I’ve been sitting on this idea for a while, and I finally decided to just say it out loud. I’m going to collect every single Nintendo 64 game released in North America. Every last one, licensed and legitimate, until the shelf is full.

I know how that sounds. There are people who have done this already, people with spreadsheets and price alerts and a level of patience I probably don’t have. But I’ve been playing games for over 30 years, the N64 was the console of my childhood, and I’ve never let a good obsession go to waste. So here we are.

Why the N64

Out of every console I own, and at this point I own a lot of them, the N64 is the one that still gets me a little sentimental. I remember exactly where I was the first time I played Ocarina of Time. I remember arguing with my cousin over Mario Kart 64 items being unfair. I remember the exact sound the cartridge made when you blew into it, which we now know did absolutely nothing, but we all did it anyway.

There’s also something about the N64 library specifically that makes it a fun console to chase. It’s small enough to be realistic. It’s weird enough to be interesting. You’ve got your obvious hits like Mario 64 and GoldenEye, sitting right next to genuinely strange stuff like Body Harvest or Clay Fighter 63 1/3: Sculptor’s Cut. A complete N64 shelf tells a story that a lot of other libraries don’t.

What Counts as “Every Game”

I want to be upfront about the rules I’m setting for myself, because “collect everything” can mean a dozen different things depending on who you ask.

For this project, I’m going after every licensed North American N64 game, loose cartridge only. That’s usually cited as somewhere around 296 titles, though you’ll see that number shift slightly depending on which database you trust and how they count regional variants. I’m not chasing boxes or manuals as part of this. If a game happens to come with one and the price is still reasonable, great, but a complete collection for me means every cart in hand, not a shelf of pristine box art. I’m also not chasing unlicensed releases, homebrew, or the flood of reproduction carts that have popped up over the years. If you’ve read my post on spotting fakes, you already know how I feel about those.

Condition matters to me, but I’m not a grading purist. A cart that works and looks decent is good enough to check off the list. Keeping this to loose carts is also just realistic. Some of these games get genuinely absurd once you factor in box and manual, and I’d rather spend that money on more games than on cardboard.

Where I’m Starting From

I’m not starting completely from zero, which honestly makes this feel more real than theoretical. I went through my existing collection and cross referenced it against the full list, and I’m sitting at 18 games down out of 296. That includes some of the console’s biggest names, Ocarina of Time, Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, Perfect Dark, Majora’s Mask, and a few surprises, like the fact that I already own Conker’s Bad Fur Day, which is one of the pricier carts on this list even loose.

278 to go. I’m tracking everything in a spreadsheet with current secondhand pricing pulled from PriceCharting, so I have a real sense of what this is going to cost me before I get too far in. I’m keeping a running checklist of the whole list here.

The Games I’m Already Dreading

Every collector who’s tried something like this will tell you the same thing. The first 200 games are the easy part. It’s the last stretch that gets ugly. Pulling actual pricing data instead of just going off memory, a few loose carts stand out as genuinely brutal: Clay Fighter: Sculptor’s Cut sits at close to two thousand dollars loose, Super Bowling and F1 Racing Championship aren’t far behind, and Bomberman 64: Second Attack and Worms Armageddon are both well into the hundreds. I’d be lying if I said those weren’t a little intimidating to think about this early.

That said, I’d rather aim high and fall short than never take the shot. Worst case, I end up with an incredible collection of 250 or so N64 games and a few good stories about the ones that got away.

How I’ll Track It and Share It

I’m setting up a running tally on the blog under a new category, N64 Project, so anyone following along can jump straight to the updates without wading through my other posts. Expect a mix of content here: pickup posts when I add a game, deeper retrospectives on titles I’m playing through as part of the hunt, and probably a few rants about pricing once I hit the expensive stuff.

I’ll also be posting shorter updates over on Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram as games come in, so if you want the quick version of the journey without the full blog post, that’s where to find it.

This Doesn’t Replace Everything Else

To be clear, I’m not turning this into a single-console blog. I’ll still be writing about my backlog, other consoles in the collection, and whatever random hardware project catches my attention. The N64 Project is a hook, not a cage. Think of it as the thread that ties things together while I keep doing what I’ve always done here.

If you’ve done a console completion project yourself, or you’re sitting on an N64 game you think I’m going to have a hard time tracking down, I want to hear about it. Drop a comment below. This is going to take a while, and I’d rather do it with company than alone in the basement.