Granted, most looked blurry, but that was a cartridge limitation, not a hardware one. Yoshi Story, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, Mischief Makers, Wonder Project J2, Ogre Battle 64, Rakuga Kids, Puzzle Dama, is proof of that. Huge crosspad and 6 face buttons for the win. It was a lot better than the PSX controller, I can tell you that. Killer Instinct Gold, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, and lots of other (crappy) 3D fighters played just fine. N64's controller was just fine for fighting games. They didn't because of Sony's quickly growing strength, the Saturn's great 2d hardware, lower licensing and production fees on both other consoles, and wanting to get away from Nintendo's history of controlling moves. There is no hardware reason to not have perfectly competent, or even great, versions of 2d fighting games, had companies wanted to make them. The point is, the N64 is such a great, great console, and its hardware can do very nice 2d. When you release nothing, of course no market is going to develop! I know third parties were frustrated with Nintendo's past restrictions, but it's really too bad that the N64 didn't get at least SOMETHING early on, to see whether there was a market or not. Had SFA2 released on N64 instead of SNES, or in addition to the SNES, I think it definitely would have gotten attention, and hopefully also good sales. All that was needed was for actual games to release, beyond just KI Gold and MK Trilogy most of the better fighting games were Japanese, after all, and Capcom and SNK were the best. It's definitely possible early on, particularly, there was interest from N64 owners in plenty of kinds of games the SNES had had. Their one attempt at an N64 exclusive ended up as a Gamcube game (RE0).īut seriously, given how good the N64 controller is for fighting games - and it's pretty good, with a decent d-pad and six face buttons - it's really frustrating that neither of them tried releasing even one single fighting game on the system, particularly early on! Who knows, maybe it would have sold well and helped lead to the system getting more 2d fighters, which would have been fantastic. SNK never supported the N64, and when Capcom did it was with only a couple of games that also released on the PS1. It's really unfortunate that that happened, but it did. Yeah, this is something I've wondered about before, and there really isn't a good answer beyond that Capcom and SNK gave up on Nintendo and switched over to Sony and Sega.