It may come as a surprise, given how accustomed we are to games weighing in at hundreds of gigabytes, that the entire Nintendo 64 library comes to less than 25GB. Including Japanese exclusives, that’s 388 games – 7530 fewer than released on the PlayStation. It’s odd, then, in such a relatively small selection, how much room there is for games to fall through the cracks and slip out of our collective consciousness.
One can justifiably blame this on the titanic status of many Nintendo 64 titles. Super Mario 64 revolutionised platforming as the genre moved to three dimensions, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remains one of the most beloved games in our history, and one can make the case that few first-person shooters have lived up to Goldeneye’s legacy. The list goes on, longer than one would think from the miniscule catalogue from which it’s sourced.
But those games mask a wider catalogue that didn’t become cultural touchstones. Games like Hybrid Heaven and the criminally underrated (and unfinished) Holy Magic Century (Quest 64, if you’re nasty), that fell into the relative obscurity that awaited so many third-party titles on Nintendo’s flagship console of the late-90s. Yet among those games that continue to languish in anonymity, one sticks out as perhaps the least deserving. Released in 1998, Space Station Silicon Valley was an innovative and ambitious 3D platformer and, as it celebrates its 25th anniversary, it still holds up in an industry bereft of the platforming genre.
