As I write this, we are one cart away from a complete N64 PAL collection…or are we…
When we (seriously) started our collection in mid 2015, we had a handful of games (from our younger years) and we were aiming for a ‘complete’ PAL collection of 242 carts. This list was compiled using various online sources and included the three Australian PAL exclusive titles;
– Ken Griffey’s Major League Baseball
– Starcraft64
– Snowboard Kids 2
As we gradually grew our collection, we read about a Kickstarter campaign in February 2018 for a new N64 game called 40 Winks. The game had previously been released on PS2, but the original N64 version was shelved, most likely as the N64 console was rapidly approaching the end of it’s run, with the game coming out in 1999 and the production of the N64 finishing in 2003. Anyway, we jumped a the chance of owning a new N64 game and signed up for a copy of the Kickstarter game, with all the bells and whistles. The game arrived in early 2019, taking our total required up to 243.
Our collection continued to increase steadily, helped by regular trips to independent retro game retailers, various branches of CEX and Ebay, until, in August 2024, we came across a copy of All Star Tennis ’99 online which claimed to belong to someone called Yannick Noah. A little investigation quickly taught us that Yannick Noah is a French tennis player who won the 1983 French Open and in the French release of that particular tennis game, Noah was included as an exclusive, playable character. Needless to say, the auction was ‘won’ and our “complete collection” figure rose to 244.
Less than a month later we made yet another variant discovery; this time the Australian version of Beetle Adventure Racing being branded and released as HSV Adventure Racing. This came about as we had ordered some custom vinyl labels for our collection and when they arrived there was a mysterious HSV sticker. Another quick bit of Internet research taught us that HSV stands for Holden Special Vehicles which are produced by an Australian car company, based in Victoria. In the Australian release, the unmistakable Beetles are replaced with HSV VT cars. One month and a customs charge later and the cart finally arrived. New cars and a new total. 245.
Almost a year of collecting past and we were closing in on the final few games we needed, when we read online about variants of the Michael Owen’s World League Soccer game. We already knew about Mia Hamm Soccer 64, which reskinned the game to feature Hamm and the USA Women’s Team following their World Cup success in 1999, but were not chasing this title as we were only looking for PAL games. There were however, two other variants released in Europe; RTS WLS 2000 for the German market and Telefoot Soccer 2000 in France. These European variants didn’t seem to have too many differences from the Michael Owen game besides title screen and language changes, but we decided to add them to the list anyway…running total…247.
Now we thought surely there couldn’t be any more games. We had done a lot of N64 research since 2015 and thought we’d finally got our complete list, but Carmageddon was about to prove us wrong. As written about in a previous post, we discovered that the German release of this game had been censored, replacing red-blooded zombie with green-blooded dinosaurs. This was a more significant difference from the football games we had previously allowed into the gang so it had to go onto the list. We thought it may be a tricky fine as the cart covers are identical in all but the Cart Serial Number however, we managed to find a cart for sale in the UK on Ebay within five minutes of searching (pretty lucky!). We snapped it up, taking our cart tally to 248.
During the summer holidays, as this research took us deep into variant territory, we decided to record the Cart Serial Numbers in our game database (hopefully something which will be discussed in an upcoming post) and in doing so we discovered that among the UK and general European version carts we had amassed, our copy of Mortal Combat Trilogy had a German specific cart number. Fresh from Carmageddon Censor-Gate we did another bit of research and sure enough, the German release of this game had less blood and gore and cut back cut scenes. Whilst we were happy to have a variant cart, we now needed to add the UK version of Mortal Combat Trilogy to our list…249 *sigh*
I said at the start of this post that we only needed one more cart to complete our collection. Now this is almost true (we need Snowboard Kids 2 and Telefoot Soccer 2000), but Carmageddon appears to have opened up a whole can of worms. There seems to have been a number of games which saw a censored release in Germany, with three of the four Turok games being given green blood and robots for starters…that’s three more games needed…252?!?
We know we are close – the elusive complete PAL collection is within our reach! – but it keeps surprising us. Maybe that’s a good thing…I’m not sure what happens when you 100% this one…