At 3.36 million, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask topped the list of 2000 releases in terms of both sales and quality, nearly cracking the lifetime sales top 10 for the N64 despite its late arrival to that party. Banjo-Tooie, Pokémon Stadium 2, Mario Tennis, Excitebike 64, Mario Tennis, Kirby 64, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Paper Mario, WWF No Mercy, and 007: The World Is Not Enough - the sequel to GoldenEye 007 - would all release in 2000, and would all sell in between 007’s 1.08 million copies and Banjo-Tooie’s three million. That’s not to say that everyone with a Nintendo 64 stopped buying games for the system, or that Nintendo and the third parties that supported the 64 stopped trying just because the next-gen had arrived. The N64’s successor, the GameCube, wouldn’t arrive until the fall of the next year, sure, but the Dreamcast was already eight months old by the time Perfect Dark hit shelves, and Sony’s Playstation 2 - which stormed ahead of the early arriving Dreamcast in a hurry and then sold so well for so long that it saw a release of 2011’s iteration of MLB: The Show - was already two months in by the time Perfect Dark arrived. It didn’t come out until late-May in 2000, well into the Nintendo 64’s lifespan, and when gamers were, en masse, moving away from the fifth generation and into the sixth. Perfect Dark’s release date is the primary reason why it’s not a more significant deal. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link. Throughout the month of September, I’ll be covering the console, its games, its innovations, and its legacy. On September 29, 2021, the Nintendo 64 will turn 25 years old in North America.
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