This is the best way to play classic N64 games in 2025. Perfectly handles any original N64 game. Brace yourself, millennials--the Nintendo 64 turns 30 in 2026. The console you spent countless hours huddled around as a kid is now old enough to be crippled by student debt and burdened with existential despair, just like you! If that reminder of the cruel and ceaseless march of time makes you want to retreat into a nostalgic bubble when life was easier and, say, play some N64 games, unfortunately, that's been pretty tricky in recent years.

There's a good chance you've never played one, much less seen one, but the PC Engine--branded in the US as the TurboGrafx-16--is a game console that arrived at a unique moment in gaming history. A bona-fide Nintendo-threatening hit in its home country of Japan when it launched there in the late 1980s, this system from computer maker NEC and game company Hudson Soft (makers of Bomberman) could have changed the gaming landscape. But in the US, the console was quickly overshadowed by the Sega Genesis, which launched around the same time. Thankfully, all those long-neglected PC Engine and TurboGrafx-16 games are being given another chance. Since finally launching its first handheld system, hardware maker Analogue is taking a crack at the PC Engine, giving its software a home suitable for the 21st century.

Grim news heralded in a report published this week by the Video Game History Foundation, which claims that 87% of video games released before 2010 are no longer commercially available. This equates to a lacuna of tens of thousands of works, many of which represent key moments in the medium's evolution. It's an excruciating loss of source material for the people who worked on these games, as well as for historians and archivists, for gem-hunters and for any younger player who might wish to enjoy interactive works created in different socio-political circumstances, against different technological constraints and fashions or within different market conditions. The void is not unique to video games – there are books that are no longer published even in digital form, some films can only be watched on defunct formats, others disappear from streaming services mere months after release – but the scale of the video game void is unmatched in other media. According to the report, less than 5% of games from the Commodore 64 are still available today.

There's never been a better time to be a retro video game enthusiast. Playing old video games on modern screens used to require elaborate cabling and detailed electronics knowledge, or you would have to wade into dodgy ROM sites and tinker with confusing emulators. Today, however, we are blessed with a panoply of options, led by Nintendo's "classic" mini-consoles. But the premium, top-of-the-line retro console maker remains the hipsterish British-American company, Analogue. Analogue's Super NT, a Super Nintendo (SNES) hardware emulator released last year, was a revitalization of the SNES library ready to plug and play (and upscale) to modern HD televisions with a graphical fidelity unmatched by even Nintendo's own offerings.

Nature abhors a vacuum – and so does the video games industry. Over the last year, Nintendo and Sony have each announced new versions of their classic consoles: the Mini NES and SNES machines are outselling modern platforms, and the forthcoming PlayStation Classic is stirring up interest. So what of Sega, the creator of the Master System and the Mega Drive (AKA Genesis), the console that brought the arcade home in the late 1980s? When it comes to retro consoles, until now there have only been cheap third-party Mega Drive retro consoles, which often have popular games built-in but use software emulation to replicate the original hardware. This has meant that games often run with terrible input lag and tend to look horrible on contemporary LED displays, making for a disappointing nostalgic experience.

Trying to play an NES cartridge on Nintendo's original, 30-year-old hardware can be an exercise in frustration. The console's ancient composite cables offer terrible image quality on modern televisions, and getting games to actually run is a ballet of reseating, jostling and, of course, blowing on game cartridges. Nintendo's own NES Classic Edition and the Wii U and 3DS virtual consoles offer refuge for the casual gamer's nostalgic yearnings, but collectors looking for an authentic, cartridge-based retro gaming experience have long suffered under the dark shadow of compromise. Is it better to play on the original, but unreliable, hardware, or an NES clone plagued with compatibility issues? With the Analogue Nt mini, you may not have to tolerate either -- but at $449, Analogue's compromise-free Nintendo doesn't come cheap.