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Popularity comes from utility. Utility comes from the right trade offs. Limitations demand careful trade offs.

The tradeoff was that the N64 was cheap and had Pokemon on it

The N64 is older than Pokemon.

Not true, the N64 was released a couple of months after the first Game Boy games.

Pokémon in Japan came much earlier. Also, the PSX was the cheap choice, among the rampant CD piracy vs the very expensive N64 cartridges.

Cheap? In its generation the Nintendo 64 was the expensive choice. Maybe not because of the console itself (price varied across its lifetime relative to the competition) but because of the cost of the games (and nearly complete lack of piracy).

As for Pokémon, the Nintendo 64 launched in June 1996 and the first Pokémon game was Pokémon Snap released nearly three years after the console in March 1999.

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