[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

I think what I find amusing is this idea that the game must be exclusive to prove ... something, not sure what, about the N64.

exclusives are generally a lock-in scam for the companies and say absolutely nothing about the games on a system.

The question is, did the N64 have a lot of amazing games on it, and the answer is unequivocally yes.

[scott_w]

I’m not sure if you were around but, at the time, there wasn’t really the concept of being “console exclusive,” it was just the default. PlayStation, PC and N64 were all so different that making a game cross-platform was a real challenge that only really happened after its success was proven on one platform.

[actionfromafar]

Or if it was a movie franchise or something. For instance Batman was released on Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum 48k, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, MSX and PC.

But the games were often developed by completely different teams, sometimes the gameplay was extremely different between platforms.

[wincy]

Haha yes I remember being very confused as a kid that The Addams Family for the NES was a sophisticated game and the SNES game felt like an arcade game. They were developed by totally different teams and were different games that sort of rhymed but the SNES one wasn’t nearly as cohesive or fun.

[SkyBelow]

Even then, cross platform generally meant the same game concept implemented differently. Sometimes the differences were minor enough that it could be hard to tell there were any if just viewing ads for the game. Other times the differences were massive, potentially even shifting the genre of the game.

[scott_w]

Aladdin and The Lion King are two games that come to mind from this time.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

plenty of games released on multiple consoles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo-Kazooie

> The franchise debuted on the Nintendo 64 and subsequent entries in the series also appeared on Game Boy Advance and Xbox 360.

This is but one example.

[scott_w]

N64 is a different generation to both GBA and XB360, so you’re not counteracting my core point which is “platform exclusivity wasn’t a thing so much as it was the default position.” The consoles were all too different from each other to start from a cross-platform position. Ports took a lot of additional work, thus the reason they usually happened after success.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

GBA was released during that generation, you might as well say XBox wasn't in the same generation because its release date was different than the Playstations.

You can say it and I'll defend your right to say whatever nonsense you want. But it doesn't refute jack.

But if you're really fussed about it, pick one of the other myriad examples. Tony Hawk, SC64, etc.

[scott_w]

I already went through your list in another reply. I’ll not waste my time doing it again.

[progman32]

To be fair, Banjo-Kazooie on the GBA is effectively a completely different game. It bears only a passing resemblance to the N64 games, and is 2-D. The 360 port came ten years later, and the significant effort needed to do so was justified by the game's proven appeal.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

I can't speak to the GBA version, but the point is that that generation was the first generation to start getting cross-platform games.

What is being said was true of previous generations, but not that one. N64 even had starcraft ported to it.

[chrisco255]

Yeah ports existed but they were far more rare then, because as OP said, it required devs to build an entire game engine from scratch for each platform. After the early 2000s, projects like Unreal engine and Unity engine started to take over game development and allow for lightweight porting efforts across all game consoles and PC.

N64 had very few ports and vice versa with the PS1. PS1 had a catalog of over 1000 games but N64 had somewhere around 300, with Nintendo franchises probably forming about 20-25% of the total catalog.

This was also partly because games engineered and designed for the N64's strengths were not suitable for PS1 and vice versa. Porting Resident Evil 2 to the N64 took heroic efforts by Capcom to compress the game into a size suitable for cartridge, for example, and even then they had to create a custom cartridge design for it. StarCraft 64 was clearly quite different gameplay-wise from its PC counterpart as a result of a lack of mouse and keyboard, which are especially important for RTS. It also required a 4MB (RAM) expansion pack to be installed onto the N64 in order to play the full game. Other differences included a lack of voice acting in campaigns as a result of cartridge size limitations.

Ports existed in the SNES and Genesis era (NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Earthworm Jim, etc come to mind). I would argue they were far more common then as the two consoles were not far off in specs and 2D game engines were already mature by then.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

> it required devs to build an entire game engine from scratch for each platform

No it didn't, please stop saying untrue things.

[datpiff]

These are ten years apart!

[chongli]

I say exclusive because a lot of the non-exclusive games (ports) had severe compromises which meant they were way better on other systems (PS1 or PC). Compare any of the sports games on the N64 to their PS1 counterparts and the difference is stark.

[chrisco255]

NBA Courtside and MLB w Ken Griffey Jr were fantastic sports games. NFL Blitz was also more fun on the 64 with 4 players.

[eru]

But why would you expect the non-exclusives to be better on console A instead of console B?

[chrisco255]

At the time the hardware differences were more significant than they are in modern systems (we're also in an era of diminishing returns on graphical improvements). Playstation 1 had larger storage space and could take advantage of prerendered graphics and full motion pre-recorded video, but the actual real-time graphics were more limited on the PS1 than the N64. The N64 had also created the analog thumbstick, and although Sony would later copy and improve the design with the Dual Shock controller, initially N64 was a far superior platform for games with twitchy 3D gameplay like platformers and even first person shooters. Another factor was multiplayer. For party games, N64 was a superior experience, as up to 4 players could play at once vs. PS1's two controller ports.

At any rate due to these factors you'd have to make various trade-offs when porting a game from PS1 to N64 or vice versa (cut back on multiplayer, reduce textures, adjust controls, compress audio, etc). There was also no such thing as a universal game engine like Unity or Unreal that could cross-compile for both platforms. On each system you'd have to bake an engine from scratch.

[eru]

Yes. So I'm saying that concentrating on exclusives for comparison might not be a good idea. A game that's available on both PSX and N64 might be better on the former or on the latter. You'd have to look at the specific game.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

most consoles had their own build chain, most development studios had tools to use the different build chains.

starcraft made it onto that console, that in and of itself negates most of what is being talked about here

https://starcraft.fandom.com/wiki/StarCraft_64

[chrisco255]

StarCraft 64 came very late in the N64's lifespan.

It was pretty awful as a console game (as most RTSes would be). It also lacked significant features like online gameplay, voice over cinematics, and significant changes were introduced to make it easier to play with a controller, although none of it worked well enough to make up for the clunkiness of the port itself.

The exception does not disprove the rule. The PS1 had almost 4x more games than N64. If it was trivial to port games then, it would have happened. But of all the generations of consoles past the 16 bit era, that generation in particular probably has the smallest venn diagram overlap of ports available on multiple systems.

Nowadays even indie devs creating experimental games can cheaply port their games to all consoles using a cross-platform engine like Unity or Unreal. Those tools weren't around for that console generation

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

That it wasn't great doesn't matter, the claim is refuted by its existence.

[scott_w]

>> At any rate due to these factors you'd have to make various trade-offs when porting a game from PS1 to N64 or vice versa (cut back on multiplayer, reduce textures, adjust controls, compress audio, etc). There was also no such thing as a universal game engine like Unity or Unreal that could cross-compile for both platforms. On each system you'd have to bake an engine from scratch.

> starcraft made it onto that console, that in and of itself negates most of what is being talked about here

Your statement does not in any way negate the statement you're responding to. Or much of anything in the thread for that matter.

The core of what people are responding to is that you state "console exclusives are a scam," which, at the point in time in history we're talking about, is verifiably not the case. You can point to agreements between companies (Final Fantasy VII being the most famous example) but these are not console exclusives in the modern sense. They were agreements, which had a mixture of commercial and technical factors, to make a game on that console. Once that decision was made, it wasn't really necessary to contractually enforce exclusivity because, until the PS4/XB1 era, porting to a different console was really, really hard.

Did companies do it? Yes. Was it planned in as part of the regular flow of developing a video game? At this point in time? No. It was a decision taken later.

[PaulHoule]

Today there are a lot of games that come out for PS4, PS5, XBOX One, XBOX Series One and the Switch. The Switch is quite capable but it is a a much less capable platform than the others so games get "dumbed down" for it or sometimes use radical methods. For instance Control has hardware requirements way too high so it is streamed to the Switch

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/28/21538173/control-cloud-v...

As for the Sony-Microsoft duopoly though there really is no major difference between XBOX and PS today or between those platforms and the PC platform. I have mixed feelings about that because a lot of games on the XBOX (say Numantia) come across more like a PC game than a console game these days with font sizes that make them not at all cozy from my couch.

[scott_w]

Because games back in the 90s weren't developed the same way they are today. The consoles were so different that you had to make significant changes to the games to fit within the limitations of different consoles. This usually meant the game was better on the original than the port (since they'd deliberately designed around that console).

There's plenty of stuff on YouTube showing the differences for different games. Avalanche Reviews did a good video of Resident Evil 2 ports across different consoles and generations.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

No, most AAA studios had their own engine which was designed to port to the different consoles.

The only real difference between something like Unreal Engine and what they used back then is that UE won and is the de factor standard whereas back then most were rolling their own still.

[scott_w]

I've flagged two MAJOR games studios that were the exact opposite of what you claim: Capcom and Squaresoft. One ported games (PORTED, not designed cross-platform) with some major issues doing so. The other outright didn't.

All you've posted in response is a small number of games that were obviously ported AFTER released (in one case 10 years after).

Unreal Engine has nothing to do with this. It was first released in 1998 as a PC engine, not appearing on consoles until the Playstation 2 era in the 2000s. The 2000s happened after the 1990s.

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

as stated in another response to you, stop being dishonest in your replies. This distinction of ported vs planned is one that doesn't exist when discussing exclusivity to a console.

It's also not relevant when discussing studio's adding support for multiple consoles to their in-house game engines.

[rowanG077]

N64 had some good games. It's still not even a contest compared to the PS1 which is almost unbelievable as it is a first gen console. Imagine Dell releasing a game console now and that it's game offering would be much better then ps5 and Xbox. It just truly insane to even think about it.

[msh]

Exclusives drives sales. I like the Xbox more than the playstation but in the PS4/5 era the playstation got the games i want to play so that's what I got.

[unethical_ban]

You are correct, but your statement doesn't conflict with the parent comment. Exclusives are bullshit, and in any case, measuring a console success by exclusives is a poor method.

The method is measuring good games. Which, now, often are exclusives.