The Nintendo 64 had a small library and a loud one. Mario, Zelda, GoldenEye and Banjo shouted so loudly that they drowned out everything underneath them — and underneath them sits one of the strangest, bravest second tiers any console ever produced. These are not the “hidden gems” that turn out to be mediocre games with good box art. Every game on this list does something no other game on the system — and in several cases no other game, period — was doing at the time. Some were made by DMA Design just before it became Rockstar North. Some were made by Rare and Treasure in the middle of legendary runs and still got ignored. All of them are better than their sales, their review scores at the time, or their rental-store reputations suggest. If you only know the N64’s headline acts, this is the list that fixes that.
10. Glover
A platformer starring a disembodied glove, escorting a ball. That pitch sounds like a mascot-era fever dream, and in 1998 most shoppers walked straight past it — which is a shame, because underneath the oddity is one of the most mechanically interesting games on the N64. The ball is the game: you dribble it, bounce it, slap it over gaps, and transform it — rubber ball for bouncing, bowling ball for crushing and sinking, crystal ball for fragile precision, ball bearings for speed — while the glove surfs, carries and occasionally loses the thing entirely, usually into a hazard, usually at the worst moment. It is a platformer about momentum and custody rather than jumping, years before physics toys became a genre unto themselves. The hub worlds are charming, the difficulty quietly stiffens, and the whole thing has a handmade oddness that focus-grouped mascots never risk. Glover sold modestly and got a sequel cancelled for its trouble. It deserved the sequel.
9. Bangai-O
Treasure’s other N64 shooter is the one even Treasure fans forget, partly because the cartridge version stayed in Japan in 1999 while the Dreamcast port got the Western tour. The idea is gloriously perverse: you pilot a tiny mecha through maze-like stages packed with turrets, tanks and fruit (yes, fruit — it is your score and your lifeline), and your most powerful attack is a counter-barrage whose size depends on how close the enemy’s bullets are when you trigger it. Bangai-O literally rewards you for standing in the fire. Skim a hundred missiles and your reply fills the screen; panic early and you get a damp squib. It turns the shmup’s survival instinct inside out — courage is a resource — and wraps it in a plot so cheerfully incoherent that the localisation became a legend in its own right. Short, dense and like nothing else on the system, it is the deepest cut on this list and maybe the most Treasure game Treasure ever made.
8. Wipeout 64
The strangest licensing story on the system: Wipeout was PlayStation’s coolest launch-window trophy, the game that sold consoles to club kids — and Psygnosis went and made an exclusive entry for the N64. Not a port: new tracks, the series’ signature weaponised anti-grav racing intact, and a four-player split-screen mode that the PlayStation originals could not match. What makes it a gem rather than a curiosity is how well the machine handles it. The speed is real, the handling model survived the translation to that three-pronged pad, and the whole package has the Designers Republic sheen that made the series a design icon. Nintendo loyalists in 1998 mostly shrugged — Wipeout was “a Sony game” — and PlayStation loyalists never looked across the fence. Both missed one of the best racers on either machine, and still the only Wipeout Nintendo hardware has ever had.
7. Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine
LucasArts’ PC Indy adventure was a good Tomb Raider rival; Factor 5’s N64 version is the one people still talk about. The studio that squeezed Rogue Squadron out of this hardware rebuilt Infernal Machine for the console — whip, revolver, sprawling puzzle-tombs from Babylon to Meroe and back — and produced one of the largest, most atmospheric adventures on the system. Then history mugged it: released at the very end of 2000, it initially reached North American players only as a Blockbuster rental exclusive, which is about as discoverable as burying the cartridge in the desert it depicts. Those who found it discovered a game with real patience — exploration, machinery puzzles, and set-pieces that understand Indy is a scrambler and a thinker before he is a shooter. In an era when licensed games were mostly landfill, this was the exception that proved a licence could be a promise.
6. Jet Force Gemini
Rare made so many classics on the N64 that one of them was bound to get lost, and Jet Force Gemini — a huge third-person bug hunt across a whole star system — is the one history mislaid. Three playable heroes (one of them a dog in a tank), cooperative play, a deathmatch mode, and ant-headed enemies that explode in showers of green are only the start; underneath is a genuinely enormous adventure that keeps opening up long after you think you have its measure. It asks a lot of you in its back half — the famous Tribal rescue requirement still starts arguments — but as a showcase for what Rare’s artists and musicians could squeeze out of the cartridge, it is up there with their very best. Underrated because it stood next to giants, not because it fell short of them.
5. Sin and Punishment
Treasure again — because on the N64, Treasure were the hidden-gem factory. Sin and Punishment was a Japanese-only rail shooter in 2000, released so late that the West did not officially get it until the Wii Virtual Console in 2007, and it plays like a fever dream of the whole era: you run, dodge and blast through collapsing cities and carrier decks, locking on with one hand and slashing with the other, while the plot sprints ahead of you at double speed. It is short, relentless and completely uninterested in slowing down to explain itself. Every stage throws a new set-piece at you — a boss fought on a raft of debris, a duel on a speeding train — and the N64, famously wheezy by 2000, somehow keeps up. This is what the machine could do in the hands of maniacs.
4. Blast Corps
The premise is perfect: a carrier hauling leaking nuclear missiles is stuck on autopilot, crawling across the country at walking pace, and anything it touches will set it off. Your job is to get in front of it and demolish everything in its path — farms, cities, skyscrapers — with a fleet of bulldozers, dump trucks, giant robots and a car that destroys buildings by skidding into them sideways. Blast Corps was Rare’s first N64 game and it is still unlike anything else: a puzzle game disguised as a demolition derby, where the real enemy is the clock and your own vehicle handling. The medal chase and time trials give it months of life. It reviewed well and then simply vanished from the conversation, which is a crime this list exists to correct.
3. Body Harvest
Before DMA Design became Rockstar North, before Grand Theft Auto III rewrote the industry, there was Body Harvest: an open-world alien invasion in which you travel through time — Greece 1916, Java 1941, America 1966, Siberia 1991 — to stop bugs from harvesting humanity, commandeering any of more than sixty vehicles along the way. Cars, boats, planes, tanks, a combine harvester: if it moves, you can drive it, years before that became the industry’s favourite trick. Nintendo, its original publisher, got cold feet about the violence and the difficult development; Midway released it in North America and Gremlin in Europe, to modest sales and a permanent cult following. It is rough, ambitious beyond its hardware, and historically enormous. Play it and you are watching the open-world era being invented in real time, fog and all.
2. Space Station Silicon Valley
The other great DMA Design experiment of 1998, and the funnier one. A space station full of robotic animals has gone rogue; your ship crashes; your robot hero Evo is reduced to a crawling microchip who survives by leaping into the bodies of the station’s mechanical wildlife — a dog that herds, a mouse that fits through gaps, a sheep that can float, a fox on skis, dozens more — each with its own abilities, each the key to some puzzle in the station’s four artificial worlds. It is a possession mechanic a full console generation before possession mechanics were a selling point, wrapped in DMA’s dry, very British silliness. A notorious bug stopped some players finishing it 100%, and it deserved better in every way. Few games on any system are this inventive this consistently.
1. Mischief Makers
In 1997 the entire industry sprinted into 3D — and Treasure, contrarians to the bone, made a 2D platformer about grabbing things. As Marina, a robot maid rescuing her creator, you seize enemies, blocks, missiles and bosses themselves, shake them until they give up items or change form, and hurl them at everything else. That one verb — grab — turns every level into a toybox: you ride thrown enemies, juggle bombs, shake a boss until its attacks fall apart. Reviewers at the time marked it down for being 2D, short and weird, which reads today like marking down a meal for being delicious in the wrong decade. GamesRadar later called it possibly the most underrated game on the whole system, and for once the superlative is earned. It is the most purely joyful game on the N64, the one that has aged the least, and the clearest proof on this list that “hidden gem” and “one of the best games on the system” can be the same sentence.
Honourable mentions, and the arguments we had
Any honest gems list leaves blood on the floor, so for the record: Rocket: Robot on Wheels, Sucker Punch’s physics-driven debut, missed the top ten by a whisker and would headline most other consoles’ lists outright. Beetle Adventure Racing — one car, endless shortcuts, a T. rex — remains the best licensed racer ever made. WinBack was doing cover shooting years before the genre had a name, and Snowboard Kids 2 is still the party racer most likely to end a friendship. If your favourite is missing, that is the nature of a ten: the N64’s bench is deep enough that the arguments are half the fun, and we expect — indeed demand — to hear yours.
The N64’s second tier is not a consolation prize. On any other console, half of these would be the headline acts.
What unites this ten is nerve. A glove-and-ball physics toy. A shooter that pays you to stand in the fire. A demolition puzzle game. An open-world alien epic and a body-hopping robot zoo from the studio about to change everything. The N64 is remembered as the console of a handful of untouchables, and that memory is true — it is just incomplete. Dust off any three games from this list and you will find a stranger, funnier and more daring machine than the history books describe. The gems were never really hidden. We were all just looking at Mario.