To summarize, though, I collected user ratings - 250,849 of them this time - for North American N64 games from Emuparadise, Grouvee, IGDB, and HowLongToBeat. The methodology used to compile these rankings was essentially the same as the SNES list, so revisit that for more details. So, still in data-gathering mode, I decided to make a similar list for the N64, one that can help you plan which games to play first when N64 games are added to Nintendo Switch Online, as was recently announced. Speaking of ratings, the aforementioned SNES rankings feature was a fun project that taught me (and hopefully you) a lot about the defining console of my childhood. For reference, that’s substantially less than half the size of the SNES’ North American library (720 games). A handful of other games are scattered throughout the site’s top-100 list as well, which is impressive considering not many games were released for the N64: just 296 in North America.
It’s also the only title on the review-aggregating site to achieve a 99 rating. That said, there’s plenty to love about the N64, and critics agree: The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time is the highest-rated game of all time across all consoles on Metacritic. More importantly, it lived in the shadow of its main competitor, the PlayStation, which sold about three times as many consoles. While the SNES was the clear leader of its console generation, its follow-up was not: The N64 sold about 32 million units, which is less than the SNES’ lifetime sales (49 million). The SNES and N64 enjoyed very different lives. Now, this month brings another major video game anniversary: The Nintendo 64 was released in North America 25 years ago today, on Sept. Last month, I celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System by compiling over 200,000 user ratings from multiple gaming websites, crunching the numbers, and coming up with a data-driven list of the system’s most popular games among modern players.