October 8, 2025
“Old friends are best.” — John Selden
The Nintendo 64
Back in the late 80’s Sony and Nintendo had an agreement to make a CD-ROM-based attachment for the Super Nintendo called the PlayStation. That’s right – in some alternate universe we would’ve had the Nintendo PlayStation. The partnership went well until Sony pushed for control of the new disc format. Nintendo then secretly struck a deal with rival Philips. Sony, feeling betrayed, single-handedly created the Sony PlayStation instead. Talk about creating your own competition.
On top of that, Nintendo licensed the Mario and Zelda franchises out to Philips as well, which resulted in the unholy trilogy of CD-i Zelda games and Hotel Mario. The games (now YouTube comedy gold) made Nintendo stop licensing their IP’s out for a long time. In any case – this whole situation led to the ultimate gaming rivalry of the late ’90’s: the Nintendo 64 vs the Sony PlayStation. In ’97 the PlayStation was already out and the N64 was soon to be released. Since I myself was coming straight off the Super Nintendo, my preference went out to the Nintendo 64. SEGA Saturn was out too, but nobody gave a shit.
I was now at the age of 10 and I couldn’t wait (my parents) to get (me) the N64. I already played Super Mario 64 multiple times, all over town. My mom would drop me off at scattered demo pods (inside media stores) so she could finally shop in peace. I begged for the console consistently but money was tight, so it had to wait. About a year and a half later my dad barged into my room and told me they would get me a N64 for my birthday. Holy shit! We rode to Toys ‘R Us and I spent the whole trip home checking the box. The console came bundled with Super Mario 64. Finally I could explore the game at my own pace. The analog stick was a new way of controlling games and I could barely walk a straight line. I played Super Mario 64 for months on end. A friend of mine got his N64 with Banjo-Kazooie months before I got mine and we played the shit out of it. Once I got my own console, we’d borrow each others cartridges to one-up high scores or time trials in Perfect Dark, Mario Kart and Yoshi’s Story to name a few.
Since I didn’t have internet at home in the 90’s, I’d get my video game news from magazines. I was subscribed to Power Unlimited (because they cancelled Club Nintendo Extra, my very first magazine), but my favorite one was Nintendo Official Magazine (NOM), imported from the UK, and sold at my local cigar shop. Every time I walked past the shop I’d pop in to check if the latest issue had arrived. It was worth every cent. The previews, reviews and layout were packed with screenshots and detailed coverage. Thanks to NOM, I got hyped for games. One of the best parts was a section in the middle listing every N64 game from A to Z. These were mini reviews in little squares with a score included. Within those few pages you had an overview of the entire N64 library.
Seeing a 10-page article of your favorite game (or the one you were interested in) was amazing. These tiny screenshots would make you decide if you were interested in a game or not. In fact, they’re still fun to browse through once in a while. Now, years later and being familiar with those games, it’s fun to see how well reviews hold up (or don’t). It’s clear they would often give very lenient scores to games that clearly didn’t deserve such high praise. Though this is all subjective, I guess. Whatever. It was the best source of info we had. Good old pre-internet days, man, I tell ya.
Only a handful of Super Nintendo / PlayStation hybrids exist
Back before release, the N64 was still known as the “Ultra 64″
Nintendo Official Magazine’s awesome N64 library spread
A Luxurious Day
The year was 1999 and a new wave of N64 games were about to roll in, Super Smash Bros. being one of them. Touted as the ultimate Nintendo brawler, it promised your favorite Nintendo characters “duking it out“. Judging from the NOM previews I wasn’t exactly blown away by the graphics. The low polygon (blocky) models were pretty rough, but that was just the way things looked back then. In fact, most games were this way, or worse. Goldeneye’s enemies were ugly as shit, Mario Party’s characters were even blockier than usual and Perfect Dark’s co-op was barely playable thanks to its slideshow frame rate. And I mean that literally, unless you became good at factoring in about a whole second of input-delay, in advance. To run well on this ancient (then amazing) hardware meant having serious concessions. The N64’s graphics were often muddy or blurry (Pilotwings specifically I thought to be an unintelligible mess) but we didn’t care. We knew the hardware had its limits. PlayStation had that weird wall texture-warping (where the camera moving alongside a wall tore the textures out of proportion) and the N64 was a blurry, low framerate mess. In the end, fun was all that mattered. And as Reggie Fils-Aimé once said: “If a game is not fun, why bother?”. That’s one of the most logical quotes I’ve ever heard when it comes to entertainment.
Eventually the Super Smash Bros. commercial was unleashed onto television. It showed Mario, Yoshi, Pikachu and DK hopping through a flowery field. “Happy Together” was playing in the background and the sun was shining, until someone kicked the other in the shins – and *record scratch* they all started beating the shit out of each other. Awesome. The game launched right before my birthday in December and I couldn’t wait to get it with my birthday money. The day after my birthday, when I went to town to get it, something amazing happened. While walking through town, I bumped into an old friend of my mom on the street. We got talking and at some point my birthday was mentioned. Then, she handed me 100 guilders out of nowhere. Whoa! I was 13, what an insane gift. This is ’90’s currency we’re talking about. I had gotten 20 guilders from my mom’s boss – also casually for my birthday – just moments before – it really seemed like it was my lucky day. The average N64 game went for about 130-150 guilders. And straight off to Intertoys I went.
The back section of the store had a beautiful wall of cardboard N64 boxes that only a kid could truly appreciate. Super Smash Bros. was there and getting that seemed a given, but then I suddenly noticed Duke Nukem: Zero Hour. I was a huge fan of Duke Nukem 3D (not so much the censored N64 port) and I was a bit torn. I didn’t know Duke was out and I really, really wanted to play that as well. Then I realized – I had enough money to buy both! Should?– yeah of course I should! Two brand-new N64 games, what a total luxury! I took the tram home, both games in my bag. Up until that point this was my most satisfying purchase ever. I immediately called a friend of mine with the sole fact that I had just bought Super Smash Bros. He was also looking forward to playing it. Being a fan of NOM as well, he had seen the exact same previews as me.
The Super Smash Bros. N64 commercial
Super Smash Brothers
Super Smash Bros. European Box-Art
The N64 introduced 4-player split-screen and made everyone squint at their own little corner of the TV (or someone else’s). Somehow everyone was perfectly capable of blurry, low-framerate, pixelhunting deathmatch. I remember specifically playing Goldeneye’s “Caves” map with some friends in the Golden Gun mode (one hit kill) on a small 30 cm CRT TV. How did we manage it? Who knows, we weren’t used to anything better. Plus we were the perfect age during this huge 3D shift in gaming. We soaked it all. When Smash Bros. came along, 4 players could “duke it out” on a single screen.
The goal of Smash Bros. is pretty simple; you knock your opponents off the floating stages to the ‘outside’ of the TV screen. That’s it. Each fighter has a percentage meter that rises as you take hits and the higher it climbs, the easier you can launch them off-screen – eventually with the speed of light. I always preferred matches with five lives and one-hit / healing items off, keeping things focused on speed and skill. The hilarity that ensued when players accidentally launched themselves off-stage or pulled off desperate triple jumps to claw back to safety (only to be met by a waiting opponent ready to finish the job) was something truly new. Shields, hookshots and clever guarding added layers of strategy, and as everyone got better, the matches became more intense. There were other modes too, like the timed “Break the Targets” and “Race to the finish” challenges, but multiplayer was the real shit.
Aside from all its fun, the first Smash Bros. had some disappointing aspects. First of all, I remember my excitement the first time around, going through the “main campaign”. My first character (and series main-stay) was Link, being such an Ocarina of Time / Zelda nerd. I was wondering if every character had their own in-universe enemy as a final boss. So for Mario, I expected Bowser. For Link, I expected Ganon. However, reaching the end of the “campaign” for the first time, it turned out to be some lame-ass flying white glove. Why? The “Fighting Polygon Team” also seemed like a lazy way to add content, as these were mostly the playable character models, except without textures.
There were also unlockable characters I never even heard of. NES? Who the hell is NES? Also, Jigglypuff? The lamest Pokémon of all? Really, it was just a handful of characters and a handful of levels, but aside from that fact, it was an amazingly fun game. I played it so much that in the Records section I reached 10.000 kills with Link. A testament to the replayability of it all. In fact, all my friends seemed to enjoy it, even those that weren’t that much into Nintendo and considered it “kiddy shit”. The game was super chaotic and we all laughed our asses off. The contents of the first Smash game might seem bare-bones by today’s standards, but back then, it was more than enough to occupy us for years.
Duke it out with 4 players!
Just twelve characters was all we got in ’99
The Thief
As this was my last year of lower school, I progressed to secondary education. I got transferred to a complete other class than my old friends. A lower grade in fact. I guess I played too many video games, flunked on a few tests and the teachers noticed and just thought I was more retarded than the rest. Or maybe I was, who knows. Anyway, it was disappointing to suddenly be with all new kids. I didn’t feel at home and in the beginning I had trouble staying motivated. But the first year went by without too much trouble and in the second year, I got transferred to another building of the very same school. This one was at the end of the street where I used to live. This was nice; I could simply walk to the school in 5 minutes. But the kids were annoying and most of them had terrible attitudes, mainly towards teachers. This behavior reached a point where lessons simply couldn’t be followed and the teachers left once the classes started. I had some new classmates who I used to hang out with and we used to play some games together once we were done with school. Mainly Smash Bros. and Oddworld (I didn’t have a PlayStation, but most of the other kids at that time did).
A friend of a classmate (another classmate) came to my house once, for whatever reason, and asked if he could borrow my Super Smash Bros. cartridge for a few days. I was a bit hesitant, but we were in the same class, so I didn’t think too much of it. That turned out to be a mistake. Weeks had passed and I wanted my game back, so I asked him to return my cartridge. He said no! When I got upset he just laughed. Unsure what to do about this situation, I demanded my mutual classmate to accompany me to his house. He introduced me to this fucker, now he would help me resolve this whole situation. I got so annoyed that I forced him to come along, and he begrudgingly did.
Once we got to the thief’s house, his mother opened the door. She was shocked when I called her son a thief. I don’t recall anymore exactly how the conversation went, but I do remember is how determined I was not to leave without my cartridge and firmly stood my ground. I described the label in detail and wouldn’t leave without it. Obviously she tried for me to just fuck off, but it didn’t work. The thief’s mother and my classmate exchanged words in another language I didn’t understand, but I knew the gist of it. I saw how my friend looked at the floor, clearly embarrassed and ashamed of the whole situation. In the end I got my cartridge back. At home I found out that he tried to erase all my progress, but failed.
The next day, the thief approached me in the main hall of school, very angry and almost foaming from the mouth. His glasses turned all blurry. The point was that I had the audacity to go to his house and ask for my cart back. What the-? The audacity of him instead! I started boiling with rage, which was quite an exception for me. He tried to lure out a fight by pushing me and, since I was already pissed off, in a fit of anger I launched him into the wall-mounted coat-rack hangers. Basically just hooks sticking out the wall. I was already big and tall and I guess I didn’t know my strength, and I didn’t mean to happen to hurt him as much as I did, but he flew into those hangers like a rag-doll and got hurt and that was the end of that. Nothing else was said. That was the end of the situation completely. We didn’t talk anymore for the rest of the year. I certainly didn’t care. This fucker tried to steal my cartridge. But now it was back in my possession. At the end of the year I went on to higher education, a graphic design school called Grafisch Lyceum. I was glad to move away from that school. Good riddance.
The GameCube
It was now 2001 and I wanted to design video games, as I always thought a career like that would be the next logical step for me. This never happened and I’m glad it didn’t (but that’s another story). This school had a course called “Animation and Games” – the biggest lie ever told – as it had barely anything to do with animation and absolutely nothing to do with games. I guess that’s one way to lure kids to your school – put the word “games” in the course title. I was in a classroom full of new kids and hesitant on making new friends, seeing as how the last class turned out. However, since this was technically a video game course, it might seem unsurprising that I quickly bonded with someone over video games. The hit-off game in question was Final Fantasy VII and within a few months we were best buds. In fact, this is still a great friend of mine to this day and we still hang out once every few months. Another future-to-be-friend was on holiday when the year started. He came about a few weeks later, and well, same story here. We got along well in no time. I’ll elaborate on them a bit later.
At the same time I had my first job as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a local cafe/restaurant. I wanted to make some money. I wanted to buy games. The owner was a drunkard looking 70 at the age of 50, with a flabby alcoholic neck and big spectacles. The waiters were absolute degenerates, eating leftover food from the customers once they entered the kitchen. Some nights a suspicious car parked behind the building across the street from the kitchen exit and a few colleagues went out and came back with small white envelopes. Following their return, I would hear snorting noises coming from the back of the kitchen. Whatever. I didn’t partake in this shit, and really, I didn’t care anyway. I got a decent amount of money for my age and I could use that money on video games or computer parts. Frequent PC upgrades were also my thing. The N64 was still fired up with friends regularly, playing Perfect Dark with bots, Mario Party encore runs or competitive Mario Kart 64. By now Nintendo’s new console was announced as the GameCube and I was looking forward to it. Especially since a new Smash Bros title was confirmed to be a launch title
Right before the GameCube released, the console’s graphics had already blown my mind as the first time I ever saw anything related to that little, purple cube was at a video game store demo pod in town. They had the intro cutscene of Luigi’s Mansion running. My head was still wrapped in N64 polygon graphics and here I couldn’t believe the cinematic quality of this game. Round edges? Whoa. It looked like an interactive animated movie. The lighting was amazing. I also stared down at the console itself. I really liked the design of it, a small, sturdy powerhouse, powered by the often-advertised ATI graphics chip in NOM that could do amazing water simulations. This was especially apparent in Mario Sunshine, a game based around water. Before it released it was known as the “Dolphin” and the first thing we all saw was the Mario 128 demo, where 128 small Mario’s were running and jumping around a platform. It was a cool tech demo, but nothing could have prepared us for the real thing. A friend of mine bought the GameCube on release with Star Wars: Rogue Squadron 2. There weren’t that many launch titles, but all I needed was the sequel to Super Smash Bros. anyway, now called Super Smash Bros. Melee. It looked better, it looked faster and it seemed to have much more content – I couldn’t wait! On launch, I didn’t have my funds to secure a Cube yet, but my friend did, and I remember going to MediaMarkt with him and a few other friends on release day.
Cube launch day was hilarious. My friends, me, and some random kids were waiting at the escalator down MediaMarkt for the doors to open. There were two guys from a website called Cubezone interviewing people on the street. They asked some stupid questions, and we were taking jabs at them for the time after. Miyamoto being my second father and all that. Once the doors opened, everyone ran upstairs and to the back of the store where the Cubes were situated. A friend of mine blocked the escalator for the others kids so we had free reign to run towards the consoles and at some point I saw another friend walking with 2 Gamecube boxes, one in each hand, even though we already had one. It was like a slap-stick comedy. Once we got home and popped in Rogue Squadron, our jaws dropped to the floor. The graphics were mind-blowing. I know I use the term “mind-blowing” a lot, but the graphical leaps that video games made back then can’t be overstated to this day. The high quality textures, the silky-smooth 60 fps, the damaged paint on the X-wings, the highly detailed sky-boxes — holy shit! Had we ever seen such amazing graphics before, on any device? I don’t think so. The graphical leap from N64 to Gamecube was unreal, just as SNES to N64 was. Again, I didn’t have the money to get one, and Super Smash Bros Melee was already out and I was annoyed I couldn’t get one yet. Luckily, my friend that got a Cube offered me to borrow money so that I could buy one and pay him back later, which I accepted, and I bought the GameCube with Melee. It turned out to be everything I hoped for – and more.
The opening cutscene of Luigi’s Mansion was amazing in 2001
The “Dolphin” demo showcased raw computing power
Star Wars: Rogue Squadron II still looks great today
Super Smash Bros. Melee
Super Smash Bros. Melee Box-Art
The hype was (un)real
No other fighting game had done for its console as to what Melee did for the Cube. The game was simply mind-blowing. Aside from the fact that this was almost an entire historic library of everything Nintendo, the graphics were amazing and the music was amazing. The menu interface was slick and chock-full of interesting things to discover. There were new game modes like the Home-run contest, where you had to manage as much damage you could to a punching bag in a short amount of time and see how far you could hit it. It was addicting. It had tons of new stages, with remixed music of every major Nintendo title, an OST that spanned an amazing 100+ remixed classic tracks and it had unlockable trophies (sort of a digital precursor to Amiibo’s, with detailed biographies of the characters). The roster went from 12 characters in N64’s Bros to a staggering 26 characters in Melee – it was everything and the kitchen sink and just about every fart that Nintendo had produced since the 80’s was in this game. An absolute insane amount of content. It was hilarious, it was fast and it was the most fun you could have with friends that were completely in-tune with the game. It was everything I hoped it would be, and more. Melee was just an incredible game.
Meanwhile at the Grafisch Lyceum I was enjoying a bit of popularity in my new class. I used to joke around a lot and I got along with almost everyone. It was a strangely harmonious class. Each break we would go to the supermarket across the street, eat garbage, and just joke around with each other. In fact, I kinda enjoyed going to school for the first time in my life. We would meet at Central Station and all walk to school together in the morning. When school was finished, we would walk back to Central Station and see each other off. While we were walking, we would just talk about the latest movies, video games and other nerd stuff. Sometimes we would meet in town to check out game stores. We went to a local comic book store called Yendor. We went all across town. It was just a really fun group of people that I had a lot in common with, more than any group before. One day, I decided to invite a few of my new friends over to my house to check out the new Nintendo console. I knew my parents would be gone that day and this was a chance to get to know them better, so we all took the tram to my house and started hanging out. I proposed to play Super Smash Bros Melee, as that was the only multiplayer game I had, and it seemed like the most obvious choice anyway.
I booted up the game that nobody was yet familiar with. I already laughed at the chaos of the game on my own time, but this was elevated to a whole new level once my new group of friends started playing. They paused the game every 10 seconds to see some ridiculous still of characters doing weird shit. Everyone was in tears. I didn’t remember the last time I laughed so much or had such a good time. It was a truly great day. I obviously had an edge to the game at that specific time, as I had already played it for dozens upon dozens of hours, but what followed were many, many days of Melee, and my friends were becoming pretty good at it. We could play it from morning til evening. We would play Smash Bros Melee all day. It was the best multiplayer experience you could have at that time, and I was glad to have found a new group of friends that enjoyed the game (or games in general) as much as I did.
School went on, but the sun seemed to shine brighter the rest of that year. I was quite happy during this period. The dedication was real. We hung out almost every other week. My friends used to come to my house on the weekends with the tram, located on a 10 minute walking distance from my house, where I would pick them up. We then already eagerly talked about stuff on the way home. I had a small bedroom, but even with 3 or 4 people, we made it work. Eventually, as time progressed, other amazing games came out for the Cube: Mario Tennis, F-Zero GX, etc. We moved on to higher education together and met with the final new friend of our group. We invited him along for Smash Bros, and he became a permanent staple of the group. Smash? Smash! The hours racked up on Smash Bros. Melee reached past the 350-hour mark. My friends also got Gamecube’s with Smash Bros. and suddenly we were getting really close in skill. Matches were tense. I quickly lost my position as the dominating force, as my friends gave me a run for my money. The four of us, every Saturday or Sunday – let’s go! We bonded over Super Smash Bros. Melee, and for the next 20+ years, we would continue to hang out. Even now we maintain the tradition of hanging out together, every few months or so. What dedication indeed.
Hyrule Temple, probably the most played map
Melee had great maps to screw each other over
The Incident
One day, starting out another session, an incident happened. In the past, you saved your game progress on a memory card as consoles didn’t have a hard drive or any form of internal memory yet. That day, Super Smash Bros. Melee booted and some memory card corrupt screen came up. “Format, lol?“. It all happened in a split-second. We all saw the screen and I knew that the muscle memory to simply press ‘A’ would kick in immediately. I launched myself at the Cube “NOOOoooo–!” in a desperate attempt to turn it off before anyone had the chance to press the button, but we knew the button was pressed, because before the console turned off, that 1 single frame was temporarily burned into our retinas once the screen went black: Memory Card Format Complete. I hoped for some reason that it wasn’t so, but we all knew what had happened. That sinking feeling. We sat there for a moment in silence. It was as if someone had died. And sure enough, once the console turned on again my memory card was completely wiped.
350+ hours of Super Smash. Bros Melee. Gone. A complete 100% file of F-Zero GX. Gone. Mario Tennis. Gone. Time Splitters 2. Gone. 120 shines in Mario Sunshine. Gone. Everything that was played from 2001 up until that point was deleted in a split-second. All those save files. Lost, like tears.. in rain. Why didn’t I make a backup? Well, with some games like GX, you couldn’t make a back-up as it etched itself into your memory card as a permanent un-movable savefile. But the main reason was that memory cards were pretty expensive, and I never bothered to get another one up until that point. Besides, I never saw this screen appear at any moment in time before. I didn’t even know it could happen. And as much as I hate memory cards; really, truly ass-fuck whoever programmed the memory card wipe-screen to set it to “yes” by default and not ask for any form of confirmation.
Wrapping Things Up
After that incident, we obviously still kept playing games every other week however, and even though we rebuilt a new Melee file, it was perhaps time to try out other things. And as the new Smash Bros games came and went and we all played them vigorously, none had the impact that Melee had. Now, almost 25 years later, I still meet up with said friends, usually once every quarter of the year. And although the Smash Bros sessions have grinded to a halt in the current year, we still spend our times playing puzzle games such as Myst, Riven and The Talos Principle. We’ve completed every Gears game in co-op and tons of other games over the years. We’ve watched tons of movies with accompanying pizza’s.
It’s nice to spend a full day with friends you’ve known for so long. It’s nice to have a handful of friends for almost 25 years. Aside from this group of friends I still meet up regularly with my older friends as well, ones I’ve know for 30+ years by now. And while friends lead their own lives and might not be particularly involved in each others personal affairs – the odd birthday here and there, or a movie theater run or some major event excluded – it takes a special type of friend to stay committed in seeing one another. Friends that make time to hang out, even though it might just be a handful of days a year.
THE END