Nintendo 64 is the third major video game home console made by Nintendo. It was released in 1996 and competed with Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn and later Dreamcast. Unlike its competitors, Nintendo 64 used game cartridges as the primary storage medium instead of optical disks. The console introduced a unique gamepad with a D-pad, six face buttons, three shoulder buttons, a trigger and an analog stick, which later became a standard in the industry and has been used in every major video game console since. The game cartridges on Nintendo 64 contained significantly less storage than CDs on other consoles. That resulted in N64 games having much less cinematic cutscenes, music tracks, and other multimedia data.
Compared to the SNES, Nintendo 64 gained far less support from third-party developers. The most notable third-party developer for the system was Rare which made some of the most well-received games for the consoles such as Perfect Dark, GoldenEye 007 and Banjo-Kazooie. The most popular first-party games on the system include Super Mario 64 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart 64 and Mario Party 2.
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