When the Nintendo 64 launched in the UK on 1 March 1997 — a full 16 months after the PlayStation — Nintendo had bet the house on cartridges at a time when everyone else was moving to CD-ROM. Their reasoning was solid enough: cartridges were faster, more reliable, and harder to pirate. The cost, however, was steep. N64 game cartridges were expensive to manufacture and that expense was passed directly to consumers. At launch, GoldenEye 007 retailed at £59.99. Ocarina of Time, later, would hit £69.99. This was not small change in the late 1990s, and it limited the console's third-party support considerably, as publishers balked at the production costs.
None of which diminishes what Nintendo achieved. Super Mario 64, the launch title, was nothing short of a revelation — the first fully realised 3D platformer, and one that demonstrated what the hardware could do so convincingly that even the PlayStation faithful were quietly impressed. GoldenEye 007, developed by a team of relative novices at Rare, essentially invented the template for the first-person console shooter and remains one of the finest games ever made. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is, depending on who you ask, the greatest video game ever created. For a console that struggled against Sony on third-party support and software library breadth, its first-party output was almost comically good.
The controller was a curiosity — designed for a three-handed human, by all appearances, with an analogue stick in the centre and a peculiar trident design. It worked surprisingly well in practice, and the analogue stick itself was a genuine innovation for home console gaming. The N64 sold just over 33 million units worldwide, significantly behind the PlayStation's 102 million, but it gave us some of the finest games of any generation. Not a bad record for a machine that Nintendo's partners defected from in droves.