Console · 1996–2002
The N64 sold 32.93 million units — a figure that made it the most influential commercial disappointment in Nintendo's history, comprehensively beaten by the PlayStation while inventing the vocabulary of 3D gaming.
As of the end of 2009, the Nintendo 64 had recorded lifetime sales of 5.54 million units in Japan, 20.63 million across the Americas, and 6.75 million elsewhere, for a worldwide total of 32.93 million. That places it 19th among the best-selling video game platforms of all time — behind the Sega Genesis on 34.06 million and ahead of the Atari 2600 on around 30 million. The regional distribution tells the real story. The N64 was a substantial success in North America, where nearly two-thirds of its units sold, and comparatively weak in both Japan and Europe. It was also being beaten, badly, by a machine from a company that had never made a console before: the PlayStation sold roughly three times as many units in the same generation. The cause is not mysterious, and Nintendo has never seriously disputed it. The decision to stay with cartridges rather than move to CD-ROM made N64 games more expensive to manufacture, more limited in storage, and — decisively — drove away the Japanese RPG publishers whose games were the beating heart of the PlayStation's library. Square took Final Fantasy VII to Sony. That single defection is worth more than most consoles' entire marketing budgets.