N64 Project Pickups: Body Harvest Leads a Four-Cart Haul

Four more N64 Project pickups landed this week, not long after the GoldenEye haul: Extreme-G, Excitebike 64, Body Harvest, and Castlevania. Different decades, different genres. One of them is a cart I have been actively hunting for a while, and I did not want to pay eBay markup for it.

The Big One: Body Harvest

This is the one I was genuinely excited to find. Not because it is rare. It shows up often enough if you are patient. I just kept missing it at a fair price. I was not about to cave and pay eBay markup for a game I could clearly find eventually.

Body Harvest came out in North America on October 20, 1998, developed by DMA Design and published by Midway. The setup sounds simple on paper: a genetically engineered soldier named Adam Drake uses a time machine to fight off an alien force that returns every 25 years to harvest humans, jumping between settings from 1916 Greece all the way to a near future. In practice it was one of the earliest games to hand you an open world. It just let you drive, fly, or walk across it looking for the next objective. That was years before the idea was common on consoles.

The part of this game’s history I find genuinely fascinating has nothing to do with aliens. Body Harvest was built inside DMA Design’s Dundee studio at the same time a separate team down the hall was writing the graphics engine that would eventually become Grand Theft Auto. DMA Design later became Rockstar North, the studio behind the entire GTA series. Body Harvest itself went through a rough development, pulled between Nintendo of America wanting more depth and Nintendo of Japan wanting it simplified, and by most accounts came out the other side a stranger, more interesting game for it. Reviews at the time were solid but not spectacular. Metacritic has it at 73. Its reputation as a cult classic has only grown since.

Picked this one up for $49.99, tied for the most expensive of this week’s four.

Castlevania

Konami first showed this one off at Tokyo Game Show in 1997 under the name Castlevania 64, and for a while internally it was called Dracula 3D. It finally released in North America on January 26, 1999, as the series’ first fully 3D entry. Konami Computer Entertainment Kobe built it.

The development story is a good reminder that even a finished, well reviewed game rarely ships as originally planned. The team designed four playable characters and had to cut it down to two, Reinhardt Schneider and Carrie Fernandez, to hit the release date. One of the cut characters, a werewolf fighter named Cornell, did not just disappear either. He resurfaced later that same year in Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness, an expanded rerelease that restored a lot of what got trimmed the first time around. Critics were mostly positive on the original, Metacritic has it at 78. The usual complaint was stiff controls, something a lot of early 3D platformers got stuck with.

$49.99 for this one as well, right alongside Body Harvest as the priciest pickup of the four.

Excitebike 64

This is the one that took the longest to actually arrive. The original Excitebike came out on NES back in 1984. Nintendo did not bring the series back until Excitebike 64 launched on May 2, 2000. That is a sixteen year gap for a sequel by anyone’s math.

Left Field Productions built it, and it turned into one of the better reviewed racers on the console, sitting at 88 on Metacritic. The track editor is the feature people still bring up, it let you build and save your own fully functional courses, which was a genuinely rare thing to offer players in 2000. It also leaned on the Rumble Pak for the physics feel and shipped with a run of oddball extras, including a soccer mode Nintendo Power called one of the coolest ideas they had seen. It sold around two million copies. A European release that arrived over a year late probably cost it some momentum it could have used.

Picked this one up for $24.99.

Extreme-G

Last one in the haul, and the cheapest at $14.99. Acclaim published this one on October 27, 1997, developed by Probe Entertainment, and it is about as pure a WipEout chaser as the N64 got. You are piloting an anti-gravity bike down roller coaster style tracks at speeds that top 750 kilometers per hour. Along the way you pick up weapons like homing missiles and magnetic mines.

It reviewed well, Metacritic has it at 82. It also sold about 700,000 copies within its first year, enough to spin up a full series. I already had the sequel, XG2, sitting on the shelf from earlier in this project. Now I finally have where the whole thing started.

This Week’s N64 Project Pickups: Updated Tally

Four more checked off, which puts the N64 Project at 40 down, 256 to go, out of 296 total. Closing in on 50 faster than I expected. When I kicked this whole thing off with a spreadsheet, I already had 18 games in hand. You can see the full list on the tracker any time.

Body Harvest is the one I will remember from this batch, mostly because I get to stop refreshing eBay for it, but Castlevania showing up in the same week feels like a genuine step forward for the collection too. Two well known names and two deep cuts, in one haul. That is pretty much what these N64 Project pickups are all about.

Maybe you have a Body Harvest story, or a soft spot for Excitebike 64’s track editor. Maybe you are still holding out on a copy of Castlevania yourself. Either way, drop it in the comments. And if anyone wants to argue Extreme-G over WipEout, I am listening, but I do not think you will win.