Throughout life, I have always been a gamer. It’s just been part of my identity, for better or worse. The framework of the majority of friendships and life endeavors I have formed since birth. Growing up on a PC, I quickly learned about the huge variety of games out there in the world. Eventually, that turned in to console gaming with the Sega Genesis. I was always enthralled by the storytelling, creativity, and excitement video games could offer. While I was already fully invested in the world of video games, all of that would reach its pinnacle on Christmas Eve, 1996.
Enter the Nintendo 64. Man’s greatest invention. One of the most interesting video game consoles ever to be released.
From day one, I was absolutely sucked in to the possibilities of a 3D console with Super Mario 64. As time moved on, I would rent every game I could get my hands on. Trying out a variety of games kept things exciting. From the absolute best games to the absolute worst, the Nintendo 64 had a little of everything.
Even after I had moved on to the Sega Dreamcast in 1999, I continued keeping up with the console over the years. I purchased many video games from thrift stores and second hand stores amassing a small collection of all these games I had played over the years. A few decades later, I had hit nearly half of the entire library.
Much like most of my questionable ideas, it all started with one tweet.
Someone talk me out of my dumb idea to play through all the N64 games in chronological order— braktheman (@braktheman) July 9, 2019
A bit of a joke, but also with some hidden desires in it.
An excuse for a new project. An excuse to continue working towards that ultimate goal – the goal to own every single licensed game released for a console.
For some context, I had done some video game livestreaming on uStream and then eventually Twitch on and off since the early 2010s. From speedrunning to variety gaming, I had tested out the waters on all of it. As an introvert, Twitch provided just the right level of social interaction and feedback that I desired. Broadcasting to a relatively small audience and getting instantaneous feedback. A chance for me to be on when I wanted to and off when I didn’t. In 2019, I hadn’t done much streaming in the past 5 years. I’d come back for a few months and then disappear for a few years. Sticking with projects was never something I was exactly great at. I was ready to give it another shot and be a bit more serious about it this time than I had been in the past.
The idea was perfect – a combination of both worlds. I would finish my lifelong collection by buying the remaining Nintendo 64 games released in North America and then livestreaming a playthrough of every last one on Twitch. Two hundred and ninety-six games was no small feat, but compared to almost every other console in existence it just felt a bit more attainable. I started doing the research to see how expensive this project would be and honestly it was way more than the average person would invest. While I didn’t tally up the totals as I went on, completing the collection probably cost me a few thousand dollars over the course of a few years. It was not pocket change and a bit of a financial risk. I didn’t expect a return, it was just the collector in me wanting to finish what I started out doing – owning an entire set of Nintendo 64 games.
Collecting for the Nintendo 64 is an extremely complicated goal. Many individual games cost hundreds of dollars due to extremely small production runs and some even being exclusive to rental stores. On top of that, there is a large counterfeit market for some of the more expensive titles. It’s easy to get scammed. Luckily, I had done my research and I now knew exactly what to look for – how to open up cartridges, the best ways to clean them, the best ways to verify boards. This lead down a rabbit hole and I had begun doing mods to let my console play imported games. Equipment was purchased to give myself the best possible quality on a stream within reason. In a matter of months, I had become a self taught expert on the Nintendo 64 internals of the consoles and cartridges alike.
By the time I had completed purchasing about 75% of the console library, it was off to begin planning for streams. At this point, I was unsure if I was going to stream the entire library or just start it and see how it felt. I did a few test streams just playing random games for small chunks of time. The picture quality looked better than expected and returning to streaming just felt like riding a bike. I instantly remembered what I enjoyed about it to begin with. I knew this was what I wanted to attempt.
On August 18, 2019, I was off to the races by starting off with the game that started it all, Super Mario 64. My history with Super Mario 64 goes all the way back to playing it on the previously mentioned Christmas Eve in 1996. Much later in life, it became the first game I learned to speedrun. I had a lot of history streaming Mario 64 and have probably streamed more hours of it than any other game. This first stream was going to be a little different. I was going to do something I had never attempted before, doing 100% of the game in one sitting. An eight hour stream to kick off this large event just felt like the right thing to do.
I was pleased to find that the reception was pretty good. Taking a lot of time off streaming, I was thrilled that some of my old audience came back to check it out. I was very blessed with a large raid from one of my oldest twitch friends JSmithOTI which also brought some new eyes to the project. I had developed a small fanbase which was the one piece that was really crucial to motivate me to play through this entire library of games on stream. They proved over the next few years to be extremely dedicated, loyal, and supportive. Without the audience, I 100% never would have been able to do this. I am so extremely grateful.
After this stream, I had solidified that the plan was going to be seen through. I started doing the behind the scenes things that needed to be done to really get the project rolling. Over the course of the first month I had slowly developed a stream layout to help give the stream a little bit of flavor. A schedule was created for a more consistent time for streams 3-4 days a week. I started implementing custom notifications for followers and subscribers, just mimicking what I had seeing many streamers do before me. The decision to rank games as I went formed and a Google spreadsheet was created to document everything along the way. A Discord server was created to keep up with my community and allow some automated posting of stream notifications. One of the biggest regrets of this experience from the beginning was not figuring all of this out before the first stream. While it did allow for the community to help form it along the way, it made the first month or two of streams feel a bit detached from the many months later. I am a bit of an archiver so I made sure to locally save all the streams as I went, but early on I didn’t understand the way Twitch uses highlights to long term archive. Many of the early streams can only be found on my personal hard drive due to this.
Decisions also had to be made on what the challenge was. Completing a game may seem obvious for certain titles, but what does it mean for others? How do you complete a fighting game? A puzzle game? A sports game? There were a lot of questions that had to be answered. The real answer was, I never took the art of the challenge seriously. This was always meant to be a fun exercise and an excuse to stream all of these games I was purchasing. The decision was quickly made for things to be on a case to case basis. Due to the sheer quantity of sports games, I would just simply win a game of each. This made sports games only last an hour or so, but also kept the content moving and more interesting. Some of the more popular games I would stretch out to a full 100% playthrough. This was usually reserved for the games people really wanted to see or ones that I personally enjoyed. The rules about cheating were also pretty casual and relaxed. I’m not the greatest gamer in the world, in fact I would dare to say I’m pretty mediocre at most genres of games. I would make solid attempts at completing games, but if the scenario required a cheat code to be entered or a Gameshark to be used, so be it. Purists will probably say I didn’t accomplish a true challenge here and I’m here to state that I really never cared about how others perceived my challenge.
As time went on, I continued purchasing the final games I needed to complete the collection. I would turn these in to some bonus stream content by showing them off and cleaning them on stream as they came in. It was a nice way to get out some creativity between game playthroughs by switching up the content occasionally. Much later in the streams, after I had acquired all of the cartridges, I had also done bonus streams of my own content just to keep things a bit more varied and exciting for me. While I loved streaming Nintendo 64 games, it didn’t allow me much in terms of creativity. I had figured out my content for years with little wiggle room for sneaking in my own ideas. In my earlier streaming days I would have to come up with new ideas multiple times a week. With this challenge, I was doing the same thing week after week. In the end, this was one of the biggest unexpected challenges. Repetition can sometimes get the best of you.
The next big thing to happen with the stream was when Twitch decided to implement a new feature called “channel points”. These would reward long term watchers and subscribers of a stream with a fake currency that could be used to trade in for perks. I thought I would have some fun with this new feature and make an expensive goal. In exchange for what was likely watching hundreds of hours of my stream, a viewer could cash in 100,000 of these channel points in exchange for the opportunity to “skip the line”. This would take any game of their choice from later in the library and make it the next entry I played. It kept things exciting. At any moment, someone could choose my fate and make me play a great game or make me play a terrible one. I figured at this expensive cost it would be rarely used. Over the course of the challenge, it was used nearly a dozen times. Most of the times, this feature was great, but as I neared the end of the library, I quickly learned that many of the better games had already been tapped and the library started growing a bit more stale. I have no regrets implementing this feature, but it definitely changed the dynamic of the library more than I had anticipated.
Once I hit various milestones with the challenge, I would feel rejuvenated and be given a new boost of energy. I rarely felt like quitting. On the occasions I was feeling down and defeated, my community was always there to pick me up. The hardest parts of the challenge were the long form games that didn’t really interest me. Playing a game for weeks on end that I wasn’t feeling would definitely drain me mentally. Luckily, these experiences infrequently happened back to back.
As I started nearing the end of the library, a bunch of new emotions had come in to play. On a positive note, what had seemed like a giant waste of money investing in all these games had suddenly become just that – an investment. The video gaming market hit a huge boom in the past year and many of those games have doubled or tripled in value. On top of that, the generosity of my community over the past two years helped to pay off all the money I had invested in games and equipment. What had started as a project I assumed I would lose money on had somehow turned in to just a fun project that didn’t cost me any money. It only cost me a few thousand hours of my life.
While most of the experience of playing the entire Nintendo 64 library on Twitch was extremely positive, a lot of other emotions had also turned up. Streaming is an extremely difficult thing. It’s putting yourself out there and opening yourself up to an audience. In an introvert like myself, this can sometimes lead to a lot of extra anxiety and sometimes a strange sense of loneliness. It’s one of the only industries out there where you really have a one way relationship with the audience. You’re speaking to them in voice, some of them are speaking back to you in text. A lot of larger streamers talk about the parasocial relationships that are built on Twitch – luckily as a small streamer, I feel like I have always used Twitch in a way to make friends. It still can mess with your head a bit that people know a lot about you while you know very little about your audience as a whole. I tried my best to use this experience to learn more about the individuals that watched my streams and made the best of my time and think I handled this all pretty well.
Internet trolls could also make streaming an anxious scenario. While 99% of viewers are just there to see what’s going on or to check in on the challenge, that other 1% of people that only show up to mess with you can lead to trust issues when seeing new names in chat. While I didn’t deal with a lot of problems over the course of the challenge, by the end I definitely became wary whenever I’d see a new name pop up in chat. I felt like I had fostered a pretty tight knit community, so whenever a new name popped up I instantly feared for what the response would be. It never feels good to question anyone new that shows up and hopefully over time I’ll learn to relax a bit more internally on this stuff.
As of about 24 hours ago from writing this very sentence that you’re reading, I have completed the Nintendo 64 challenge. I completed all 296 licensed Nintendo 64 games (plus one bonus unlicensed game released in 2019) in about 1550 hours. I learned a lot about myself and about game development from that era over the past two years. I have zero regrets from starting this challenge and the results exceeded my expectations.
If you are reading this and considering doing a challenge for yourself, I say go for it. Learn from my successes, learn from my mistakes. If you ever want advice, feel free to ask! There are surprisingly a lot of people doing similar things all over the internet. Plenty of advice to be found. My ultimate advice would be don’t take it too seriously, just try to have fun.
From here, I am taking a break from streaming and moving on to a new project that I’ve always wanted to do – game development. My biggest takeaway from years of streaming one challenge is the confidence to complete a goal that I set forward to do – even if it takes a lot of time.
One of the biggest questions I got while streaming was what is the next streaming challenge. I’ve always said there is no way I would go through the process of physically collecting another set of games again. Since then, I’ve begun working on the early stages of collecting for the aforementioned Sega Dreamcast. While I don’t plan on ever doing another challenge like this, you never know where the future will take you. Closing the door, but it’s still unlocked.
All I know is whereever I go from here, I’m far more confident about my ability to take it on.
Thank you to everyone who has watched. Thank you to everyone who is reading this. Thank you to everyone who has believed in me. It means the world.
braktheman 