20 Best N64 Multiplayer Games

BattleTanx has one of the strangest setups on the console. In the year 2001, a virus has killed 99.99% of the women on Earth. Countries fight over each other's quarantine zones and end up in a nuclear war that destroys much of civilization. You play Griffin Spade, who claims a tank and crosses America to find his fiancée Madison, heading west as far as San Francisco.

The story is an excuse to put four tanks in a ruined city. Deathmatch is first to seven kills, and Family Mode is a deathmatch where you cannot switch ammo, only use it up. A sequel, BattleTanx: Global Assault, followed in 1999, and when players name the series it is usually that one they shout for, so grab both if you see them.

Pokémon Puzzle League began life as Panel de Pon 64, a sequel to the Super Nintendo's Panel de Pon, before it was reskinned with characters from the Pokémon anime. You line up three or more blocks of the same type to clear them, and chains and combos send garbage blocks over to your opponent. It came out in North America on September 25, 2000.

Ash Ketchum is the only playable character in the 1P Stadium mode. The 2P Stadium mode opens up the other characters, so your friend can be Misty or Giovanni while you try to bury them. It was nominated for Best Console Puzzle Game at The Electric Playground's Blister Awards 2000. Players still keep it on their lists of favourite N64 games, which is a lot of loyalty for a block puzzler with a cartoon on top.

Vigilante 8 is car combat set in an alternate 1975. A terrorist named Sid Burn is hired by OMAR to wipe out every competing oil company in the United States, and a kind-hearted trucker named Convoy forms the Vigilantes to stop his gang. The game began as a port of Interstate '76 before the developer, Luxoflux, asked Activision if it could become its own thing. The team had five people.

The Nintendo 64 version has three multiplayer modes, deathmatch among them, to take advantage of the system's four control ports. It also adds a two-player Story Mode. Y The Alien gets his own story mode, and there is a fantasy stage called Super Dreamland 64. Players still name it among their favourites, and some of them call it underrated.

WCW/nWo Revenge is the sequel to WCW vs. nWo: World Tour. It has more than 60 wrestlers and a 40-man Battle Royale mode. According to IGN in 1999, it was the best-selling wrestling game on the N64, and at the time it was the top selling third-party Nintendo game ever.

It was also the last WCW game AKI made for the console. Their next one, WWF WrestleMania 2000, used the World Wrestling Federation license instead, and that road led to the game sitting much higher on this list. Players remember Revenge as the game they played with their friends, between rounds of Mario Kart 64 and long after.

Snowboard Kids 2 is set in Snow Town, where the kids go about their days while Damien makes ridiculous attempts to sabotage them. It plays almost the same as the first game, with a few changes. The Shots are now called Weapons, and the Rocket and the Whirlwind are among the new ones. You can do several tricks in one jump now, and a trick or board grab at the right moment repels a weapon.

There are four new characters and five returning ones, nine in all. Only the six starters are in Story mode, but all nine can race in Battle mode once you unlock them. You can also look behind you with the R button, which is useful when your best friend is holding a Rocket. Players still name it among the N64's best.

NFL Blitz was made by a team headed by Mark Turmell and Sal Divita, who were known for NBA Jam, and it was a deliberate attempt to bring that exaggerated arcade style to football. There are fewer players on the field, the hits are bigger and the whole thing has lots of personality. It was ported to the Nintendo 64 in 1998.

It plays like those pick-up games where every play was a pass and you needed two completions for a first down. That makes it the rare football game you can hand to someone who has never watched a down. Players still name it among their N64 favourites, and they call it a good arcade sports game first.

Mario Golf is the second game in the Mario Golf series, after NES Open Tournament Golf. It has four 18-hole courses and 11 golfers, and you can create your own golfer and build up their experience by playing. It looks simple, but the engine has many variables that can affect a shot, like wind (shown by a Boo), rain, each character's attributes and spin on the ball.

Every character has voice samples you can use to comment on your opponents' shots. That is the multiplayer feature nobody mentions on the box and everybody uses. The N64 version was re-released on the Nintendo Classics service in 2022, and a sequel, Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour, came to the GameCube in 2003. Players keep it on their lists of N64 favourites, and some still have its music on repeat.

Bomberman 64 sends Bomberman after Altair, who is using the Omni Cube to drain the energy from Planet Bomber. The Adventure mode takes him through 24 areas with the aid of a mysterious helper.

Then there is the Battle mode, which is the reason it is here. Up to four players bomb each other until one is left, and you can play as the standard Bomberman or a custom one saved to an N64 Controller Pak. Players remember it warmly, and they put it right next to Smash Bros. and Diddy Kong Racing when they list what they want to play again.

Snowboard Kids was developed by Racdym and published by Atlus, and many reviewers compared it to Mario Kart. You race down the hill for several laps, ride a lift gate back to the top and grab Shots to attack the others. Items cost 100 gold each, which you earn by doing tricks or picking up coins. The courses include an amusement park and a Japanese village during the cherry blossom festival.

You get two item slots, one for a shooting item and one for support items like a rock or invisibility. EGM's Dan Hsu called it Mario Kart on the snowy slopes, a sleeper hit that "has just about everything going for it." Players still bring it up whenever N64 favourites come up, and some think it deserves more attention than it gets.

Gauntlet Legends is the sequel to the 1985 Gauntlet and 1986's Gauntlet II, and the final Gauntlet produced by Atari Games. It started in arcades, and the Nintendo 64 got the first home port in September 1999. It supports up to four players with the Expansion Pak, or three with the standard Jumper Pak. The PlayStation port only allows one or two.

It also added an inventory system, so you can stock items and use them later, and Sumner's tower with its shop. The players who pick Gauntlet Legends pick it loudly, often in capital letters, and treat it as the obvious answer.

Mario Party 3 is the third and final Mario Party on the Nintendo 64, and the final first-party N64 game released in North America. It has eight characters, with Waluigi and Princess Daisy joining the original six. The new duel maps have two players lower each other's stamina to zero using partners like Chain Chomps, since the characters cannot attack each other directly.

Critics were split on whether it improved on the first two games. It still sold over a million copies, and it was the first Mario Party with multiple save slots, which settles a lot of arguments about whose file is whose. Content from it was later remastered in Mario Party Superstars on the Switch. Players keep picking it, some of them as their favourite Mario Party of all.

Mario Tennis was made by Camelot, the studio behind Mario Golf, and it has a 14-player line-up led by Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Peach, Toad and Donkey Kong. You can do seven types of shot with just the two main buttons. Bowser Stage is a bonus mode where the court tilts as the players move, and you can hit the ball through Mario Kart item boxes to disrupt your opponents.

It is also the game that introduced Waluigi, who was created to give Wario a doubles partner. Critics praised its depth and the amount of content. Players rank it close to Mario Golf, and plenty of them put it next to the console's big multiplayer names. Doubles with four people is still one of the best ways to play.

Mario Party 2 came out in Japan on December 17, 1999, and in North America on January 24, 2000. It has six characters, Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, Wario and Donkey Kong, and each of the five Adventure Boards dresses them in a different costume. Critics praised the minigames and the improvements over the first game, and criticized the lack of originality.

You still roll a dice block to move and buy Stars with coins, and friendships still end over it. The Mini-Game Stadium mode is a board of only blue and red spaces where coins come from winning minigames alone. Players name it among the N64 games no collection should miss, and it was re-released on the Wii Virtual Console in 2010 and on Nintendo Classics in 2022.

Mario Party was developed by Hudson Soft and came out in North America on February 8, 1999. Four players roll dice to move around a board and buy stars with coins, and the coins come from one of 50 minigames played at the end of each turn. Critics liked its multiplayer mode and disliked its slow pacing.

Some of its minigames have you rotate the control stick as fast as you can. Providing the estimated 1.2 million gloves could have cost Nintendo up to $80 million, which tells you how those went. It was never released on the Virtual Console and stayed off digital stores until Nintendo Classics in 2022. Players name it right alongside Smash Bros. and Mario Kart 64.

WWF No Mercy was developed by Asmik Ace Entertainment and AKI Corporation, and it is the last of the N64 wrestling games that started with WCW vs. nWo: World Tour. You compete for seven different WWF titles, each with its own story. Up to four players can compete in modes that include cage and ladder matches, and some matches go backstage to four different locations.

Strikes and grapples come from one button press plus a direction, and you build your Attitude meter by attacking. Critics praised the series' controls, and the improvements here made them better. One player summed it up: "The create-a-wrestler feature is so good, and the game play is fast and deep." Players still call it one of the most fun games on the console.

Mario Kart 64 is the second Mario Kart, after Super Mario Kart in 1992, and the first in the series with three-dimensional graphics. The characters and items are still pre-rendered 2D sprites, a trick that saved memory. It came out in Japan in late 1996 and worldwide in 1997, with 50cc, 100cc and 150cc engine classes and two camera angles.

Critics praised the tracks and the multiplayer, and criticized technical issues and difficulty. It sold 9.87 million copies, the second best-selling N64 game. Players tie it to whole nights of racing and battle mode with friends and family. It was re-released on Nintendo Classics in 2021.

Diddy Kong Racing started at Rare as an adventure game called Wild Cartoon Kingdom, then became a racer called Pro-Am 64. When Banjo-Kazooie was delayed, Rare needed a stronger character for Christmas 1997, so the game was built around Diddy Kong. You race to beat Wizpig, a pig wizard from space, across five worlds with four tracks each, and you can drive a car, a hovercraft or a plane.

It sold 4.8 million copies, the Nintendo 64's eighth best-selling game, and David Wise wrote the soundtrack. Plenty of players take it over Mario Kart 64 and get touchy when it gets overlooked. Some just want it for the snow tracks. A remake, Diddy Kong Racing DS, came out in 2007.

Super Smash Bros. is a crossover fighting game made by HAL Laboratory, directed by Masahiro Sakurai and produced by Satoru Iwata among others. You do not drain a life bar. Each player has a damage percentage that rises as they get hit, and the goal is to knock the others off the stage. The box art and the manual show the characters as toy dolls that come to life to fight.

It came out in North America on April 26, 1999, sold over five million copies by 2001, and won IGN's Editors' Choice for Best Fighting Game. It also started a series with a sequel on every Nintendo console after it. Players still put it near the top of the whole N64 library, and some think its legacy is the biggest of any game on the system.

Perfect Dark is Rare's spiritual successor to their first N64 shooter, released in North America on May 22, 2000. You play Joanna Dark, an agent of the Carrington Institute, across 17 missions to stop a conspiracy by the rival corporation dataDyne. It has a co-operative mode and deathmatch, an optional high resolution mode and Dolby Surround Sound. The campaign and most of the multiplayer need the Expansion Pak.

It is one of the most technically advanced games on the system, and the multiplayer lets you fill the empty seats with bots. Players say those bot matches are still fun today, and some of them prefer it to the game at number one. Others think it improved the mechanics without changing the genre the way its predecessor did.

GoldenEye 007 is based on the 1995 James Bond film, and an inexperienced team led by Martin Hollis spent two and a half years on it. It was first planned as a side-scrolling platform game for the Super Nintendo, then became a 3D shooter inspired by Doom and Virtua Cop. It faced low expectations from the gaming media. It sold over eight million copies, the third best-selling N64 game, and won a BAFTA in 1998.

Its split-screen mode supports up to four players, with deathmatch and team modes. The Golden Gun can only be taken back by killing whoever holds it, and the Klobb is named after Nintendo producer Ken Lobb. Players still name it among the first games anyone should play on the N64. It came back in January 2023 on Nintendo Classics and Xbox Game Pass.