N64 Project Pickups: GoldenEye 007 Leads a Four-Cart Haul

Four new N64 Project pickups landed on the shelf this week, and normally that is a quiet update, a paragraph or two, a price, done. This time one of the four cartridges is too big a deal to bury in a list, so this one gets a proper writeup.

The haul: GoldenEye 007, NBA Courtside 2 Featuring Kobe Bryant, Top Gear Overdrive, and Mickey’s Speedway USA. Four different genres, four different decades of my own gaming memory, all sitting on the same shelf now.

The Big One: GoldenEye 007 Leads This Week’s N64 Project Pickups

Let’s not bury the lead. I finally have a loose copy of GoldenEye 007.

If you know anything about the N64, you already know why that matters. Rare built this off the 1995 Pierce Brosnan film and released it in North America on August 25, 1997. It did not just sell well, it changed what people expected a console shooter to do. Over 20 weapons. Mission objectives that rewarded playing carefully instead of just running and gunning. A four-player split-screen deathmatch mode that ate entire weekends of my childhood. It went on to sell more than eight million copies, making it the third best-selling game on the whole console. It also picked up a BAFTA and four Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences awards along the way. People still point to it as the game that proved first-person shooters belonged on a controller, not just a keyboard and mouse.

Plenty of collectors already had this one on day one of their own N64 projects. For mine specifically, checking it off feels different. It is the cartridge everyone assumes I already own. Now I actually do.

It is worth about $38 loose these days, the priciest of this week’s four, and still a bargain for what it represents.

NBA Courtside 2 Featuring Kobe Bryant

Next up, a genre I do not talk about much on this blog: sports games.

NBA Courtside 2 Featuring Kobe Bryant came out on November 8, 1999. Left Field Productions developed it, and Nintendo published it. Kobe did the motion capture himself and landed on the cover, which said a lot about where his career was heading at the time. The roster covers over 300 players from the 1999 to 2000 season. The game also added a three point contest mode and expanded season play on top of the first Courtside game. Reviews at the time were favorable, and Left Field’s engine was already earning a reputation as one of the more competent basketball sims on the console.

I am not much of a sports gamer these days, but the N64 Project rules are the N64 Project rules. Every licensed North American cart counts, and a piece of Kobe Bryant’s console gaming history counts. It is worth about $15 loose these days, one of the more affordable pickups of the bunch.

Top Gear Overdrive

Then things get a little ridiculous, in the best way.

Top Gear Overdrive is Kemco’s 1998 follow-up to Top Gear Rally. The cover alone tells you everything about the tone: a black sports car with an actual mouth full of teeth painted across the front bumper. The game leans into arcade excess with a nitrous boost system and a six-season career mode. Track shortcuts can make or break a race if you find them. It also has a strange little claim to fame. The entire soundtrack was composed by a Portland band called Grindstone, reportedly the first band to score original music for an N64 release. It picked up favorable coverage from IGN, GameSpot, Game Informer, and a handful of other outlets back when it launched.

This is exactly the kind of genuinely strange stuff I mentioned when I kicked this whole project off, sitting on the shelf next to the console’s biggest hits, and that contrast is half the fun of chasing every single cart. It is worth about $17 loose these days.

Mickey’s Speedway USA

Last one in the haul, and it is another Rare game, though it could not feel more different from GoldenEye.

Mickey’s Speedway USA came out on November 13, 2000. Rare developed it and Nintendo published it, with Disney Interactive along for the ride. Pluto gets kidnapped by a gang of weasels. Mickey and a small cast of Disney characters race across American-themed tracks to get him back, complete with a Grand Prix mode and multiplayer battle modes. Reception was mixed. Metacritic has it sitting at 71, and reviewers seemed split on whether it stood up next to the kart racers it was clearly chasing. Still, it is a genuine piece of the Rare and Disney Interactive partnership from that era, and that alone earns it a spot on the shelf.

It is worth about $28 loose these days, and honestly a fun reminder that Rare was not only making spy shooters and platformers in this window. They were doing kart racers with Mickey Mouse at the same time.

This Week’s N64 Project Pickups: Updated Tally

Four in, and the spreadsheet finally gets an update. That puts the N64 Project at 36 down, 260 to go, out of 296 total North American licensed titles.

GoldenEye 007 is the one I will remember from this batch. But finding a genuinely weird pickup like Top Gear Overdrive in the same week was almost just as satisfying. That is the whole appeal of chasing N64 Project pickups one cartridge at a time. You go in chasing the famous ones and you come out remembering the car with teeth just as fondly.

If you have a favorite from this list, or a story about tracking one of these down yourself, drop it in the comments. And if you were sitting on a loose GoldenEye copy you would have sold me before I found mine, well, too late now. I would still love to hear about it anyway.