ShareThisOne of the games I look back on most fondly was a title by the name of Snowboard Kids. Admittedly, when my friend first brought it to my attention, I was more than a little sceptical about how it could stack up to the aforementioned Mario Kart and F-Zero‘s of this world, but turns out, it may have been even better! This game had it all, high speed multiplayer hijinks, great course design, selectable equipment extras and of course killer items. Shouts of “Pans” in the room would be greeted with a resigned sigh of fate, from those of us who were on the receiving end of this devastating weapon. The perpetrator usually letting out a snide laugh as they speed past your squashed character, who is now , barely moving at walking pace. Rocks to trip over, ghosts that slow you down to a crawl, and money grabbing rats (no, really) were all par for the course in Snowboard Kids, and they all added up to form a game that could get the blood boiling in the spirit of competition, just as easily as its esteemed rivals in the racing genre.
If you never experienced this on N64, you missed out! Awesome game!
One of the many zeniths of multiplayer goodness achieved on Nintendo’s 64 bit black box was of course, the irreplaceable, unmovable, unquestionable greatness of Super Smash Bros. This game had people fighting after matches had finished. There could quite easily be over eight people in the room ready to play. Sometimes the bottom two players would pass the pad on to make rotation quicker, but sometimes it was just the person who came in last; either way, the wait for my next turn was tortuous. Almost as torturous as it was to watch on as my stricken character falls pitifully to their death, the last chance for recovery gone, and with it, all hope. Video game mathematics, to try and work out when I would be on next, came into play.
Take the number of people in the room, divide by the number of control pads, multiply by the number of minutes it takes to complete an average game, and you have your rather spuriously concluded answer (I never was very good at maths) to the age old question of “when is it my go next.” Sometimes you may find yourself on the end of a particularly harsh three on one scenario, where (through no particular act of vindictiveness) you receive one hell of a pasting between three players each taking it in turns to furiously pound the life out of you, and before you know it the grim statistics of over 200% would be showing ominously on your life metre. Then, the final insult of a hammer to the head would send you unceremoniously over the horizon to your final resting place. What a game! It’s hard to top this masterpiece of game design. The inherent competiveness which comes in every Smash Bros. title was founded in this game and back when it was first released the very sight of such epic pummellings really was something to behold.
The originator in all its glory.
Then of course we have Rare. Not the watered down Kinect-centric Rare of today, but the development team in all their stupendous glory, and two games in particular which became synonymous with multiplayer action, GoldenEye and Perfect Dark. These games (particularly the former) laid down multiplayer console laws which are still followed to this day, and bred a level of competitiveness that I had never witnessed before; it was a wonderful thing! The mastery of multiplayer goodness achieved with GoldenEye is hard to transcribe, if it were not experienced during the time of original release. This game got played so much that it is not even funny. Literally, it was no joke. Pent up tension and anger would explode into a foul mouthed rant of variable expletives as the screen ran red with blood, and the ceremonial passing of the controller took place.
Proximity mines were a personal favourite. Throwing them onto a green ammo case, collecting said case, so it would repsawn with (now invisible) proximity mines still attached to it produced hilarity on many-an-occasion. Some of the dead-pan expressions etched onto the faces of my friends after the sound of a mighty explosion involving upwards of 10 strategically placed proximity mines still brings a wry smile to the face. So many mines in fact, that the resulting explosions led to the frame rate being severely affected, with the four screens running at half an already questionable rate, good times!
After a good few years of endless matches, GoldenEye got to the point where it was almost no fun to play anymore. Spawn locations, and the order in which you spawn at those locations were memorised with perfection on certain levels by all of us. It was no longer about running around in open spaces shooting, no, it was more about getting the hell away from your spawn point before someone with a shotgun ran you down with a quick head shot, as you’re still respawning. You could literally go from one spawn point to another on some levels killing the same player until you won. Probably not exactly how the game was envisaged to be played, but still, the pure frustration it caused others on the receiving end was ample entertainment at the time. Perfect Dark followed, and again we ran around for hours shooting each other in the face with remote controlled rocket launchers, good wholesome family fun.
What more needs to be said, the legend itself!
Memories from these games and the era in which they were released will always stick with me as a gamer. We can play in the same group of friends, even now, and still have a level of competitiveness which has stayed with us from those heady days of 64 bit bliss. We as gamers honed our multiplayer skills on Nintendo 64, and at the same time, consoles in general were being shaped by the experiences Nintendo’s four player machine offered us. In my opinion, Nintendo 64 left a legacy of how multiplayer games on consoles should be done. Millions of people were playing together huddled round one console, and this has now expanded since the dawn of online multiplayer so we are not just limited to being in the same room as someone else to play with or against them. If N64 and the games synonymous with its greatness were never released it would be hard to say the multiplayer landscape would be the same beast it is today. Nintendo 64, you proved that there is a massive market for this type of experience on consoles and helped bring in a new age of multiplayer goodness, which we are still experiencing today, and for that we salute you.
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