I remember loving almost every single Nintendo 64 game in my collection when I was a child. It didn’t matter if it was Ocarina of Time, Castlevania 64, A Bug’s Life or Top Gear Rally, I was almost always able to have some fun with those games. Very few made me feel indifferent towards them back in the day, but one of the unfortunate games was Wave Race 64. Despite being considered one of the best titles in the system’s earlier days, with absurdely high scores from almost all outlets, I remember not caring about it. Years have passed, and with the game now being a whopping thirty years old, I wanted to give it another go. I learned about its technical achievements and its importance in gaming physics, but have I always been too harsh on it? Was I just a wrongful, foolish child?

Red ones, go through their right. Yellow ones, the opposite. Now you know the game’s basics.

For the uninitiated, Wave Race 64 is, first and foremost, a jet-ski racing simulator, and also a sequel to a lesser-known Game Boy title released in the early 90s. Its premise is the simplest it could be: ride a jet-ski through wavy waters, manoeuvre around specific buoys (if you miss a certain number of them, you’re out), win races. It’s not exactly rocket science. The core aspect of Wave Race 64‘s gameplay was never what made it so popular when it first came out. The game was, almost entirely, being carried by its physics engine. Well, there’s also the fact it was a new Nintendo 64 release back when they were even more scarce than we’d imagine, but mainly the physics engine.

It’s not Tony Hawk (or whatever its jet-ski equivalent is), but you can perform a few tricks when jumping off ramps.

There’s no denying, the waves, and the way they move with such realism and independence in each of the game’s courses is impressive to this day. Depending on the size of the wave and strength of a tide, you might even be able to jump over some barriers, cutting some precious seconds off your race, or even reach previously unaccessible shortcuts. Looking at those waves in 2026 is impressive – I can’t even imagine how game changing these physics might have looked and felt in 1996. Like, what the hell was the PS1 doing at the same time? Not those physics, that’s for certain. So in a technical standpoint, lovely, groundbreaking, a giant leap for sports video games. But as a game with lasting content? Err…

This course’s name just hasn’t aged very gracefully.

The thing is, Wave Race 64 is a game that just doesn’t have a lot of substance. Even for its time, it had, like, four riders and half a dozen different courses. With the exception of a little open-ended course that lets you perform a few tricks at your own leisure, that’s all the variety the game has to offer. Different difficulty settings thrown in a handful of additional traps and barriers onto existing courses, but the amount of content this cartridge had to offer was pretty slim, even for 1996, super early Nintendo 64 settings. PilotWings was offering a much bigger open world for you to explore, and you don’t really need to say anything about how much content Super Mario 64 had to offer back then.

Some courses are actually set in rivers and lakes. That kinda goes against the point of WAVE Race, but the reflections are impressive…

As such, for as much as I understand how impressive Wave Race 64 was for its time, and is today, I don’t think it’s one of the most fun or long-lasting games the Nintendo 64 had to offer. Ironically enough, for a game about riding jet-skis on open seas, it’s a very shallow experience. With its paultry amount of riders and courses, it should have honestly been a pack-in title for the Nintendo 64 back in the day: people would have already bought Super Mario 64 regardless, with this smaller game being the perfect (and very brief) showcase of what the system’s CPU and graphics chip were able to come up with, something the PS1 and Saturn would never be able to replicate.