Star Fox 64 ended up making a huge impression on me that summer, and it's held up remarkably well since. It was a very contained experience that could be easily completed in an hour, but its surplus of routes and challenges made each run a very different experience.
But after the credits rolled, there were more planets to unlock, medals to earn, and an expert mode, which really was quite difficult to beat. Like most people, I was able to beat it on my first try, which was surprising given how hard the original game was. Star Fox 64 was in many ways the forerunner to today's triple-A extravaganzas, offering a light, relatively easy to experience story that borrowed heavily from the likes of Return of the Jedi and Independence Day. There had been a middling licensed shooter released in tandem with the movie, but it was Star Fox 64 that ultimately captured the excitement of shooting the saucer's core before it could destroy the friendly base. The biggest and best of them was Katina, which was essentially a straight copy of the climactic battle from Independence Day, which had been released the summer before. And then as you continue, there are the crashing asteroids at Meteos, the giant waves of lava at Solar, and the floating debris field at Sector X, each setpiece more impressive than the last. There's the moment shortly before fighting Corneria's alternate boss where you can gracefully skim over the water. There's the first moment that the screen fades into the Star Fox team flying gracefully over Corneria, each pilot plainly visible in the cockpit (nevermind that you can really only see their heads).
Even today, you can still see all the little touches that were designed to emphasize its graphical fidelity. Star Fox 64 was one of the first games of that console generation to leave me absolutely floored by its visual splendor, the other being Wave Race 64. The multiplayer was less impactful, being quickly replaced by Goldeneye as the Nintendo 64's primary party game when it was released the next month, but the campaign was gold. Instead, I trekked to my friend's houses to play through the campaign, steadily earning medals and working to top each other's high scores.
Like most kids that summer, I did not own a Nintendo 64 or a copy of Star Fox 64. shelves, which was impressive for the time, seemingly cementing it as one of Nintendo's top franchises going forward. It sold some 300,000 copies in its first week on U.S.
Star Fox 64 was a runaway success, aided in part by the lack of software on the Nintendo 64-a problem that would later become an epidemic on Nintendo platforms.