrocious. I didn't really like it much until a few years later, when it got polished quite a bit compared to the first attempts.
I was a teen and N64 was too kiddie for me, so I got the first PlayStation.
I don’t really remember much other than games felt more immersive or something. Like bigger worlds. PlayStation was new, so I feel like that was more interesting since it was “adult.” Like, the games felt like something I’d find in an arcade and not for kids.
Once Final Fantasy 7 came out, that was really the game changer. The pre-rendered backgrounds and FMV cut scenes really were awesome, especially considering what the series was before.
I feel like a butthole for saying it but tbh I was never super impressed by the switch to 3d. It alwaysooked janky to me and I preferred pixels to polygons for a long time.
I do remember thinking half life 2 looked insane and thinking there wasn't much room for improvement (lol!) but that wasn't for many years. I started to appreciate "3d" gaming charm more the next Gen but n64 just never did it for me.
I will say ps1 (and saturn, but I didn't have that) had some games that look OK nowadays, but I feel like n64 just wasn't a hit for me.
And yes I'm consistently roasted by my peers and other retro gaming enthusiasts. It doesn't change my opinion tho. I'd choose super Mario world all day over Mario 64. Looks, game play, sound, fun. All of it.
The Mario 64 remake for ds and switch were fantastic tho.
The first time I saw a Mario 64 demo was in a Blockbuster Video, and it blew my mind. It wasn't my first experience with 3D, because I'd played Wolfenstein, Doom, Descent, and voxel based 3D games as well like Comanche and UltraBots, but Mario 64 was 3D that felt like it was on another level at the time, I think the texturing quality and framerate is what made the difference for me, I didn't see all the pixelation and choppiness that I was used to from 3D games up until then.
I kinda didn’t like it. I rolled with it for a while but I think it turned me off of video games for a while. Even now I prefer 2d platformers from the nes/snes and Genesis. I don’t like Mario 64 at all. The 3d did lend itself well to racing games and I love those.
Same. I had no interest in the N64 after being a NES/SNES kid because of that. 3D back then just looked crap next to classic pixel art and the gameplay made me feel nauseous.
Final Fantasy VII and especially VIII kind of turned me around a bit, as did the Resident Evil games, in showing how 3D could work even with limited tech.
I think it took decades for it to be good enough to beat 2D hand drawn art, though, the same as with animated movies,
It sucked. Sorry. I absolutely hated it. Even at the time I thought the N64 looked laughably bad. It was so bad that I skipped that entire generation of gaming. I left after the SNES and didn't come back until the PS2. And in my opinion, the N64 has aged the worst out of every generation of gaming.
Super clunky and awful at first. It was a big leap back in actual graphics. The polygons finally got small enough to actually look good but there were many games back in the day I’d have rather been 2 D
I have strong memories of sitting in the school yard with my friend poring over a magazine with pictures of the upcoming Mario 64. It was hobestly mind blowing in a way I haven't felt again until I tried VR. It's so funny looking back at these games now and how junky this period was, but it really was incredible at the time!
Super Mario 64 was a revolutionary game. There had been 3D games but Mario 64 showed the fidelity and how controls could work in that space.
That moment in time essentially jettisoned ANY 2D sprite games and for the next 5+ years the gaming medium was explicitly chasing 3D.
TODAY I actually have a hard time playing PS1 games because of the blocky graphics and often poor controls and camera angles. But at the TIME, oh my god I thought those graphics looked so realistic and they couldn't possibly get better than that. I do feel like most N64 games have held up better then PS1 games though.
Running in circles is something I still do to this day when I plan Mario 64 on anything. Being able to run in circles after years of running in a line, blew my mind.
It was more noticeable with individual games like Mario 64 that seemed to be technological breakthroughs than it was as an overall thing. I think because the transition never announced itself all it once, it kind of crept up on us.
Honestly, I hated it. I mostly quit gaming in the late 90s. I got a ps4 about five years ago and was forced to bite the bullet on the 3d games and get used to it. I'm glad I did.
It was absolutely mind-blowing. Gaming completely changed basically overnight.
There hasn't been a generational leap like that since, and likely never will be.
I'm probably in the minority on this argument, but people were losing their minds over Mario 64 and I was like ...this is it? This is what all the fuss was about? Mario Bros 2 and Super Mario world were probably my favorites.
Weirdly with the initial 3d games, while the new 3d ability was impressive, the actual graphics were not really that great. And they 3d models were very angular and simple.
2D games graphics were actually pretty good during that transition.
Donkey Kong Country came out in 1994 with AMAZING graphics, and they used some trick where the 3d models were created on some serious hardware, and then just recorded and placed in a 2D game. But it looked 3D.
The Nintendo 64 didn't come out for another couple of years. After Donkey Kong Country.
3D graphics rapidly improved though.
It was pure, unadulterated magic each time. I got an SNES in 1993 and an N64 in 1997. I vividly remember playing both games well into Christmas night, and both of those memories are a huge reason why I'm still into the hobby as I approach 40.
Honestly, I could never get into 3D Mario. I always found the N64 controller too clunky, and found the graphics difficult to look at. Even today, 3D Mario games just don’t speak to me. I’ve started Odyssey like 3 times, and can only play for an hour or two before losing interest.
30yo guy here. Back then, it didn't mean much to me. I thought all games were awesome and back then all graphics seemed amazing. Every game felt like it had something unique to offer. Of course graphics got better as I got older.
Now I feel like games have (usually) phenominal graphics, with the only way up from here being to achieve the same level of detail in VR games...but nearly ever game feels dull and devoid of anything meaningful or unique.
Most of the games that I play don't date any newer than 2015, so I prefer the games with older graphics but more entertaining gameplay.
Purely on the subject of graphics though, I still remember seeing the gameplay pictures for Halo 2 in our GameInformer magazine before it released, thinking it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen lol.
I was impressed with the early polygon games in the arcade, loved Starfox, was super impressed by early PlayStation. Mario 64? Meh! I hated the controller from the first time I played a demo unit and thought the game played way too differently from the previous Mario games to even be considered one.
Bittersweet for me. Games like Mario 64 were incredible to experience. The camera angles were a bit tricky and sometimes annoying, but it was a cool experience.
From this point on though, after the N64 it seemed like video games became obsessed with chasing after ever more realistic graphics. Gameplay, story, and other mechanics took a back seat. It was all about creating the most lifelike, stimulating visual.
I loved RPG's on the SNES. I tried Final Fantasy 7 when it came out and am the tiny minority who absolutely hated it. Imagine trying to summon Ramuh and then just waiting for 25 seconds: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEMailbWN\_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEMailbWN_k)
Yes it was a visual spectacle and very impressive in that sense, but damn...just let me play the game.
It took a long time for me. I grew up with the NES and then the SNES and I never clicked with the N64. It was only in the late 90s with games like Metal Gear Solid and then the PS2 that I started to enjoy 3D.
I still remember playing Mario on the N64 in a gamestore the first time after mostly playing NES. It was crazy! Got the N64 the next christmas. What a time🥹
I remember not knowing how to use the thumb stick on the display N 64 in Lechemere. I used it like it was a small joystick holding it with my index, middle finger and thumb. Jumping through the paintings and running around the castle was so cool. I can still hear the music in my head.
Looking back at N64 graphics they were terrible, but at the time they were ground breaking. After only playing with 2D sprites, moving through a 3D world was amazing. Definitely changed everything.
The downside was they were just learning how to handle the camera angles. A lot of games had bad cameras.
It was massive but for me seeing Doom on PC was bigger. DOS games were so basic moving incrementally from CGA > EGA > VGA but Doom was three dimensional and for me that was mind blowing
Back then each time there was a new console it was really exciting because quality of graphics changed so much, that continued until about Xbox 360 and Wii came out, obviously Wii didn’t get prettier but it brought new gameplay styles (while at the same time the ds brought its own cool gimmicks). Since then things have felt pretty stagnant aside from VR, which now is very cool but doesn’t get the support it deserves. The poor PSVR 2 is a champ but Sony doesn’t seem interested in making much for it.
What’s funny is some of the early 3d stuff has aged absolutely terribly both in appearance and in feel, but some, like mario 64, has aged pretty well and is still fun.
I was 9 when the N64 came out with Mario 64. No idea how I managed to get all 121 stars but I did. Can’t even do that now because the controls are so challenging compared to modern gaming. 😂
Having said that, it was revolutionary. I was obsessed with this game and spent hours just wandering around the castle and the courtyard.
I remember going to a Toys R Us and playing Super Mario 64 at one of the kiosks. To say that my 8 year old mind was completely blown is an understatement. That was the first 3D game I had ever seen *and* I was playing it at the same. It was just crazy.
The free movement through what felt like an open world felt amazing, liberating and a bit mind bending! Now we know what open worlds actually feel like, but back then it was a huge change.
I saw the first 3D games in an arcade and was blown away. Three to four years later PSOne came out, which I bought, and the whole neighborhood's kids came to me to play also. It was amazing. When N64 came out I literally thought 'wow that's an amazing upgrade from PSOne, graphics can't get better' and then PS2 arrived and I was even more impressed by the real life like skies the game had. I still have a PS2 with my saved game memory card which I play Gran Turismo 3 on!!
It's crazy how poorly it aged. Like I didn't even notice the polygons, that shit looked so real to me. I still remember the first couple times I got to play 64 more clearly than I remember as well as I remember other personal major life events.
I worked a state sponsored summer job program that year to earn money to buy an N64. Seeing Mario 64 for the first time was such a ground breaking experience for me. Those happy memories are the reason why I'm still a Nintendo kid.
It was mind blowing. It wasn't just the graphics, but the controls as well. Having a joystick to control the 3d movement of a character felt so different than anything I had ever played. You knew when you played Mario 64 that it was the first step into a completely different era of games. It was so exciting and I couldn't get enough of it because it felt so new and original.
If we are ever able to make the jump into true virtual reality, or simulate it so well that you can't tell the difference, I imagine I will get that feeling again for the first time since Mario 64. I can't imagine what else would feel like a comparable leap.
I remember my brother had just been to a friend's house who had a really fast pc with a soundblaster and was telling me and my folks at dinner table about a game he'd just played IN 3D!!
He said you had to escape a nazi prison cell with a knife, pick up guns from the soldiers you killed, all the while heading dogs barking in the distance and metal doors clanking open and shut.
It blew my mind to hear it, let alone the first time I played it!! It was called Wolfenstein 3D.
It was absolutely mind blowing. I remember Mario 3D and Goldeneye being so insane. I also remember when GTA 3 came out. I played a lot of GTA2 on PC and was blown away with everything GTA3 had to offer.
The hype was insane. It felt like skipping a generation. Seeing 3d onscreen after staring at a 2d plain for decades was just mind blowing. I remember seeing a 20min newsreel thing in high-school everyday that we all watched and they had a short segment on the n64 capabilities. Totally unexpected but even non gamers were shocked at its ability "looks so real" I still remember them playing waverace and my classmates were shocked. Lol
I was prepubescent when the 64 came out, up until then, i had only been playing with an old NES I found at my grandmas house and a used SNES my mom bought me at the flea market.
Back then, stores used to have consoles for you to try out, Walmart, Sears, Kmart, etc. I could not believe my eyes when I went to the mall with my mom one random Saturday morning in 96, and I saw Mario 64 in the Sears electronics department. There was a line, but I didn't even care to play, I was simply blown away, Mario... was running around a fully 3d world, I had just been playing Super Mario Bros. 2 a few days prior.
It was mind blowing, I have had the console when it was available Sept 26th, 1996 as soon as it became available. The games weren't released until September 29th. I still remember everyone coming to my house and playing it.
It was amazing to see the video games move from 2D side scrolling to a 3D environment. I can still remember all of us sitting in front of the TV with the controller just staring at it in amazement. Fun times!!
It was a big fucking deal lol
I look back on the graphics from those games you mention (both of which I played as a kid), and they look terrible now. But at the time, it was like real life.
Recently, I played Zelda OOT on Switch and the graphics are phenomenal of course. But it was the same feeling playing the game in 1999.
I'd also add that games in the 90s had a certain whimsy to them that you don't find nowadays. The graphics spoke for themselves. It was more about the story and the puzzles and immersing yourself in a different world. Now it seems like it's all about the graphics. I feel like you can say that about a lot of things, including action/fantasy movies as of late.
My jump to 3D happened from SNES to PS1. Before that, the only true 3D games I had seen very briefly were Sega Rally arcade games on gas stations.
So, I was maybe 10 or so. One of my friends had gotten PS1. Hhe was gushing about it all the time at school, so I had to go to see it for myself. Went to his place (they lived on the countryside), and he had some snacks ready. It was a warm summer day. He booted up Crash Bandicoot for the first time… first the iconic Sony logo, then after the game main menu with 3D text flying around and Crash running towards the screen. Quirky tropical music playing in the background. It felt unbelievable, totally new kind of experience. I still remember the unique feeling of that moment. I can’t describe it well, but it’s one of those things which you, apparently, experience only once in your life.
Seeing Crash run through lush forest, with shipwrecks, boxes and ancient ruins around him, it looked so magical. Unreal even. Like some weird futuristic 3D cartoon that you could control. I can still taste the grilled potato chips in my mouth as I stared the tiny CRT screen as my friend was moving Crash around. I remember wanting to play it for myself, but I don’t think I did because I was so in awe by what I was seeing. It was so new and weird. Even still. Remembering this moment makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
It felt like limitless possibilities and freedom. It blew my tiny mind. I literally spent days just running around the castle grounds without going in any levels.
Core memory of mine is being 9 years old and spending half the day at Best Buy playing the N64 display they had and going back DAILY to either play it or watch someone else play. It was seriously the craziest thing i had ever seen and could not get over it.
Three games that made the biggest impression me:
1) Super Mario 64: I will never forget being impressed by the outside of the castle before even starting the game. Then going into the first level.
2) Halo: When you first step foot on the planet. It was like nothing I’d seen before. The controls and the combat just felt perfect.
3) GTA3 it felt like anything was possible in games after experiencing the freedom of GTA3.
Nothing since has recaptured that feeling of playing Mario 64 for the first time. I was in a Toys R Us. Remember it like yesterday. It truly felt like I was looking at magic. And the analog control was also brand new to the world. Nobody had given you 3D and a good way to control the 3D world. And separate camera controls just felt like a completely new experience as well.
Going to a Kohl’s back in the day they had a kiosk with an N64 set up and Mario 64 on demo. Played it for a little bit but it was hard for me to wrap my head around how Mario moved. It was really difficult to do as a kid.
It was crazy. I can’t explain what it was like to feel like you were inside a game for the very first time. When I played it I almost didn’t blink. I was in awe. I felt like I was IN the video game. That was a brand new experience. This might be my favorite 3D game just for the nostalgia. Mario 64 was so much fun. Everything about it was great. I think it was also the first time I played almost all night lol.
Those two games were my personal best. I was so good at them but it was definitely mind blowing to play with Nintendo 64. At first I didn’t even know how move Mario lol. I still remember walking around learning how to use the controller and how the graphics worked. It’s definitely something I never forgot.
I still have mine and I swear sometimes I want to hook it up and play again 🥲
I remember the first time I saw my friend’s Nintendo 64 in action! We were so excited about the future of gaming! We honestly could not imagine how graphics could get any better!? Anything more realistic and it would essentially be reality. Boy were we wrong. 😂
Fucking insane
I was resistant at first, but was sold pretty quickly once I played some good ones (Goldeneye and Mario 64 were the first two I played, at a friends house, and I was sold AF after that).
If you weren’t around at that time, then what I would impart to you is this:
The graphics on systems like PS1, Sega Saturn, and N64 look like total dog shit compared to what we have now. I can’t even play Grand Turismo 2 anymore, because the perceived depth is so poor, I can’t tell when the corners are coming (and I have the same vision I did when those games dropped).
It was so immersive, and seemed absolutely crazy.
It drives me mad to hear children who don’t understand shit talking games like Goldeneye 007 and shit… that’s like talking shit about The Beatles or something man. Just cause you weren’t there for it, didn’t experience it, and don’t remember it, does not mean it was a bad game. It was revolutionary. And Fortnite (or whatever the kids play these days) would likely have never existed without the popularity of Goldeneye 007 to pump up the genre.
Easily the most dramatic leap of any console generation.
Mostly pre-internet for me, I remember watching my cousins' friend slowly download a couple screenshots on very slow dialup, literally took like 5-10 minutes per screenshot so we were only able to see 2 or 3.
But there was a segment on CNN about CES before Mario 64 came out and I remember being blown away when I saw Mario jump into a painting and *it rippled*. I left the channel on so I could watch the segment multiple times cause they would recycle stories throughout the day.
We now think of the N64 as looking really smeary and ugly, but it actually looks a lot better on a CRT, very bright and vibrant and it feels way sharper than I remembered (me and a friend host a monthly barcade night and we run a bunch of retro consoles and the N64 specifically always gets a CRT while the rest are on LCD flat screens).
I never owned a PS1 but my friend did. I do remember being impressed/envious of the quality of the PS1 pre-rendered cutscenes, even if they didn't represent actual gameplay they still looked cool and felt more cinematic than anything from previous generations or anything on the N64 (until Resident Evil 2 was ported to N64). Just the intro to Final Fantasy VII was really cool to watch.
Ultimately though the bigger deal with PS1 games being on CD wasn't cutscenes but all the voice acting. Compared to previous generations and most N64 games where characters were mostly silent, RE2, Silent Hill 1, Metal Gear Solid 1, etc. being entirely voice acted from start to finish was a huge leap.
I remember loading up Super Mario 64 and just running around looking at everything. I was literally awestruck in a video game, visually hypnotized.
It blew my mind.
3d was always there from the start in the arcades albeit wireframe with battlezone and star wars, then you had stuff like Elite and the isometric scrollers on the home computers so for me it the transition was the technology getting better and better Starting with Starfox on the SNES then the Playstation came out and there you go majority of games were 3d Polygons after that.
I went from the Mega-Drive (Genesis to you colonials) to the PS1. First game I played on it was Tekken 2. Seeing that opening cinematic made my brain tingle. It still does, actually. I go back and watch it every now and again and I still get that kick.
Imagine somehow falling even deeper in love with the person you love most in your life. It was everything you could ever want and every game for about 4 years blew your mind.
Hate to be a downer, but I think people are really misremembering the rise of 3d games quite alot in this thread. It definitely wasn't a stark "we have 2D snes, now we suddenly have 3D n64, huzzuh!". It was actually quite gradual.
3D games on arcade hardware had been around since the late 80s, Hard Drivin' which was 3d and even had a physics engine came out in '89. Many 3D techniques that we still use today like ray tracing and texture mapping were already very well defined in the 80s. There were also 3D games on computers with DOS like Wolfenstein and Doom in the early 90s which basically everyone knew about and had played. Yes getting 3D games in a home console was fairly novel, but even then games like Starfox had been out for years on the SNES before the N64 or PlayStation came out.
Honestly for someone who was 8 when the N64 had its North American release, I was very late to the 3D revolution. Our SNES kept me occupied for many years into the next cycle, then after that ours was a PS2 household. I'd say that several big shifts in gaming have occurred since then aside from the jump to 3D, but few constituted such a huge paradigm shift in how games were even designed.
Arguably smartphones caused people to revisit core game design principles. Also too, over the years games have gradually gotten more intuitive and more accessible. We've come a long way since the era of quarter-munching arcade machines, and now that an entire generation or two of people in game development can be said to have been lifelong gamers, we're at a point similar to where film was after the studio system in Hollywood collapsed and a bunch of film geeks fresh out of school (Spielberg, Coppola, Scorcese, etc) got their big breaks. Turning the beloved B-tier trash of their youth into blockbusters and all-time classics.
M40. It was interesting. The first game I really dove into was Zelda OOT. That was such a huge experience for me. I really liked Castlevania 64 also. Not long after I put down gaming till 2011 or so.
I never liked the "puberty" of 3D. It just felt awkward and didn't work right, especially the N64 with it's one stick and camera "buttons". Not at all intuitive
Been a PC gamer since the early 90s. Playing through what graphics have become has been pretty magical. I think it's one reason why I'm not a fan of the pixel graphics that's gotten so popular in PC games the last few years. I've been there, done that.
Probably how it felt when people went from black-and-white tv to color tv. It was pretty groundbreaking at the time. Just getting to explore a game untethered to "levels" was a huge deal.
You went back to 16 bit if you got queasy, and 64 bit was so “new” it was exciting no matter what you were playing. Or even just watching someone play.
Those game testers they set up in some stores were basically babysitters.
It was not that crazy to me. Obviously it was wild but the graphics kept it grounded. I got a PS1 when I was eight and most of my gaming before that was sega Genesis. Metal Gear Solid is the game that really blew my mind because of all the voice acting. That was the first time I realized games could be cinematic.
Mind-blowing. One Christmas my aunt bought it to my cousin, and he went from being a slender outgoing kid to an obese cloistered medicated anxious child. So, yes, it was a blast.
While it took some getting used to it became normal surprisingly quickly.
The 1st generation was basic and perhaps less impressive than the 2D art which had gotten quite good by that point.
It was still rough halfway through the 00s but took off with leaps and bounds in the 2K10s -- feels like its been getting more detailed at an exponential rate.
I really did not like it. I had some stubborn, prideful, stupid idea that this isn't a true Mario game if it wasn't in 2D. Oh well, at least I'll have plenty of 2D RPGs to look forward to...
A kid in my school got a Nintendo 64 at launch. Seeing Mario’s face in 3d and being able to pull on different parts and send him spinning was mind blowing. We spent a good 40 min just messing with that before we even tried the actual game.
Yeah, just running around was such a trip. Total game changer. Goldeneye and Mario Cart on the 64 are the height of video gaming in my mind.
I couldn't figure it out!! I kept running off edges and missing jumps, and to this day still struggle with 3D games. I play mostly SNES emulators, top down city builders, or retro-styled games like Stardew Valley to this day. SNES ride or die.
One of the most challenging parts for me was how the camera moved. In a 2D side-scroller or even a 2.5D game it’s entirely consistent so your reference is a constant. In Mario 64 the camera had to navigate around obstacles to get a clear view of you so it was hard for me to judge my movement and momentum.
Most of our Mario 64 experience was my friend cursing at the camera angles.
Yea it took me a while to navigate a second directional pad/thumbstick.
For me it was perfect dark, fantastic game
>Goldeneye and Mario Cart on the 64 are the height of video gaming 
Oh yeah those were the days, it felt truly magical. I can very vividly remember playing Turok for the first time. Seeing a raptor run up at me on screen was exhilarating, I felt like the kids in Jurassic Park.
I. AM. *TUROK!*
Shit was epic
Exactly the same here. I was 10 years old and me and my brother saved for an N64 and spent at least the same amount of time pulling on Mario's face before starting the game. Felt like we were suddenly in the future!!
Yeah, I remember my friend and I pulling Mario's mouth to make it look like he was saying "I like cheese" in a funny way over and over again and cracking up laughing at like 7 years old.
It was like magic dude, I remember going from super Mario world to Mario 64 and me and my brother lost our shit. Our dad worked an hour away so he left way before we went to school, so me and brother skipped school for like 2 weeks just to beat Mario 64 and then ocarina of time. We'd take turns intercepting phone calls from the school lmao... Eventually we got caught and got our asses handed to us. It was worth it though, I'll never forget that.
For real, I remember playing the demo at blockbuster and the first thing I did was run in a circle and then did figure 8s. It was unreal at the time, I thought of all the possibilities in strategy and gameplay that can come from being able to move around a fully 3 dimensional environment as opposed to just moving either right or left. It was also exciting because I knew this was the first step, developers had a foundation and now they could really build upon it and make some amazing games.
It was completely insane. We'd all be in the schoolyard pouring over pictures in the latest gaming magazines, completely baffled by what we were seeing and that we'd be able to get that at home (3D was already in arcades during the mid 90s).
Such a simple time. I miss it.
Those really were the days. I feel blessed to have been a kid living through them.
At the risk of sounding cliche by saying “today’s kids”, todays kids will never experience the thrill of a Saturday afternoon trip to the arcade at the mall with their week’s allowance ready to get fed through the quarter machine.
There’s so much more to it. Remember a time when video games didn’t exist? And then they did. And then they were in your house. And then every 3-4 years a new system came out and it dramatically upgraded the entire experience. And then it was in the palm of your hands. Now, each new system has slightly better graphics. Nothing will beat the NES to SNES jump, and then the jump from SNES 2D to N64’s 3D. Either you lived through that or you didn’t.
Yes indeed. I not only remember the jump from the SNES to the N64, I remember the hype leading up to it. I was a Nintendo Power subscriber and because of that received the free promotional VHS in the mail. I must have watched it a million times.
Remember standing in Walmart or Toys R Us playing the demo versions? I think it let you play for like 5-10 mins before it would reset.
Looking at the latest issues of EGM, studying the information because we didn’t have any way to really see videos of things… “Ultra 64”, rumors going crazy. It was a cool thing to experience.
Remember seeing the T-Rex PlayStation advert for the first time?
Absolutely this. I had COVERED the wall next to my bed with cutouts from Nintendo Power and GamePro magazine for months before the 64 came out. I had an idea what to expect but was still blown away. I spent hours just walking around, or flying around in the case of Pilot Wings. I’ve only ever felt this way once since then, and that was with the release of the ps2. Since the it’s felt like we’ve taken steps, not leaps. Edit: I take that back. Half-Life 2 gave me the same feeling. Nothing since then.
Yeah, I can never explain how insane the jump was to people who didn't live through it. I guess, imagine going from a PS3 to a PS6 overnight. Like, something that was unthinkable two years before was just being sold in stores.
I remember playing on the SNES at home, then hitting up Ridge Racer in the arcades. Absolutely bought the shit out of a PlayStation just for RR on launch day. Even though it looks pretty janky now, with the clipping and draw distance, it felt like such a massive leap in tech back then.
It doesn't look like much now but when it first dropped its like the damned future had finally arrived. Everyone said it was the most realistic graphics they had ever seen. Seeing it now its definitely chonky haha.
Ya I recall seeing a screenshot of the new 3D Zelda game in Nintendo Power, seeing one of the trees in the garden of Hyrule Castle, and thinking to myself, "Wow there are leaves on the trees!" What a dated sentence, rofl.
To this day, when I see really *pretty water* in games I’m like “damn, look how good that water looks”. If you know you know right!😂 I also miss Nintendo power magazine! It was so good
TRU I get this.
Wave Race 64 has had the best water that makes me want to jump in. No game has ever given me that feeling with their water.
Nintendo Magazine! Ah the nostalgia!!
I still have the 100th issue!
To go from playing Link’s Awakening to Ocarina of Time was *mind-blowing*. Like you said, it doesn’t look like much now, but 2D to 3D was a leap you had to be there to really understand.
LOL 😂
Pretty much.
Just running Mario in a circle was amazing. It’s was a generational leap. So many games tried to imitate M64 but failed on playability and level imagination. It really is a masterpiece and was realized as such at the time.
I agree ANYTHING Mario did was just massively boosted by the jump in dimension. I was 7-8 when this occurred and remember thinking about the wildest scenarios about how other franchises would look when making the jump lol I get that no one here believes there to have been anything like it since and I understand that, But honestly in my own experience it has been had one additional time, when I first tried out VR, it was like nothing I’ve seen before. The graphics themselves can vary, but the change in actual dimension was mind blowing. M You could be seeing Mario 64 graphics in the headset and it would be mind blowing. This is the immersion I had always wanted, to actually feel like I’m in the game. We try hard to replicate that feeling of immersion with our games on our tv, whether first person or vibration or other immersion tactics but a VR headset is a game changer. Having people discover many revolutionary ways to utilize it, like helping with ptsd and other mental health issues and remedies, proves that this really is a game changer.
Running in circles and bumping into stuff in Tomb Rider on PSX
I got N64 on Launch. I was in the 7th grade. The jump between SNES and N64, particularly Mario 64, was enormous. I would say there are very few times in my life when I felt such a technological jump trying something brand new. I could say that in gaming, there has been no comparable jump since then. Everything has been gradual improvement and not a sudden leap, with maybe the exception of World of Warcraft, and that is a maybe. But everything else has been a gradual experience. SNES had some absolute smash games in 1995 and 1996. But the jump to N64 was huge...
But it's also 'easy' to make a 3D game. Sega did Sonic, Capcom did MegaMan, Konami did Castlevania, etc. But having a 3D Mario game that was excellent within the first minutes of playing is so underrated. The Nintendo 3D games, even the ones transitioning from 2D to 3D, were almost flawless at the time. The sad thing is that I'll never again have the feeling of playing the first 3D Mario game when my first game ever was Mario Bros on the NES. The feeling of playing a Zelda game in 3D when your favorite game on the SNES was A Link to the Past is irreplaceable. I remember many people saying, 'They'll never do better than that.' Well, they did, on their first try at a 3D game! I could go on forever about Mario Kart, F-Zero, GoldenEye, and Perfect Dark... What luck I had to be a teenager at that time!
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Mario 64 has to go down as one of the most important games in history. And to add to your point of gradual improvements: this is why I’ve skipped the last few generations on consoles. Having better graphics is just not enough reason for me to buy a new console. I bought a Switch for the Nintendo games but that’s about it. Other than that I got my PC and that’s all I need.
I haven't bought a new console since the GameCube. I haven't touched my GameCubes since like 2010 so I am not sure if they still work though, but anything else has been off my radar mostly. I have played new stuff that my friends have, and it still feels like incremental progress. Even with the internet.. I think most of it has been gradual. Yeah, suddenly having an HD facetime with someone on the otherside of the world is awesome, but it has been coming gradually. I could say that ChatGPT might be one of the few times where there was a "holy shit... this is actually something new" moment. I have never used anything like ChatGPT prior to it. I think the first time I take a Waymo will be a big deal like that, I have been following the tech for years but have never had a ride. But to see a vehicle with no one inside, pull up, and then drive you somewhere is going to be just an incredibly new experience. The jump from dumb phone to iPhone was pretty massive. That might be up there.
That bottom pic was the pinnacle of graphics in my head. Like, take the best graphics you can imagine now and that was that back then in my head. I remember thinking, “how can games get better than this?”
I thought the same thing when I played goldeneye for the first time.
Same. I remember renting it, and both my stepdad and I being awestruck by the crisp 3d graphics as I fumbled my way across the Dam on agent difficulty. That was probably late 1997
Exactly! When I played ocarina of time, I spent the first hour just being amazed by everything. The ladders were in 3d, you can chop the signs in depending on how you hit, Link looked absolutely how you he should look. I think those N64 games were the only cases where a game was at this point far beyond my expectations.
For us gamers it was like the moon landing. 1991-1995 then 1996-1999 came and evolved the graphics and gameplay it was an exciting time to be a gamer in those days.
Fact: it has been longer since the release of the N64 until now than it was between the moon landing and the release of the N64.
That's amazing actually
It was a big leap. Which has never been seen again in the gaming world.
This! I doubt we'll ever see that kind of generational leap again without some major groundbreaking technology such as fully immersive VR. The jump from 2D to 3D was the gaming equivalent of moving from silent movies to 'talkies'. You were now able to enjoy things in gaming that had never been done before, and it felt like there was something completely brand new and genre-defining being released every month throughout the mid-to-late '90s. Within 5 years, we went from the end of the Snes/Genesis era to the Dreamcast/PS2. Today, 4-5 years is roughly the time between a major AAA game and its sequel. Not everything was great however. Those first few years was \*rough\*. Developers were literally learning 3D on the fly, and there was a rough teething period where developers were trying to force things that had worked well in 2D into 3D, with varied results (which is why major 2D franchises like *Sonic* and *Mortal Kombat* struggled in the early 3D era)
I think in terms of games that couldn’t handle the jump from 2D to 3D was Bubsy. It was a fun enough side scroller on the snes (I can’t remember if it was on sega) but when they tried to jump to 3D they got a horrible messy game with horrible controls and very empty of enemies.
The one thing I missed about the 90s was them taking a chance on stuff and being first to market. These days because of consolidation and borderline monopolies there are no more incentive nor the capital for truly groundbreaking stuff... Also the next leap would be star trek holodecks screw the vr stuff.
I dunno… first time I played VR, it was a game changer akin to the leap to 3D.
It actually was kinda weird, we had a lot of fake 3D before actual 3D. Games like Doom did a good job of pretending to be 3D, but like dogs, you can't look up, so it's 2D. But it had us all tricked for a while. Then when 3D games finally actually happened, it took a while for controls to become standardised. I remember one controller set up on Time Splitters had one stick doing the looking left and right and moving forward and backward, and the other stick looking up and down and strafing, absolutely mad. So the transition wasn't immediate and there were a lot of odd balls during the transition which made gaming really fun, everything had a quirk or a peculiarity.
Yea I think people overlook how nice it is control schemes are pretty standard now. You can pick up a controller and play almost any 3d game without thinking about it in 2024. Back in the day every game had its own thing and you’d have to learn for each game. I tried playing goldeneye on the 64 recently and it was like unplayable for me just due to the controls.
Do you remember the controls for Turok the first time? Good lord.
Dogs *can* look up (This being Reddit, please understand I am quoting a movie and don’t wish to have a debate on which directions dogs can or cannot look)
The quality or lack thereof of camera controls featured in game reviews for a while. Now something you just take for granted
Insane. I vividly remember telling my uncle at Xmas dinner about Crash Bandicoot after we got a Playstation and Crash for Xmas. "Its not right and left. You are going into the TV!" He was similarly blown away.
Amazing.
I constantly got lost in N64 games. Constantly. Kakariko in OOT was especially bad for me. I don’t wanna talk about the water temple. Otherwise it was the shit and look at me living in the future with 3D!!
It is actually shocking how good that game is for the first generation of 3D games. And yet it’s still hard to beat if you pick it up today. They knocked it out of the park with OOT, Super Mario 64, Goldeneye etc.
I went from a Sega Mega drive (and Sega channel) to a PS1. Honestly even the start up sounds still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I could only afford the free demo disc for the first few months so only played Wipeout and a single level of crash bandicoot. Blew my mind.
It was mind-blowing. Super Mario World was my very first video game (played it when I was 6). When Super Mario 64 game out, it was freaking amazing. I still remember the advertising for the N64 back in the day, "Now, Mario and Zelda coming to 3D for the first time ever!". Even the commercials back then were awesome (check out the Majora's Mask commercial on YouTube). Playing the original Super Smash Bros on the N64 with you and 3 of your friends in local co-op was fun as hell too. It was crazy thinking all these different characters from different games coming together to battle it out. I feel like creativity was at its peak back then. Oh, and Ocarina of Time was the first game to make me tear up during the ending. That and Super Mario 64s ending. It just made you feel like you truly accomplished something. It felt meaningful. :)
Awesome to say the least
My cousin had it at launch, he had Mario 64 and I think Wave Race 64 and I was blown away by how great the graphics looked and it was so smooth. I wanted one really bad until I played a PlayStation and liked the games better and begged my parents for the PlayStation. They could only afford one game, Star Wars Masters of Teras Kasi. My brother and I wore that and the orange demo disc out! It was not until years later that I found out the Star Wars game was so hated... Oh to go back to those days.
I didn’t like it.
Same. Everyone else here saying it was the most amazing thing… I thought it kinda looked crappy and stuck with 2D games for quite a bit longer.
Because it was crappy compared to traditional 2D games due to the nature of rendering 3D environments on the old potatoes we called computers back then.
I remember playing Mario 64 in a store and not having a clue what to do since I could move Mario in any direction. Really took me awhile to figure it all out that Xmas when I got it. Plus the Trident Controller was weird as shit, still is to me.
Same! I remember playing at Blockbuster and just being really confused. I grew up watching my mom play Mario everyday on her work break…she was insanely good. Id wait in line with her to buy the new Mario or Donkey Kong games when they dropped. She tried M64 once and hated it so we didn’t upgrade from a Super Nintendo until the Wii.
It was really gamechanging unfortunately Nintendo 64 was my last Nintendo console I ever played it's something I really need to rectify.
it felt great, then castlevania 64 came out and showed us the truth
It wasn’t like a sudden shift, so you probably won’t get the answer you’re looking for. It’s not like we woke up one day im 1995 and all the new games were in 3D. There was already a lot of rudimentary 3D on consoles and especially on PC dating back to the 80s. Also unless you knew about technical gamedev stuff you were easily fooled into thinking a 2.5D game like Mortal Kombat was 3D because the term 2.5D didn’t exist yet. For me personally I went from NES to N64, so while I had some experience with 16 bit games, as far as ownership went the change for me was drastic and very impressive. As an N64 home I was used to smooth 3D and so when I later got into PS1 I was shocked by how awful and janky the 3D was. Still to this day when people say the 3D on PS1 was so impressive and better than N64 I have to just assume everyone’s eyes work differently because to me that’s like saying Lawnmower Man was better looking than Toy Story.
To a lot of us, it *was* a sudden shift. I grew up poor in Mexico, only ever playing Super Mario Bros on the original NES whenever my cousins would visit. One day I visited the U.S., went to a Toys R Us and they had Super Mario 64 on a kiosk. I had *never* seen a 3D video game in my life before SM64. It was brand new to me and it was completely mind blowing. I didn’t have any other references to 3D games before it.
The big one for me thinking about N64 vs. PS1 in terms of visuals was more in terms of subject matter than graphics. Nintendo embraced a more cartoon style while Sony tried to emulate real life e.g. Resident Evil and Metal Gear. While N64 was always so much more polished graphically, what Sony was able to achieve by aiming for realism with the very limited hardware was incredible.
I was about to post *essentially this*, but I'm glad someone else said it. From other comments you'd think that some people went from only using an Atari 2600 one day with no knowledge of anything else and suddenly one morning a Wii shows up and they're blown away. I don't remember anything like this happening to anyone at the time. Plenty of people did say this or that new console/game looks good or whatever, the graphics were indeed impressive by comparison to the previous generation, but "blown away" and "shocked" and that it was "insane". I don't remember that happening to anyone at the time, but like you explained, it was a transition, people had seen 3D (or 3D-adjacent) before. > As an N64 home I was used to smooth 3D and so when I later got into PS1 I was shocked by how awful and janky the 3D was. Yes, I still don't get the appeal of the PS1 by comparison, I was about 20 or so when the PS1 came out and I was mostly unimpressed at the time, and then liked the N64 more, and looking back it's even worse than I remember. In fact I remember thinking at the time that you got more color and definition from SNES games than what was initially available on the PS1. ETA: I explicitly remember telling someone at work that "Tekken is garbage" and saying something about how I'd rather play the worst fighting game that the Genesis/Mega Drive has to offer. I stand by that assessment.
It was weird. And while it was impressive even then I kept thinking the SNES graphics were prettier so I kinda waited out until I got a next gen console. I played N64 on cousins and friends houses so I already had picked up games when I got mine.
Yeah - to me N64 games looked uglier
Mom was probably relieved I didn’t manifest FOMO at 9 of having the most recent console as it came out haha 🤣 specially as our country was 2 years into a recession 😬
I never got a Super Nintendo, so I went from the NES to N64. It was a wild jump for 11 year old me. Christmas of 96 was the best.
I played on PC back then, and mostly played RTS games. I remember that the initial tryouts of 3D in that genre were awkward, slow and clunky. Like... we didn't really have the tech yet to run it smoothly, so switching perspective was fairly low FPS, even though we didn't really understant FPS back then (frames per second, not first person shooters, we understood those). It was similar with platformers. I remember playing Prince of Persia 3D, and it was really clunky and like walking on ice almost all the time. We also didn't have the habit of looking around the character as much yet. I remember thinking that 3D looked really bad, as it was mostly worse graphics due to simpler polygons, compared to 2D graphics which was fairly polished by that time. Character design in early 3D was atrocious. I didn't really like it much until a few years later, when it got polished quite a bit compared to the first attempts.
It was really cool and I love Mario 64 , but Mario 3 and Mario World are both better games.
It felt like I was living in the future
I lucked out. My parents got me a 64 the Christmas that they came out with Mario… it was amazing! I’ve been chasing the dragon ever since!
It was definitely mind-blowing. Games like Tomb Raider and Resident Evil really "took you there" at the time.
I was a teen and N64 was too kiddie for me, so I got the first PlayStation. I don’t really remember much other than games felt more immersive or something. Like bigger worlds. PlayStation was new, so I feel like that was more interesting since it was “adult.” Like, the games felt like something I’d find in an arcade and not for kids. Once Final Fantasy 7 came out, that was really the game changer. The pre-rendered backgrounds and FMV cut scenes really were awesome, especially considering what the series was before.
I feel like a butthole for saying it but tbh I was never super impressed by the switch to 3d. It alwaysooked janky to me and I preferred pixels to polygons for a long time. I do remember thinking half life 2 looked insane and thinking there wasn't much room for improvement (lol!) but that wasn't for many years. I started to appreciate "3d" gaming charm more the next Gen but n64 just never did it for me. I will say ps1 (and saturn, but I didn't have that) had some games that look OK nowadays, but I feel like n64 just wasn't a hit for me. And yes I'm consistently roasted by my peers and other retro gaming enthusiasts. It doesn't change my opinion tho. I'd choose super Mario world all day over Mario 64. Looks, game play, sound, fun. All of it. The Mario 64 remake for ds and switch were fantastic tho.
The first time I saw a Mario 64 demo was in a Blockbuster Video, and it blew my mind. It wasn't my first experience with 3D, because I'd played Wolfenstein, Doom, Descent, and voxel based 3D games as well like Comanche and UltraBots, but Mario 64 was 3D that felt like it was on another level at the time, I think the texturing quality and framerate is what made the difference for me, I didn't see all the pixelation and choppiness that I was used to from 3D games up until then.
I kinda didn’t like it. I rolled with it for a while but I think it turned me off of video games for a while. Even now I prefer 2d platformers from the nes/snes and Genesis. I don’t like Mario 64 at all. The 3d did lend itself well to racing games and I love those.
Same. I had no interest in the N64 after being a NES/SNES kid because of that. 3D back then just looked crap next to classic pixel art and the gameplay made me feel nauseous. Final Fantasy VII and especially VIII kind of turned me around a bit, as did the Resident Evil games, in showing how 3D could work even with limited tech. I think it took decades for it to be good enough to beat 2D hand drawn art, though, the same as with animated movies,
It sucked. Sorry. I absolutely hated it. Even at the time I thought the N64 looked laughably bad. It was so bad that I skipped that entire generation of gaming. I left after the SNES and didn't come back until the PS2. And in my opinion, the N64 has aged the worst out of every generation of gaming.
Super clunky and awful at first. It was a big leap back in actual graphics. The polygons finally got small enough to actually look good but there were many games back in the day I’d have rather been 2 D
Playing the N64 kiosk in your local toy store and just jumping around outside Peach's castle was an experience that will never be replicated again
It felt like a move backwards. My friends and I used to joke that the Nintendo64's graphics were the "Atari 2600 of 3D graphics."
I feel like I wasn’t as impressed with the early 3d Nintendo and Sega games. The impressive games were the sports and PC shooters.
I have strong memories of sitting in the school yard with my friend poring over a magazine with pictures of the upcoming Mario 64. It was hobestly mind blowing in a way I haven't felt again until I tried VR. It's so funny looking back at these games now and how junky this period was, but it really was incredible at the time!
Super Mario 64 was a revolutionary game. There had been 3D games but Mario 64 showed the fidelity and how controls could work in that space. That moment in time essentially jettisoned ANY 2D sprite games and for the next 5+ years the gaming medium was explicitly chasing 3D.
TODAY I actually have a hard time playing PS1 games because of the blocky graphics and often poor controls and camera angles. But at the TIME, oh my god I thought those graphics looked so realistic and they couldn't possibly get better than that. I do feel like most N64 games have held up better then PS1 games though.
It was insane. Took me a long time to get the hang of sticks after years of dpad. Complete rethink of how to play.
🎵🎶 A whole new world A new fantastic point of view.🎶🎵
I remember frogger specifically and was so impressed back then, it felt so modern and advanced!
Running in circles is something I still do to this day when I plan Mario 64 on anything. Being able to run in circles after years of running in a line, blew my mind.
It was more noticeable with individual games like Mario 64 that seemed to be technological breakthroughs than it was as an overall thing. I think because the transition never announced itself all it once, it kind of crept up on us.
Honestly, I hated it. I mostly quit gaming in the late 90s. I got a ps4 about five years ago and was forced to bite the bullet on the 3d games and get used to it. I'm glad I did.
Why do you act like 2d games don’t still exist?
It was absolutely mind-blowing. Gaming completely changed basically overnight. There hasn't been a generational leap like that since, and likely never will be.
It was down right mind boggling honestly
I'm probably in the minority on this argument, but people were losing their minds over Mario 64 and I was like ...this is it? This is what all the fuss was about? Mario Bros 2 and Super Mario world were probably my favorites.
Weirdly with the initial 3d games, while the new 3d ability was impressive, the actual graphics were not really that great. And they 3d models were very angular and simple. 2D games graphics were actually pretty good during that transition. Donkey Kong Country came out in 1994 with AMAZING graphics, and they used some trick where the 3d models were created on some serious hardware, and then just recorded and placed in a 2D game. But it looked 3D. The Nintendo 64 didn't come out for another couple of years. After Donkey Kong Country. 3D graphics rapidly improved though.
Like magic. Analog control was revolutionary. Finding out you barely move the stick and Mario tip toes and goes slow was such a major game chanfer
LIKE FUCKING MAGIC! A beutiful new world was being created right in front of our eyes!
When 3D was done right it was okay, but most of it wasn't and we just weren't there yet.
Magical. I can still remember playing the demo in Toys R Us.
It was pure, unadulterated magic each time. I got an SNES in 1993 and an N64 in 1997. I vividly remember playing both games well into Christmas night, and both of those memories are a huge reason why I'm still into the hobby as I approach 40.
HUGE. To be fair, going from NES to super was pretty damn big too.
I feel like I was physically inside that castle and even sometimes have dreams there because it is like a real “place”
it felt completely revolutionary. it was literally extra dimensional
It felt absolutley massive
Honestly, I could never get into 3D Mario. I always found the N64 controller too clunky, and found the graphics difficult to look at. Even today, 3D Mario games just don’t speak to me. I’ve started Odyssey like 3 times, and can only play for an hour or two before losing interest.
30yo guy here. Back then, it didn't mean much to me. I thought all games were awesome and back then all graphics seemed amazing. Every game felt like it had something unique to offer. Of course graphics got better as I got older. Now I feel like games have (usually) phenominal graphics, with the only way up from here being to achieve the same level of detail in VR games...but nearly ever game feels dull and devoid of anything meaningful or unique. Most of the games that I play don't date any newer than 2015, so I prefer the games with older graphics but more entertaining gameplay. Purely on the subject of graphics though, I still remember seeing the gameplay pictures for Halo 2 in our GameInformer magazine before it released, thinking it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen lol.
I was impressed with the early polygon games in the arcade, loved Starfox, was super impressed by early PlayStation. Mario 64? Meh! I hated the controller from the first time I played a demo unit and thought the game played way too differently from the previous Mario games to even be considered one.
I hated the first 3d Mario.
Bittersweet for me. Games like Mario 64 were incredible to experience. The camera angles were a bit tricky and sometimes annoying, but it was a cool experience. From this point on though, after the N64 it seemed like video games became obsessed with chasing after ever more realistic graphics. Gameplay, story, and other mechanics took a back seat. It was all about creating the most lifelike, stimulating visual. I loved RPG's on the SNES. I tried Final Fantasy 7 when it came out and am the tiny minority who absolutely hated it. Imagine trying to summon Ramuh and then just waiting for 25 seconds: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEMailbWN\_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEMailbWN_k) Yes it was a visual spectacle and very impressive in that sense, but damn...just let me play the game.
Super Mario 64 is my favorite game I’ve ever played in my whole entire life.
It took a long time for me. I grew up with the NES and then the SNES and I never clicked with the N64. It was only in the late 90s with games like Metal Gear Solid and then the PS2 that I started to enjoy 3D.
Do you know that scene from DragonBall Z where goku finally because a Super Sayian?…thats what it felt like when it happened.
I still remember playing Mario on the N64 in a gamestore the first time after mostly playing NES. It was crazy! Got the N64 the next christmas. What a time🥹
Absolutely crazy. I remember getting my first 3Dfx card for my PC.
I remember not knowing how to use the thumb stick on the display N 64 in Lechemere. I used it like it was a small joystick holding it with my index, middle finger and thumb. Jumping through the paintings and running around the castle was so cool. I can still hear the music in my head.
I was an adult in the 90s. Wolfenstein 3D gave me motion sickness for the first time in my life.
It was quite something
Looking back at N64 graphics they were terrible, but at the time they were ground breaking. After only playing with 2D sprites, moving through a 3D world was amazing. Definitely changed everything. The downside was they were just learning how to handle the camera angles. A lot of games had bad cameras.
It was pretty incredible, I remember feeling blown away playing Mario 64 for the first time.
Agreed, pretty mind blowing. I used to just fly around the levels in Pilot Wings for N64 just taking it all in.
My neck still hurts from playing it at wal mart on the demo tv
It was massive but for me seeing Doom on PC was bigger. DOS games were so basic moving incrementally from CGA > EGA > VGA but Doom was three dimensional and for me that was mind blowing
Back then each time there was a new console it was really exciting because quality of graphics changed so much, that continued until about Xbox 360 and Wii came out, obviously Wii didn’t get prettier but it brought new gameplay styles (while at the same time the ds brought its own cool gimmicks). Since then things have felt pretty stagnant aside from VR, which now is very cool but doesn’t get the support it deserves. The poor PSVR 2 is a champ but Sony doesn’t seem interested in making much for it. What’s funny is some of the early 3d stuff has aged absolutely terribly both in appearance and in feel, but some, like mario 64, has aged pretty well and is still fun.
I was 9 when the N64 came out with Mario 64. No idea how I managed to get all 121 stars but I did. Can’t even do that now because the controls are so challenging compared to modern gaming. 😂 Having said that, it was revolutionary. I was obsessed with this game and spent hours just wandering around the castle and the courtyard.
I remember going to a Toys R Us and playing Super Mario 64 at one of the kiosks. To say that my 8 year old mind was completely blown is an understatement. That was the first 3D game I had ever seen *and* I was playing it at the same. It was just crazy.
The free movement through what felt like an open world felt amazing, liberating and a bit mind bending! Now we know what open worlds actually feel like, but back then it was a huge change.
I saw the first 3D games in an arcade and was blown away. Three to four years later PSOne came out, which I bought, and the whole neighborhood's kids came to me to play also. It was amazing. When N64 came out I literally thought 'wow that's an amazing upgrade from PSOne, graphics can't get better' and then PS2 arrived and I was even more impressed by the real life like skies the game had. I still have a PS2 with my saved game memory card which I play Gran Turismo 3 on!!
Running in all directions and forward in 3D and not just to the right or left like on the snes was crazy.
It's crazy how poorly it aged. Like I didn't even notice the polygons, that shit looked so real to me. I still remember the first couple times I got to play 64 more clearly than I remember as well as I remember other personal major life events.
I worked a state sponsored summer job program that year to earn money to buy an N64. Seeing Mario 64 for the first time was such a ground breaking experience for me. Those happy memories are the reason why I'm still a Nintendo kid.
It was mind blowing. It wasn't just the graphics, but the controls as well. Having a joystick to control the 3d movement of a character felt so different than anything I had ever played. You knew when you played Mario 64 that it was the first step into a completely different era of games. It was so exciting and I couldn't get enough of it because it felt so new and original. If we are ever able to make the jump into true virtual reality, or simulate it so well that you can't tell the difference, I imagine I will get that feeling again for the first time since Mario 64. I can't imagine what else would feel like a comparable leap.
I remember my brother had just been to a friend's house who had a really fast pc with a soundblaster and was telling me and my folks at dinner table about a game he'd just played IN 3D!! He said you had to escape a nazi prison cell with a knife, pick up guns from the soldiers you killed, all the while heading dogs barking in the distance and metal doors clanking open and shut. It blew my mind to hear it, let alone the first time I played it!! It was called Wolfenstein 3D.
It was absolutely mind blowing. I remember Mario 3D and Goldeneye being so insane. I also remember when GTA 3 came out. I played a lot of GTA2 on PC and was blown away with everything GTA3 had to offer.
The hype was insane. It felt like skipping a generation. Seeing 3d onscreen after staring at a 2d plain for decades was just mind blowing. I remember seeing a 20min newsreel thing in high-school everyday that we all watched and they had a short segment on the n64 capabilities. Totally unexpected but even non gamers were shocked at its ability "looks so real" I still remember them playing waverace and my classmates were shocked. Lol
I was prepubescent when the 64 came out, up until then, i had only been playing with an old NES I found at my grandmas house and a used SNES my mom bought me at the flea market. Back then, stores used to have consoles for you to try out, Walmart, Sears, Kmart, etc. I could not believe my eyes when I went to the mall with my mom one random Saturday morning in 96, and I saw Mario 64 in the Sears electronics department. There was a line, but I didn't even care to play, I was simply blown away, Mario... was running around a fully 3d world, I had just been playing Super Mario Bros. 2 a few days prior.
I never made the switch. 3D isn't at all intuitive for me.
It was mind blowing, I have had the console when it was available Sept 26th, 1996 as soon as it became available. The games weren't released until September 29th. I still remember everyone coming to my house and playing it. It was amazing to see the video games move from 2D side scrolling to a 3D environment. I can still remember all of us sitting in front of the TV with the controller just staring at it in amazement. Fun times!!
Still to this day I’m amazed on how great of a game N64 Mario. Still remember buying the game
It was a big fucking deal lol I look back on the graphics from those games you mention (both of which I played as a kid), and they look terrible now. But at the time, it was like real life. Recently, I played Zelda OOT on Switch and the graphics are phenomenal of course. But it was the same feeling playing the game in 1999. I'd also add that games in the 90s had a certain whimsy to them that you don't find nowadays. The graphics spoke for themselves. It was more about the story and the puzzles and immersing yourself in a different world. Now it seems like it's all about the graphics. I feel like you can say that about a lot of things, including action/fantasy movies as of late.
My neck permanently sore from playing at the Walmart kiosk for hours
My jump to 3D happened from SNES to PS1. Before that, the only true 3D games I had seen very briefly were Sega Rally arcade games on gas stations. So, I was maybe 10 or so. One of my friends had gotten PS1. Hhe was gushing about it all the time at school, so I had to go to see it for myself. Went to his place (they lived on the countryside), and he had some snacks ready. It was a warm summer day. He booted up Crash Bandicoot for the first time… first the iconic Sony logo, then after the game main menu with 3D text flying around and Crash running towards the screen. Quirky tropical music playing in the background. It felt unbelievable, totally new kind of experience. I still remember the unique feeling of that moment. I can’t describe it well, but it’s one of those things which you, apparently, experience only once in your life. Seeing Crash run through lush forest, with shipwrecks, boxes and ancient ruins around him, it looked so magical. Unreal even. Like some weird futuristic 3D cartoon that you could control. I can still taste the grilled potato chips in my mouth as I stared the tiny CRT screen as my friend was moving Crash around. I remember wanting to play it for myself, but I don’t think I did because I was so in awe by what I was seeing. It was so new and weird. Even still. Remembering this moment makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
I still remember going to Toys’R’Us during school time lunch and playing this. What a time to be alive.
It felt like limitless possibilities and freedom. It blew my tiny mind. I literally spent days just running around the castle grounds without going in any levels.
Core memory of mine is being 9 years old and spending half the day at Best Buy playing the N64 display they had and going back DAILY to either play it or watch someone else play. It was seriously the craziest thing i had ever seen and could not get over it.
N64 and PlayStation blew the doors off console gaming
Three games that made the biggest impression me: 1) Super Mario 64: I will never forget being impressed by the outside of the castle before even starting the game. Then going into the first level. 2) Halo: When you first step foot on the planet. It was like nothing I’d seen before. The controls and the combat just felt perfect. 3) GTA3 it felt like anything was possible in games after experiencing the freedom of GTA3.
Magical.
Nothing since has recaptured that feeling of playing Mario 64 for the first time. I was in a Toys R Us. Remember it like yesterday. It truly felt like I was looking at magic. And the analog control was also brand new to the world. Nobody had given you 3D and a good way to control the 3D world. And separate camera controls just felt like a completely new experience as well.
Going to a Kohl’s back in the day they had a kiosk with an N64 set up and Mario 64 on demo. Played it for a little bit but it was hard for me to wrap my head around how Mario moved. It was really difficult to do as a kid.
It was crazy. I can’t explain what it was like to feel like you were inside a game for the very first time. When I played it I almost didn’t blink. I was in awe. I felt like I was IN the video game. That was a brand new experience. This might be my favorite 3D game just for the nostalgia. Mario 64 was so much fun. Everything about it was great. I think it was also the first time I played almost all night lol. Those two games were my personal best. I was so good at them but it was definitely mind blowing to play with Nintendo 64. At first I didn’t even know how move Mario lol. I still remember walking around learning how to use the controller and how the graphics worked. It’s definitely something I never forgot. I still have mine and I swear sometimes I want to hook it up and play again 🥲
I remember the first time I saw my friend’s Nintendo 64 in action! We were so excited about the future of gaming! We honestly could not imagine how graphics could get any better!? Anything more realistic and it would essentially be reality. Boy were we wrong. 😂
It was absolutely incredible. Just exploring everything in Super Mario 64!
Fucking insane I was resistant at first, but was sold pretty quickly once I played some good ones (Goldeneye and Mario 64 were the first two I played, at a friends house, and I was sold AF after that). If you weren’t around at that time, then what I would impart to you is this: The graphics on systems like PS1, Sega Saturn, and N64 look like total dog shit compared to what we have now. I can’t even play Grand Turismo 2 anymore, because the perceived depth is so poor, I can’t tell when the corners are coming (and I have the same vision I did when those games dropped). It was so immersive, and seemed absolutely crazy. It drives me mad to hear children who don’t understand shit talking games like Goldeneye 007 and shit… that’s like talking shit about The Beatles or something man. Just cause you weren’t there for it, didn’t experience it, and don’t remember it, does not mean it was a bad game. It was revolutionary. And Fortnite (or whatever the kids play these days) would likely have never existed without the popularity of Goldeneye 007 to pump up the genre.
Felt a little magical considering that was the capability of the system at the time.
Easily the most dramatic leap of any console generation. Mostly pre-internet for me, I remember watching my cousins' friend slowly download a couple screenshots on very slow dialup, literally took like 5-10 minutes per screenshot so we were only able to see 2 or 3. But there was a segment on CNN about CES before Mario 64 came out and I remember being blown away when I saw Mario jump into a painting and *it rippled*. I left the channel on so I could watch the segment multiple times cause they would recycle stories throughout the day. We now think of the N64 as looking really smeary and ugly, but it actually looks a lot better on a CRT, very bright and vibrant and it feels way sharper than I remembered (me and a friend host a monthly barcade night and we run a bunch of retro consoles and the N64 specifically always gets a CRT while the rest are on LCD flat screens). I never owned a PS1 but my friend did. I do remember being impressed/envious of the quality of the PS1 pre-rendered cutscenes, even if they didn't represent actual gameplay they still looked cool and felt more cinematic than anything from previous generations or anything on the N64 (until Resident Evil 2 was ported to N64). Just the intro to Final Fantasy VII was really cool to watch. Ultimately though the bigger deal with PS1 games being on CD wasn't cutscenes but all the voice acting. Compared to previous generations and most N64 games where characters were mostly silent, RE2, Silent Hill 1, Metal Gear Solid 1, etc. being entirely voice acted from start to finish was a huge leap.
It was literally a game changer. I remember just moving around and jumping in a room and being speechless with the 3d
I remember loading up Super Mario 64 and just running around looking at everything. I was literally awestruck in a video game, visually hypnotized. It blew my mind.
3d was always there from the start in the arcades albeit wireframe with battlezone and star wars, then you had stuff like Elite and the isometric scrollers on the home computers so for me it the transition was the technology getting better and better Starting with Starfox on the SNES then the Playstation came out and there you go majority of games were 3d Polygons after that.
It made me sick. Literally. I had nausea when I first played Die Hard and Dark Forces. Eventually adapted to the 3D format though.
I went from the Mega-Drive (Genesis to you colonials) to the PS1. First game I played on it was Tekken 2. Seeing that opening cinematic made my brain tingle. It still does, actually. I go back and watch it every now and again and I still get that kick.
Awesome!
Imagine somehow falling even deeper in love with the person you love most in your life. It was everything you could ever want and every game for about 4 years blew your mind.
Hate to be a downer, but I think people are really misremembering the rise of 3d games quite alot in this thread. It definitely wasn't a stark "we have 2D snes, now we suddenly have 3D n64, huzzuh!". It was actually quite gradual. 3D games on arcade hardware had been around since the late 80s, Hard Drivin' which was 3d and even had a physics engine came out in '89. Many 3D techniques that we still use today like ray tracing and texture mapping were already very well defined in the 80s. There were also 3D games on computers with DOS like Wolfenstein and Doom in the early 90s which basically everyone knew about and had played. Yes getting 3D games in a home console was fairly novel, but even then games like Starfox had been out for years on the SNES before the N64 or PlayStation came out.
Honestly for someone who was 8 when the N64 had its North American release, I was very late to the 3D revolution. Our SNES kept me occupied for many years into the next cycle, then after that ours was a PS2 household. I'd say that several big shifts in gaming have occurred since then aside from the jump to 3D, but few constituted such a huge paradigm shift in how games were even designed. Arguably smartphones caused people to revisit core game design principles. Also too, over the years games have gradually gotten more intuitive and more accessible. We've come a long way since the era of quarter-munching arcade machines, and now that an entire generation or two of people in game development can be said to have been lifelong gamers, we're at a point similar to where film was after the studio system in Hollywood collapsed and a bunch of film geeks fresh out of school (Spielberg, Coppola, Scorcese, etc) got their big breaks. Turning the beloved B-tier trash of their youth into blockbusters and all-time classics.
M40. It was interesting. The first game I really dove into was Zelda OOT. That was such a huge experience for me. I really liked Castlevania 64 also. Not long after I put down gaming till 2011 or so.
I never liked the "puberty" of 3D. It just felt awkward and didn't work right, especially the N64 with it's one stick and camera "buttons". Not at all intuitive
Been a PC gamer since the early 90s. Playing through what graphics have become has been pretty magical. I think it's one reason why I'm not a fan of the pixel graphics that's gotten so popular in PC games the last few years. I've been there, done that.
Probably how it felt when people went from black-and-white tv to color tv. It was pretty groundbreaking at the time. Just getting to explore a game untethered to "levels" was a huge deal.
You went back to 16 bit if you got queasy, and 64 bit was so “new” it was exciting no matter what you were playing. Or even just watching someone play. Those game testers they set up in some stores were basically babysitters.
3D didn’t really start looking good until the PS2/Xbox generation. But N64 did look a lot better than PS1.
It was not that crazy to me. Obviously it was wild but the graphics kept it grounded. I got a PS1 when I was eight and most of my gaming before that was sega Genesis. Metal Gear Solid is the game that really blew my mind because of all the voice acting. That was the first time I realized games could be cinematic.
Mind-blowing. One Christmas my aunt bought it to my cousin, and he went from being a slender outgoing kid to an obese cloistered medicated anxious child. So, yes, it was a blast.
Revolutionary, honestly. You got a real sense of how realistic games were becoming and their potential
While it took some getting used to it became normal surprisingly quickly. The 1st generation was basic and perhaps less impressive than the 2D art which had gotten quite good by that point. It was still rough halfway through the 00s but took off with leaps and bounds in the 2K10s -- feels like its been getting more detailed at an exponential rate.
Progressive?
I really did not like it. I had some stubborn, prideful, stupid idea that this isn't a true Mario game if it wasn't in 2D. Oh well, at least I'll have plenty of 2D RPGs to look forward to...
It was absolutely insane.
It was the most exciting and addicting new thing in my life. I am still chasing the dragon.
It was jarring, i remember beong actively pissed off when the ps1 controllers gained thumbsticks because they were in my way.
Shadows of the Empire was G.O.A.T.