Panic! Speculate! You know you love to!
Nintendo recently filed a trademark on the N64’s iconic controller at the European Union Intellectual Property Office. The obvious guess almost anyone would make is that an N64 Classic might be on the horizon. You might want to pump the breaks on that thinking, though.
First of all, this is a common practice for corporations like Nintendo. It’s a way of making sure their intellectual property is secure. second, well, they’d have to write an N64 emulator capable of covering all of the games that they’d want to put on it. And while I’m sure Nintendo could do it (I mean, the Wii was able to run N64 games via emulator) there’s a few hurdles. First, there are quite a few games that might be difficult to get the rights to republish in that way (Goldeneye, for one). There’s also the fact that, more so than the FX chip games for the SNES, many N64 games had customized architecture that makes them a pain to emulate (*cough* Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon *cough*). Finally, if memory serves, they were never able to get the memory pack emulation working, at least on the Wii.
And, let’s be honest. Those controllers were simultaneously genius and horror. There’s a reason few bootleggers rip them off. The control stick alone would be a new production nightmare.
So, while an N64 Classic is a possibility, it’s probably not happening soon. If ever. But if it does, it’d be nice to see some of the stuff that’s rare or hard to get running. And *sigh* Ocarina of Time again, Nintendo. We can’t leave that one out.
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