Donkey Kong 64

Donkey Kong 64 is a platformer developed by Rare and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64 in 1999. A sprawling collect-a-thon in the mold of Banjo-Kazooie, it gives the player five distinct playable Kongs, each with unique abilities, weapons, and color-coded collectibles, and turns them loose across the enormous hub of DK Isles to recover a hoard of golden bananas and stop King K. Rool. It was one of the few games to require the Nintendo 64 Expansion Pak, using the extra memory to render its large, detailed worlds. Its environments run the full gamut of a humid summer: DK Isles mixes jungle, beach, and water; Gloomy Galleon sends the Kongs swimming through a sunken pirate wreck; and Angry Aztec is all desert heat and shimmer. Enormous and dense to the point of exhaustion, it asks for the kind of long, unhurried commitment that only a season with nothing scheduled allows, and finishing it feels less like clearing a game than living through a stretch of weather. Reception was strong if mixed on its sheer scale, and it remains one of the biggest and most ambitious titles in the console's library, a whole summer of a game. Few cartridges of its era asked for more of your time, or rewarded a long stretch of it so completely.