Library: PS1
In order to find out if the PS1 or N64 is the most loved console. You need to first look at the sheer number of titles. This will give you the number of favorite titles and game companies.
While the PS1 had over 3,000 games to choose from, the N64 only had 296. The clear winner by volume of games is the PS1 in this case.
Sales: PS1
Looking at the number of titles in your retro library. You see a lot more games. And if you look at how many consoles were sold for those libraries. Nintendo sold around 34 Million consoles and PS1 sold around 102 million systems. That means that there were more consoles sold for PS1 than N64.
This was not due to the price, because they both sold for about $199. The advantage had to be in the games themselves.
Power: N64
PS1 had a hard time with only 32 bits of processing power to use. This gave a huge advantage to the N64 with as you could guess had 64 bits; hence the name. This was evident in the much larger worlds with much more interactive props.
Games that used this power gave us the epic size worlds of Zelda and Mario 64. PS1 games had to use interesting methods in order to show scale of worlds. But the clear winner in the size category is the N64.
Best Multiplayer: N64
The N64 set the standard when it came to being a party console. Their marketing slogan was and still is to be family and party friendly. That is why the N64 had 4 controller ports, and most of their games featured 4 player couch coop.
The PS1 would later throw their hand in that ring with the multi-tap. But that didn’t come across as well as the N64 with their 4 player games.
Cartridge vs Disk: PS1
The new CD revolution would take video games to a whole new level of game development. Not to mention the Blue Ray disk that came after it. The PS1 could not only play game disks but also play music disks, making it multi-functional. This might have also helped console sales.
Games could also come on 2 disks and make their games bigger than N64. The most notable franchise games that took this idea were the Final Fantasy games and the Metal Gear franchise.
More Developer Friendly: PS1
The simple design of the PS1 made it a lot easier for other developers to create games for the PlayStation console. A huge goal for the company was volume of games. This company mission still is prominent today.
Nintendo however, in those days tried to keep everything developed by Nintendo. They embraced the third party developer system and is going stronger than ever.
Load Times: N64
The CD had a much slower load time. This was sometimes a huge drawback to gaming with CD instead of disks. Some games were even notorious for their load times. The cartridge had almost no load times with a few exceptions.
Controller Design: Tie
You can NOT have a comparison of N64 and PS1 without saying something about the historic and iconic N64 controller with the third hand. Nintendo has changed their controller with almost every console version they put out. Compared to PlayStation who has had the same style for generations.
