I regret to inform you that Nintendo has gotten into the Acclaim N64 catalog. Reggie help us all.

Iggy's Reckin' Balls is not the worst N64 game ever made (Lauren Fielder gave it a 6.7) but I think that young people today will never really understand what games like that meant back in the day and specifically on the N64. Today Iggy's Reckin' Balls would be a $10 downloadable game, maybe launch on Game Pass or something, and would quickly fade into obscurity.

But in 2000 releasing a game on the N64 meant printing cartridges, and that meant that this game had to retail for at least close to as much as one of Nintendo's first party offerings (though cartridge games did vary in price a bit.) It meant that there was a big or at least medium sized publisher behind it, which meant magazine and Internet ads. They didn't just quietly make a weird puzzle racing game and put it out in the hopes of finding a niche audience. They tried to make Iggy's Reckin' Balls an actual THING. They wanted gamers to KNOW about Iggy's Reckin' Balls. They wanted gamers to spend at least dozens of dollars buying Iggy's Reckin' Balls or at the very least go rent it from Blockbuster. This was big business!

There's a reason Acclaim doesn't exist anymore.

I think that when I look back on the video games of the past that's one of the reasons that games like Iggy's Reckin' Balls, which I barely played if at all at the time (I MIGHT have rented it at some point just because of the weird cover) stand out to me more than their modern equivalents. Today a game like this would be quickly buried and forgotten. Back then there were ads, reviews, articles, everyone who followed N64 knew about it. And it was just this weird thing we all kind of laughed at together. Again, it's not a bad game, it's just a game that you're never going to convince hundreds of thousands of people to pay $50 or more in 2000s money for.

I think kids today fundamentally can't understand that. They never lived in a world where physical media was pretty much everything, and understand the barrier to entry that created. Even if they were born in the late 2000s they grew up at a time where digital distribution of everything from movies and music to games and books was extremely normal. They will NEVER get the full Iggy's Reckin' Balls experience.

But you can!

You remember the ads and the reviews and all of it. And now you can play it in glorious Switch emulation. I played a little of it! It controls like a second tier N64 game, which is to say, kind of okay but not like you'd want it to. It's pretty ugly because it has four race courses at any one time (you play a ball with a grapple tongue competing with other balls to climb to the top of some towers in a puzzle racing game that also has a battle mode) but it's an N64 game so.... The sound is all crushed with short music loops because N64. It would have made an okay rental while waiting on Gamecube to release!

As for Extreme-G...that game's okay but we have Wipeout at home.