You know what's funny? I was digging through my old GamePro magazines the other day—the ones with slightly sticky pages from spilled orange squash and excitement—when I stumbled across a preview that made me pause. There it was, in bold letters: "Nintendo Ultra 64." Not N64. Not Nintendo 64. The Ultra 64.
It's weird how certain names stick in your brain, isn't it? Like hearing your mate's older brother mention "Project Reality" in hushed tones back in '93, or seeing those first blurry screenshots of what would become Super Mario 64 running on Silicon Graphics hardware that looked like it belonged in a spaceship rather than under your telly. The whole thing felt impossibly futuristic—64-bit processing when most of us were still getting our heads around what 16-bit actually meant beyond "better than 8-bit, probably."
I remember the first time I saw that name in print. Must've been early '95, maybe late '94. The Ultra 64. It sounded like something from a sci-fi film, didn't it? Ultra everything was the future back then—Ultra-Matic washing machines, Ultra-Brite toothpaste, and now Ultra gaming. Nintendo wasn't messing about with subtle branding. They wanted you to know this thing was going to be mental.
Course, what most of us didn't know—and what I only learned years later when I started proper researching this stuff—was that the whole "Ultra 64" thing was actually causing Nintendo proper headaches behind the scenes. Turns out there was this company called Ultra Games, which was actually a subsidiary of Konami, and they weren't thrilled about Nintendo slapping "Ultra" on their shiny new console. Legal departments got involved, lawyers started earning their keep, and Nintendo found themselves needing a new name faster than you could say "trademark dispute."
The transition wasn't instant, mind you. For months, gaming magazines were caught in this weird limbo where some articles called it the Ultra 64, others went with Nintendo 64, and a few brave souls just called it "that new Nintendo thing with the fancy graphics." I've got issues of CVG where they switched between both names in the same article—probably because the poor writers were getting press releases with different names depending on which department sent them out.
But here's the thing that really gets me: the Ultra 64 name actually made perfect sense for what Nintendo was trying to achieve. This wasn't just another incremental upgrade like going from NES to Super NES. This was Nintendo saying, "Right, we're done with sprites. We're done with Mode 7 trickery. We're building a proper 3D machine." The Silicon Graphics partnership wasn't just about better graphics—it was about bringing arcade-quality 3D into people's living rooms, something that seemed absolutely mental if you'd spent the early 90s watching your mates argue about whether Virtua Fighter or Tekken looked more realistic.
The development story gets even madder when you dig into it. Nintendo wasn't just building new hardware; they were essentially learning a completely new language. Going from the Super NES's tried-and-tested 2D architecture to proper 3D polygons meant starting from scratch. The development kits looked like small refrigerators and cost more than most people's cars. I've seen photos of those early dev setups, and they're properly intimidating—screens everywhere, cables that look like spaghetti, and enough processing power to probably run a small country's air traffic control system.
What's mental is how different things could've been if they'd stuck with the Ultra 64 name. Would we have had Ultra Mario 64? Ultra Kart? The Ultra Controller with its bonkers three-pronged design that made perfect sense once you actually used it but looked like alien technology in screenshots? I mean, the controller alone deserved an "Ultra" prefix—it was the first mainstream analog stick, the first controller with a dedicated Z-trigger, and it had more buttons than most people had fingers to operate them with.
The name change to Nintendo 64 happened sometime in early '96, just months before launch. By then, most of us had got used to calling it the N64 anyway—partly because "Nintendo 64" was a right mouthful when you were trying to convince your parents why you needed to spend £250 on a new console, and partly because Nintendo's own marketing materials started using N64 as shorthand. The logo helped too—that lovely metallic cube design that somehow managed to look both retro and futuristic at the same time.
I'll be honest, I was gutted when they dropped the Ultra name. Not because it was better, necessarily, but because it felt like losing a bit of that early mystique. "Ultra 64" sounded dangerous, experimental, like something that might explode if you plugged it in wrong. "Nintendo 64" sounded… well, sensible. Corporate. The kind of name that wouldn't scare your nan when she saw it under the Christmas tree.
But you know what? The actual console more than lived up to the Ultra promise, even without the name. That first boot-up sequence, with the metallic N64 logo whooshing around in proper 3D while that satisfying "dong" sound effect played through your telly speakers—that was pure Ultra energy right there. And then Mario's face appeared on the title screen of Super Mario 64, and you could grab his nose and stretch it about like digital silly putty, and suddenly the name didn't matter anymore because you were living in the future.
The whole Ultra 64 saga reminds me why I love this hobby so much. It's not just about the games or the hardware—it's about all the mad little stories behind them. The legal battles, the trademark disputes, the marketing departments frantically trying to rebrand months before launch. It's about how something as simple as a name change can feel like losing a bit of magic, even when the end result was probably better for everyone involved.
These days, when I fire up my N64—and yes, I still call it that, even though I sometimes slip and say Ultra 64 just to wind up my mates—I think about all those parallel universes where Nintendo kept the Ultra name and we're all sitting here talking about Ultra games instead of N64 classics. Would Mario 64 have felt different with "Ultra" on the box? Would GoldenEye have been Ultra 007?
Probably not. But it's fun to imagine, isn't it?
