1996

Super Mario 64 was not the first 3D game — Virtua Fighter, Tekken, and numerous PC titles had used polygonal graphics — but it was the first game to solve the fundamental design problems of 3D action in a way that was immediately comprehensible to a broad audience. Shigeru Miyamoto and his team at Nintendo EAD spent years iterating on the movement model, the camera system, and the level design philosophy, and the result was a game in which every choice reinforced every other. Mario moved with analogue precision via the N64's control stick. The camera followed intelligently but could be adjusted by the player. The levels were large enough to explore freely but comprehensible enough to navigate without confusion. These qualities, which seem obvious in retrospect, were the result of design work that no competing platform had yet achieved.

The level design philosophy of Super Mario 64 — a central hub world (Peach's Castle) containing paintings that served as portals to self-contained courses, each course hiding multiple stars that could be collected in any order — established the three-dimensional collectathon as a genre. Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, Donkey Kong 64, and dozens of lesser imitators would follow the same structural template. More importantly, the principle of designing for movement — building environments around the pleasure of traversal rather than around obstacles to overcome — influenced every 3D action game that followed, including the open-world games of the 2000s and 2010s that are descended in a direct line from Mario 64's design philosophy.

The technical achievement deserves equal acknowledgement. The N64's Reality Co-processor — a custom SGI-designed chip — allowed Super Mario 64 to run at a relatively smooth 30 frames per second with texture-mapped polygons, fog effects, and dynamic lighting in environments far larger than anything the PlayStation or Saturn could manage at comparable fidelity. The cartridge format, criticised for its lower capacity and higher cost relative to CD-ROM, proved its worth in load times: entering a Super Mario 64 level was instantaneous, a fact that PlayStation owners, accustomed to waiting thirty seconds for games to load from disc, noticed immediately.

Pokémon Red and Green launched on 27 February 1996 after more than six years of development by Satoshi Tajiri and Game Freak. The concept — a collection RPG in which players captured and trained creatures for turn-based combat — was simple enough to be accessible on a four-button Game Boy and deep enough to reward hundreds of hours of play. The 151 original Pokémon were designed to be collectable (hence the tag-line "Gotta Catch 'Em All"), and the decision to split the game into two versions, each containing Pokémon exclusive to that version, meant that completing the Pokédex required either a friend with the other game or a link cable trade. The mechanic was brilliant: it made the Game Boy link cable, an accessory that had sold modestly for years, into an essential component of the Pokémon experience.

The initial commercial performance of Pokémon in Japan was solid but not explosive. The games sold well through the end of 1996, supported by a manga series that launched in April and word-of-mouth in schoolyards. The trading mechanic created social networks of players — you needed others to complete the game — that built the audience community before any official marketing had been directed at the phenomenon. By the time the trading card game (October 1996) and the anime series (April 1997) launched, the player base was already large enough to make both products immediate commercial successes.

The global Pokémon phenomenon — the anime, the trading card game, the merchandise, the cultural saturation of the late 1990s — is so large that it is easy to forget that it began with a modestly budgeted RPG for an aging handheld console that most industry observers had already written off as obsolescent. Tajiri's insight was that children in Japan spent enormous amounts of time travelling on public transport and that a game specifically designed for portable play, with sessions of any length and a social mechanic built into the format, would fill that time in a way that nothing else could. He was correct, and the Game Boy, approaching the end of its commercial life in 1996, was given another four years of market dominance by the game that was supposed to be its last gasp.