How many of you have dreamed of an N64 handheld, a dedicated device that you could use to take your favourite titles out of the house? It’s one of the reasons that we love the Game Gear so much here at Retro Dodo, and for some of us (I’m definitely talking about myself here), it’s the main reason we got into handheld emulators in the first place.
We’ve seen homemade attempts at an N64 handheld such as this one that plays actual cartridges, and another that also plays cartridges and utilises the look of the Game Boy Advance, but that’s as close as we’ve got so far.
Palmer Luckey and the guys from ModRetro were working on a similar project back in 2010, to build a Nintendo 64 handheld using only technology that existed from the time of the n64. They repurposed NiCad batteries from RC cars and 5-inch PS1 LCDs that kids would have taken camping or for use in the car, all in their mission to build what we’ve all been dreaming of since the 90s. And that includes Nintendo.
‘There were people in Nintendo who were pushing for it,’ said Palmer Luckey on our latest episode of the Retrospect Podcast, ‘one of the coolest things about getting to be the Oculus guy is that I got to work with a lot of game developers and game studios. One of the reasons was getting all of these studios to work with ModRetro to rerelease old game boy games from large IP franchises, a lot of that comes from building these connections in the Oculus days, including people who have been around since the 90s.’
There were a bunch of people pushing Nintendo to make a handheld N64 back in the 90s, but Palmer says that it didn’t fit with the philosophy of Nintendo at the time, something he cited as ‘lateral thinking with withered technology’. Palmer goes on to say that ‘the N64 was a very advanced system for the time – it wasn’t around for very long and was quite a short-lived system in comparison to many others, they were just planning on moving on.
‘The reason people were pushing for it, inside of Nintendo and also external developers was that they could get a bigger market for their existing N64 titles’, Palmer continues, ‘so if I’m A Nintendo 64 developer and I’ve launched my game… and let’s say I’ve saturated and sold it to everyone who has sold an N64, I know that if I reach out to this new audience of people who are buying it as a handheld, then they’re gonna buy a lot of the top games and that will turn into a big sales bump. It’s an interesting what-if and something that I ponder about all of the time.’
So there you have it – it turns out that we were a lot closer to having a Nintendo 64 handheld than we ever thought. The Nintendo 64 outsold the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive by a couple of million units, so the market was definitely there for a console-based handheld to compete with the Game Gear. Admittedly, Nintendo had the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color out at the time which collectively sold almost 119 million units, so Nintendo wasn’t doing badly in the 90s at all.
Still, just like my constant pondering and what-if thoughts over the game Cabbage, the concept of a Nintendo 64 handheld that could have been really is an interesting notion to think about. Want to hear something else interesting – Palmer teased a GBA Chromatic in our latest Podcast episode too! Head to our article to find out more, or listen to the full episode below!
