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On top of that, we were trying to make a flagship Mario game,” says Giles Goddard, a programmer working for Nintendo at that time. “It’s hard to do hardware full stop, and this was a totally new platform - new chipset, new CPU, new GPU. They needed plenty of patience, as the Nintendo 64 was delayed repeatedly prior to its Japanese release in June 1996. Total emphasised that “ next generation machine, Saturn, is a 32-bit console - fairly powerful, but nowhere near as fast as the Silicon Graphics hardware”.īy the time the console had received its Ultra 64 name in 1994, Nintendo had decided on an extensive advance marketing strategy, working with Midway to create Ultra 64 branded arcade games and taking out advertising to encourage players to wait for the console. At a time when more bits was better, being a 64-bit machine was a big deal. With SGI on board, Nintendo Magazine System claimed that the machine had “the potential to provide graphic images such as those seen in Abyss, Jurassic Park and Terminator 2”. Project Reality, as it soon became known, was also an easy machine to hype.

The tactic here was the same - simply put, Nintendo bet on having the best technology. Sony, Nintendo’s former partner on the SNES CD-ROM project, announced its intention to launch a home console of its own the following month.įor more in-depth features exploring classic games and consoles delivered to your door or digital device, subscribe to Retro Gamer (opens in new tab) today.īeing the last to market wasn’t an unfamiliar situation for Nintendo, as it had done the same with the SNES and been able to retain a substantial market share regardless.

In September 1993, the rivals had signed the contracts and made their announcements - Nintendo would partner with SGI and launch its 64-bit home console in late-1995, while Sega would use Hitachi’s 32-bit processors and launch in the autumn of 1994. Having developed a low-cost, power-efficient version of the latest MIPS processors, SGI put together a design proposal for a games console. The hardware was primarily engineered by Silicon Graphics, Inc, a huge name in movie special effects technology which had recently bought MIPS Technologies, the designer of the CPUs used in its workstations. As the two biggest players in the console market, either of them could have been behind what ultimately became the Nintendo 64. Nintendo wasn’t particularly concerned with most of these companies - at the time, Sega was its biggest rival, having been the first company to bring serious competition to the console market.