IGN 64

Back in the day, IGN 64 was an online bastion of Nintendo 64 related news, previews, reviews, and interviews for the western world. (They even had a sit-down interview with the King of game design himself.) Originally N64.com until being brought under the Imagine Games Network umbrella, IGN 64 was the premier online resource for Nintendo fanboys, whether they wanted to praise the gameplay-over-graphics mantra of F-Zero X, grieve the endless cycle of The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time postponements, share the many exploitable glitches of GoldenEye (explode remote mines on all eight of the computers suspended from the ceiling in the Complex in multiplayer mode to activate a bug which causes non-bullet projectiles such as mines and rockets to sit motionless in the air until being shot at or otherwise detonated), rage against the lack of FMVs and voice-acting in Nintendo games, rejoice later in the advanced compression methods which made FMVs and voice-acting a reality on game cartridges with about a tenth the capacity of a PlayStation CD, or finally lend voice to an echo chamber of The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time versus Metal Gear Solid debate.

The site was run by two men, Matt Casamassina and Peer Schneider. The site-reader interplay was so dynamic that Peer, a German-American acquired from Nintendojo, graciously posted and responded to reader e-mails five days per week, all of which opened with the same iconic phrasing: "Hey Peer". In spite of the editors' frequent responses to e-mails, many site readers sent them numerous e-mails, never to see their letters posted, such was their readership volume. At one point the site experimented with print and released a magazine, planned to be the first in a bimonthly or semi-annual series of print companions to the web site, but in spite of positive response from readers, the print embarkment never went anywhere after the publication of the first volume. The reviews on IGN 64 were always quite memorable in their level of detail and insight. For large titles such as The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, the review is quite long, comprising opinions from both Matt and Peer; in the course of previewing and reviewing the title they amassed nearly 500 screenshots and 30 videos, all in the days before YouTube, when a 30-megabyte video file was a serious draw on site resources. Unfortunately, with the replacement of the Nintendo 64 with the Nintendo Gamecube, the writers went elsewhere within the IGN community, as a site devoted to Nintendo 64 news has little viability when there is, well, no news to report on.


 * April Fools' Day: Averted. The editors would not run prank articles on the day in question, and for many months following Electronic Gaming Monthly's notorious fabricated "cheat" for unlocking the classic Bonds in Golden Eye 1997, they would often state their annoyance with reader questions on the "cheat."
 * Console Wars:
 * Fifth generation, and things got ugly. Christmas of 1998 was an especially fierce period, due to the dueling releases of The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and Metal Gear Solid. More generally speaking, reading the site, one becomes easily tied up in pro-Nintendo, anti-Sony rhetoric. It also didn't help that Nintendo and Squaresoft were on the down-and-out. Much discussion on IGN64 was devoted to decrying the complete and utter paucity of Role Playing Games for the Nintendo 64 (Quest 64, why must you disappoint so severely), developing schemes to bring Squaresoft back on board for development (if enough of us e-mail them...), and convincing one another that there was some rationale behind using ROM Cartridges instead of CD-ROMs.
 * Concerning OoT versus MGS, Nintendo fanboys will tell you that the difference is that although both of them can be beaten in about four hours, a casual player can easily beat MGS in four hours whereas to beat Zelda in that amount of time requires some truly pro-level bug exploitation. Sony fanboys, meanwhile, will tell you that Zelda lacks the emotional depth or the memorable boss fights of Metal Gear Solid. The truth is that they are both great games; the simple solution was to just purchase both consoles after the price-drop and ignore the debate.
 * Keep Circulating the Tapes: Unfortunately, IGN has cleaned up the site considerably, removing those aspects that once made it a community, such as the reader mailbag. These aspects of the site can now be found only on the Internet Archive.
 * Urban Legend of Zelda: The bane of Matt and Peer's existence. Probably accounted for at least half of the editors' mailbag in the months following OoT's release. They were not happy with other video game publications for encouraging rumors.