25 years on, Space Station Silicon Valley remains an innovative gem

It may come as a surprise, given how accustomed we are to games weighing in at hundreds of gigabytes, that the entire Nintendo 64 library comes to less than 25GB. Including Japanese exclusives, that’s 388 games – 7530 fewer than released on the PlayStation. It’s odd, then, in such a relatively small selection, how much room there is for games to fall through the cracks and slip out of our collective consciousness.

One can justifiably blame this on the titanic status of many Nintendo 64 titles. Super Mario 64 revolutionised platforming as the genre moved to three dimensions, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remains one of the most beloved games in our history, and one can make the case that few first-person shooters have lived up to Goldeneye’s legacy. The list goes on, longer than one would think from the miniscule catalogue from which it’s sourced.

But those games mask a wider catalogue that didn’t become cultural touchstones. Games like Hybrid Heaven and the criminally underrated (and unfinished) Holy Magic Century (Quest 64, if you’re nasty), that fell into the relative obscurity that awaited so many third-party titles on Nintendo’s flagship console of the late-90s. Yet among those games that continue to languish in anonymity, one sticks out as perhaps the least deserving. Released in 1998, Space Station Silicon Valley was an innovative and ambitious 3D platformer and, as it celebrates its 25th anniversary, it still holds up in an industry bereft of the platforming genre.

Why, however, despite the novelty of its approach, did Space Station Silicon Valley fail to gain a lasting fanbase? Releasing on the heels of Banjo-Kazooie didn’t help. Nor did a lengthy development cycle, which saw it move from the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, where it might have been regarded as worthy competition for Nintendo’s monopoly on platformers, to the crowd of platformers already on the Nintendo 64.

Though they released in quick succession, Banjo-Kazooie and Space Station Silicon Valley couldn’t be more different. Where Banjo-Kazooie iterated directly on the formula laid down by Super Mario 64, Space Station Silicon Valley had more in common with Grand Theft Auto than contemporary platformers – owing to both being in development at DMA Design (now Rockstar North) at the same time.

The story of Space Station Silicon Valley is, as you’d expect for the time, simple. In the far-flung future of 2001, Earth launches its biggest and most expensive space station, the titular Silicon Valley, only for it to disappear minutes later. When it reappears after 1000 years, it falls to the bumbling Dan Danger and his robot sidekick, EVO, to jet off and try to arrest its decaying orbit. Distracted by the radio, Danger crashes into Silicon Valley and EVO is ejected and destroyed. His control chip lands on a robot dog, Roger, and EVO assumes control – viciously murdering Roger’s sheep girlfriend, Flossy, in the process.