30 Years of Quake vs. 30 Years of N64 - The Ultimate Showdown

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**Jeff Gerstmann** (1:24)
Hey, everybody, hi, welcome to the show. It's Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026 This is The Jeff Gerstmann Show. It's a podcast about video games. I'm your host for this week's installment of the program. My name is Jeff Gerstmann. We have a lot to, we have a lot to this week. We have a lot this week. I don't know, there's a lot going on in video games. New and old. Last Friday was the end of ranking 8-bit Nintendo games. We finally, we got them all, we caught them all and put them all on a list. And yeah, I don't know. It is still, I'm trying to think about things. I think what I probably will write out like, hey, what are the things I learned about this? And most of it is like very kind of normal stuff, like, or I guess like the in, it's not like amazing insight in a lot of cases. There's some of that too, but it is stuff like, wow, Rare made a billion games for this thing, and a lot of them are bad. They are, I would be, I have not run numbers on this, but I feel like is Rare the most prolific publisher on the NES? Is this their most prolific phase of all time? Prolific doesn't necessarily mean good. But yeah, there was a whole lot of stuff that they signed up for on that platform. Wheel of Fortune games or whatever, like game show games and all sorts of stuff, Time Lord, Battle Toads, a whole lot of business there and most of it, not great.
I think for me, the exciting part about all that was really experiencing all of these games that came out much later in the system's lifespan. It really kind of posts Super Mario Bros. 3, I think is sort of where my... That was probably one of the last NES games I played upon release or whatever, and it basically had moved on to the Genesis and stuff like that at that point. And so there's just this wide range of games that hits in the 90s when the system is like extremely popular. The install base is huge, huge, huge. The cost of the console has come down a couple of notches by this point, and so it's a very affordable thing. And so you have a lot of publishers that are just like trying to cram as many games onto shelves as possible to take advantage of those conditions. And that's sort of, up until right now, up until today, this is sort of how consoles operated, right? Because the install base would grow, the cost of the console would come down, causing it to grow even more, and you would have more and more publishers able to make more money on the console later in its lifespan. Also, development would mature, and everyone would get better at making games with this particular hardware. They would know more of the tricks to get things done, so they'd be able to squeeze out more impressive technical performance, and things would generally kind of push in that direction. And I think we see some late-era NES games that are technically impressive, but ultimately, I think the best games on that platform are, you know, pre-1990, you know? And so it is sort of a weird kind of reversal of, I think, what we would see with a lot of platforms that would hit in the years ahead. But yeah, you get like Kirby as a late-era, like really technically impressive, really great game. And you know, you get a lot of stuff of people trying to kind of cram it through the door. And it's funny when you think about that in terms of like, what Nintendo had to do to get the platform on shelves in the United States to begin with, you know? And the uphill battle they were fighting against retailers who were still feeling very against video games as a result of what happened with the Atari 2600, where a bunch of developers crammed a bunch of garbage onto the platform and flooded the shelves with trash. You know, and but in that case, you know, Atari themselves were also maybe to blame with some of that stuff. I don't know, ET for the 2600 gets a lot of flak. But I bet if you were to rank, I bet if you were to scientifically look at all the Atari 2600 games, ET would probably be a roughly middle of the pack to maybe like lower middle of the pack compared to some of the junk that came out there, you know.