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.

I played this game 25 years ago! I don't need any excuses.

You better believe I rented both of these back in the day.

I didn't expect to see Extreme G the Nintendo 64 futuristic motorcycle combat racing game appear as part of the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack.

I own Extreme-G. Hardly remember it though.

Unfortunately, NSO in my area isn't getting these two games yet. Perhaps in the future.

@chamurai: So are you going to move then? I mean no Iggy's Reckin' Balls on the NSO...sounds like the best possible reason to uproot!

@bigsocrates: Surely the kids will understand...

@chamurai: Forget moving to be able to play Iggy's Reckin' Balls, I think most kids would completely not understand if you said you were going to spend a full hour (60 minutes) playing Iggy's Reckin' Balls. They would just think of it as "old man stuff" like when my dad used to talk to me about staying up all night playing pinochle.

@bigsocrates: I showed one of my sons the video and said "Yo, I own Extreme-G." and was met with the most teenage level of apathy, from a 6 year old! I may just go bury myself with my N64 carts in the backyard.

On the bright side, we did get Blast Corps today in our region.

@chamurai: To be fair if you told a 6-year-old you owned Extreme G in 1997 you might have gotten the same reaction.

Want to feel old? Blast Corps was released in Rare Replay in 2015, meaning that the retro compilation it was included in last is almost retro itself. At least that is an actually good game, though I think it's wild that Microsoft is licensing old Rare games back to Nintendo.

@chamurai: @gtxforza: I might be the only one excited by this, but we now know for sure that SOMEONE still holds the eXtreme G license. I hope they start doing something with it, because the games were actually pretty good, especially 3 and XGRA.

@judaspete: The current company that has the ownership of Extreme G is Throwback Entertainment, they purchased it along with a majority of other Acclaim's intellectual properties in 2006, now I would wish to see a new installment of Extreme G or get them to have remakes for the modern video game platforms, then the fans of futuristic motorcycle racing fans will be so happy.

Edit: XG3: Extreme G 3 and XGRA: Extreme-G Racing Association (4th game in the series) both have licensed soundtracks, if they get rereleased, they have to renew the licensing or obtain licensing for new soundtracks or compose with new original soundtracks.

@gtxforza: I forgot the gen 6 entries had licensed soundtracks. That's a bummer. It wouldn't be too hard to change the music, but considering this was a niche series even back in it's prime, Throwback probably won't think it's worth the effort.

@judaspete: On the other hand those are two of the four games the company has on its "about us" page, so it may be a priority.

COMPANY | Throwback Entertainment

The blessing and curse of having a Family Video a couple blocks away meant that as a kid I could take advantage of their 2-for-1 Tuesdays promotion and rent two N64 games for $2. I definitely rented both of these. The curse of course being that I also ended up renting games like Superman 64, which I played for about 20 minutes before giving up. Even 8 year old me knew that game was complete garbage.

@bigsocrates: *Hawkeye "Don't give me hope"* meme

To be honest, I've been playing these on Dolphin for a while. But if Throwback ever does anything with them, I will compensate their efforts with currency.