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There haven't been many unlicensed games released for Nintendo consoles, partly due to the fact that Nintendo has locked down their development hardware and software. The most famous of Nintendo's unlicensed games is probably Tengen Tetris for the NES, which is now sought after as a collectors item due to its short time on the market.

Were there any unlicensed games released for the Nintendo 64?

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    Presumably contemporaneously? Modern homebrews don't count?
    – Tommy
    Apr 4, 2017 at 22:51
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    @Tommy I guess I wasn't thinking about homebrew, although I failed to consider new games that were released on cartridges after the console was considered current gen. I'm mostly interested in unlicensed games released during the years the system was popular, but I'll accept modern homebrew that made it to an actual cartridge as well.
    – JAL
    Apr 4, 2017 at 23:01
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    N64 Homebrew seems best described as 'nascent'. Since there's the popular EverDrive, it's doubtful that future Homebrew titles will be anything but downloadable online. Also, I think contemporary unlicensed titles were impractical since Nintendo was a legal juggernaut (not an upstart) by the time we got N64.
    – Brian H
    Apr 4, 2017 at 23:18

2 Answers 2

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While I was looking for information on the Hong Kong bootleg mentioned in Tommy's answer, I actually found information on a different bootleg released in Brazil: Ronaldinho Soccer 64

Released by TEG Peru only in Brazil in January 1998, this bootleg was a modified version of International Superstar Soccer 64 which replaced all fake roster names with real player names, added some pictures of Ronaldinho to the title screen, removed the Konami logo, and changed some of the music tracks. This bootleg also lacked a real CIC, so a device such as the N64 Passport Plus III is required to get the game to boot.

Front

Back

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Board1

Additional information and source.

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    That's actually the player we now know as Ronaldo, who was briefly known as Ronaldinho, which means little Ronaldo.
    – innisfree
    Dec 30, 2018 at 9:25
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Yes, at least if you count pirated games (which are neither licensed from Nintendo nor from whomever owns the game, so twice as unlicensed). Per this moment in a REcon presentation on the Nintendo 64 CIC:

... now I should say, unlike the older Nintendo stuff, instead of having very widespread pirate chips, this pirate game is actually very very very rare. If you actually have one of these and you're willing to donate in the name of science we'd actually really like to see what's inside those. There's a very small number of pirate games made in Hong Kong that have this chip and we have very little information about the history of this pirated CIC. So, again, please let us know if you have any leads on these.

Since the presentation is an in-depth look at the Nintendo 64 copy protection by people who have studied the thing at length, and that appears to be the only reference to illegitimate copy protection chips, it's probably correct to say that there were no unlicensed games with original content, and very few pirated games. Nintendo's approach in the 64 was sufficient in practice.

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    Thanks Tommy, great answer and interesting video. I actually found one made outside of Hong Kong and added an additional answer below.
    – JAL
    Apr 7, 2017 at 17:06

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