Sell your Nintendo 64 games for cash.

Nintendo’s third home console launched in Japan on June 23, 1996, and in North America that September 29, under the development codename "Project Reality": a joint effort with Silicon Graphics announced back in 1993, built around SGI’s 3D graphics hardware. It was the last major Nintendo home console to use cartridges instead of discs, a deliberate trade: faster load times and tougher piracy protection, at the cost of losing some third-party publishers to Sony’s cheaper-to-manufacture CD-ROM format on PlayStation.

The bet on cartridges paid off where it mattered. Super Mario 64 launched alongside the system and set the template for 3D platforming and camera control that the genre still follows; the N64 controller introduced the analog stick as a standard feature, and GoldenEye 007 proved console first-person shooters could work. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time followed two years later and is still regularly cited as one of the best games ever made. Worldwide lifetime sales landed around 33 million units.

Cartridges don’t rot the way discs from this era can, which is good news for anything sitting in a box for thirty years. The catch is the controller: that signature analog stick wears out with use, so stick drift is worth checking before you assume a unit’s fully functional. On the games side, titles that didn’t get the same print runs as the system-sellers (Conker’s Bad Fur Day is the textbook example) carry real scarcity value today, well above what a common N64 cart goes for.