Top 10 Nintendo 64 Games I Keep Coming Back To

Every system has its sacred cows. The N64's are Ocarina of Time, Mario Kart 64, and GoldenEye. Two of those are on this list. One isn't. The N64 library is also genuinely smaller than the SNES or PS1 catalogs it was up against, which means a top 10 here is brutal in a way other top 10s aren't. There's no room to be polite. Below are the ten N64 games I keep going back to, in order. Not the ten I respect. The ten I reload.

1. The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask

I know what putting this above Ocarina costs me. I'm doing it anyway. Ocarina is the template. Majora is the experiment, and the experiment is what I keep coming back for. The whole game is one town and four regions and a moon that gets closer every time you forget to save. The three-day cycle isn't a gimmick, it's the game's argument: every NPC has a 72-hour life with a beginning and an end, and you are the only one who remembers any of it. Stone Tower Temple is the best dungeon Nintendo ever made. The Anju and Kafei sidequest is the best non-combat content in any Zelda. Majora is meaner, weirder, and more curious than its predecessor, and that's the version of Zelda I want.

2. Super Mario 64

Yes. Of course. The first three-dimensional Mario is still one of the most generous platformers ever made. Peach's castle isn't a hub, it's a playground you can read; the painting in the foyer telling you to keep your back to the sun is the kind of design confidence later 3D platformers spent a decade trying to copy. The camera is famously bad. It's also famously fine, because the rest of the game is so good that you forgive it. I still reload this to grind Bob-omb Battlefield in twenty minutes and then put it down. Every time.

3. F-Zero X

I'm putting F-Zero X above Mario Kart 64 and you can come fight me. Mario Kart 64 has nostalgia and Rainbow Road. F-Zero X has 30 cars on track at 60 frames per second on hardware that should not have been able to do that, plus the angriest rock soundtrack ever shipped on a Nintendo platform. Death Race is the single best mode in any N64 game, the one where you win by ramming every other racer off the track until only you remain. The X Cup randomizes the courses every time you boot it. There's nothing else like it on the system and there's barely anything like it now. Mario Kart is a party. F-Zero X is a fight.

4. Sin and Punishment

Treasure made a Japan-only on-rails shooter for the Nintendo 64 in 2000, gave it English voice acting on the Japanese cart so the rest of the world could follow along, and then watched it sit there until the Wii Virtual Console finally let everyone else in. Sin and Punishment is Treasure at peak Treasure: bosses that fill the screen and then split into more bosses, a frantic blend of shooting and melee, a plot that doesn't try to explain itself. It is genuinely one of the best games on the system and barely anyone played it on the system. I keep loading it because no one else makes games this loud.

5. GoldenEye 007

I left this off the first draft. Then I remembered the slappers-only matches in the Facility and put it back. GoldenEye in 2026 plays like a museum piece for about ten minutes and then your hands remember the controller and it's fine again. The single-player campaign holds up better than people give it credit for, because Rare put real stealth options in every level a decade before the term immersive sim was popular. The multiplayer is what brought me back this year, four split-screen players, Proximity Mines in Complex, the dumbest and best version of competitive FPS we will ever have.

6. Paper Mario

Intelligent Systems made a turn-based RPG that runs on timing and reading. Every attack has an action command. Every defense has an action command. The combat never gets old because you're never just picking from a menu, you're playing the menu. The badge system is the smartest piece of party customization on the system. Chapter 3 with Tubba Blubba is one of the great RPG vibes of the era, the haunted manor where the boss is invincible and you have to chase his missing heart through a haunted forest. Paper Mario is funnier than it has any right to be and the writing is the actual reason I replay it.

7. Banjo-Kazooie

The collect-a-thon platformer that earned the collecting. Banjo-Kazooie is a tighter game than Donkey Kong 64 in every way that matters, especially level count, and especially Click Clock Wood. The four-seasons tree where everything you do in spring shows up in summer, fall, and winter is the kind of structural flex that 90 percent of open-world games have still not topped. Grunty's rhymes are the best writing in any Rare game. Mumbo Mountain teaches you the whole grammar of the game in twenty minutes without saying a word about it. I have finished this game more times than I have finished any other 3D platformer. Probably I will again.

8. Mischief Makers

"Shake, shake!" Treasure's other N64 game is a 2D action game that came out at the exact wrong moment, when everyone was loudly insisting that 2D was dead and the N64 in particular was a 3D-only platform. Mischief Makers is what happens when one of the best 2D studios in the business ignores that memo. Marina grabs and shakes everything in the game, including the enemies, including projectiles, including bosses. The bosses are the part I come back for. They are huge, weird, and almost cinematic. Critics in 1997 didn't know what to do with this game. I do. I play it.

9. Ogre Battle 64: Person of Lordly Caliber

Yasumi Matsuno and Quest's strategy series quietly put one of its best entries on the N64, which is the last place anyone was looking for tactical RPGs in 1999. Ogre Battle 64 is the real-time-with-pause unit-management game where your alignment, your reputation in each town, and your tolerance for war crimes all feed into a hidden Chaos Frame stat that decides which ending you get. There are thirteen endings. You will get the wrong one your first time and it will sting. The localization is uneven, the art is gorgeous, the music is some of Hitoshi Sakimoto's best work before Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, and the cart is now expensive for a reason.

10. Perfect Dark

Rare's follow-up to GoldenEye is the more ambitious game and almost the better one. The single-player campaign goes further out into sci-fi than GoldenEye dared, the Carrington Institute hub is the kind of optional tutorial space that lets you respect the player without lecturing, and the AI bots in multiplayer were one of the first times I had a console FPS feel populated when no friends were around. Perfect Dark also runs poorly. The frame rate on real hardware is a slideshow in certain rooms and that is a real cost. The Xbox 360 port is the version to play in 2026, and the game is still good enough to make the list anyway.

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That's my ten. The N64 library is small enough that you have probably played five of these and missed five, and I'd argue the missed five are where the system gets interesting. If any of them are sitting on a shelf or in an emulator folder you keep meaning to fire up, drop them into your StackPop and let the random picker hand one back to you next week. That's what got me to replay Mischief Makers last month, and I'm still mad I waited this long.