Nintendo 64 Released

The Nintendo 64 reached North America on 29 September 1996, priced at US$199.99. Japan had received it about three months earlier, on 23 June 1996 at ¥25,000, and Europe waited almost another six months, until 1 March 1997. The machine launched in Japan first, then spread to North America and Europe.

The Japanese date comes from Nintendo's own product page and from its IR table of sales by region, which records the console as "released on June 23, 1996" with the region given as Japan; the Japanese price and three launch titles from a GAME Watch article. The North American date and its two launch games come from TechSpot and English Wikipedia, and the European date and the North American price from English Wikipedia.

The specifications Nintendo published

Nintendo's Japanese hardware page describes the console like this:

Nintendo pitched the CPU as a kind of super-chip admired by designers working in 3D and image processing. According to English Wikipedia, Nintendo developed the chipset with Silicon Graphics (SGI) from 1993 under the name "Project Reality". Nintendo's own page does not mention SGI.

A controller built for 3D

The controller says more about the machine than the chip list. Nintendo's page describes it as a new controller born for controlling 3D, and puts the 3D Stick at its centre: rolling the protruding stick with the thumb allows very fine movement in 3D space, and the example Nintendo gives is grabbing Bowser and swinging him around in Super Mario 64.

The four C buttons change the camera angle—close up, far away, from above, from below, from an angle. Nintendo stresses that they work independently of the other controls, so a player can keep running while the camera swings round, and calls that a pleasure particular to 3D games.

Nintendo described three basic ways to hold it. The "right position" used the stick and buttons fully, for 3D action, racing and flight games. The "left position" let the right hand work the stick. The "Famicom position" suited scrolling action games, role-playing games and puzzles—keeping the directional pad of the Famicom era while adding analogue control.

Four controller ports were built into the console, so four people could play without any adapter. A slot on the underside of the controller took the Controller Pak, a memory pack for saving game data.

The Rumble Pak came ten months later

Force feedback was not part of the launch hardware. Nintendo's accessory page gives the Rumble Pak's release date as 27 April 1997, at ¥1,400 before tax on its own. It ran on two AAA alkaline batteries, and the same page notes that it was bundled with Star Fox 64. The memory of a Nintendo 64 that vibrated from day one is not accurate.

Staying with cartridges

The Nintendo 64 kept ROM cartridges as its software medium while its rivals had moved to CD-ROM—a contrast covered on the original PlayStation page. English Wikipedia describes the decision as highly controversial and frequently cited as a key factor in Nintendo losing its dominant position. In Japan, a magnetic-disk add-on called the 64DD came out in 1999, only in that market, and received just nine games, according to the same article.

Most were sold outside Japan

Nintendo's IR table of sales by region starts with the fiscal year ended March 1998. In the first year for which the overseas breakdown is complete—the year ended March 2000, April 1999 to March 2000—Nintendo 64 hardware sales came to 6.49 million units: 0.94 million in Japan, 4.71 million in the Americas and 0.84 million elsewhere. Japan was only about 14% of the total. Software that year told the same story: of 56.66 million games, Japan took 8.10 million and the Americas 40.49 million. The console launched in Japan first, but by volume it was an American machine.

How many were sold

Nintendo's IR figures for worldwide consolidated sales give the Nintendo 64 32.93 million consoles and 224.97 million games (table as of 30 June 2026). In the same table the generation before it, the Super NES, stands at 49.10 million, and the GameCube that followed at 21.74 million. The console that set the pattern for 3D control sold fewer units than its predecessor.

Nintendo's hardware line as a whole is traced on the Nintendo page.