Thursday 29th June 2023 marks the 25th anniversary of Banjo-Kazooie's release on Nintendo 64. To celebrate a quarter-century of Rare's archetypal and much-chronicled 'collectathon' platformer — one of the finest games on the system by our estimations — we've assembled the following list of every 3D platformer on N64, as ranked by you. Breeee!
The launch of Super Mario 64 ushered in what is now commonly referred to as the Golden Age of 3D platformers. In the years before the arrival of online gaming when first-person shooters came to dominate the console landscape for a period, these colourful solo experiences represented the medium's adventures into a new frontier, with freedom of movement and worldbuilding potential never before seen.
The template that Nintendo laid out with Mario 64 guided developers of 3D worlds across the globe, and the PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were the stages for many a wonderful childhood experience that fuels nostalgia for that generation and the genre that arguably defined it.
However, looking back, the N64 didn't actually host an enormous number of platformers, 3D or otherwise. Or games in general, come to that. Internationally, just 388 titles launched for the system, and many of those went unreleased in one region or another. 2D platformers were few and far between at a time when the third dimension was the hot new stuff, so while PlayStation had a far larger library (including your Spyros, your Crash Bandicoots, et al.), the number of platformers comprising that 'Golden Age' is surprisingly slight.