Why was it so hard for the N64 to do fighters? RPGs I understand,

No audience for them. Nintendo stopped caring about the arcade audience after the NES, so they left to Sega, Sony, NEC, etc.

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If you mean 2D fighters, the N64 wouldn't have have problem doing them, but probably companies saw it as not worth the hassle, since fighting games were decreasing in popularity by the end of the 90s, as well as 2D games in general. Remember, releasing games for N64 was expensive due to carts. If companies were going to release on N64, might as well make it 3D.
Now, in terms of 3D, N64 had a bunch of fighting games, Dark Rift, War Gods, and many others, the problem with these is that the majority were bad, none of them were as good as Tekken 3, or Virtua Fighter 2, but that has more to do with developers, rather than the system. Saturn and PS1 also have their share of shitty 3D fighters, but people remember the good ones only.
There were some odd games that I think were actually good, like Flying Dragon's SD mode, but it's not a traditional fighting game, and it has light RPG elements.
>>4125590
?
SNES was the first system to receive a port of Street Fighter II. Anyway I'd say the world in general stopped caring about arcade gaming during 5th gen, it was the time of the FMVs and cinematic experiences actually getting mainstream after the failures of Mega CD or 3DO's FMV-based games.
I think arcade gaming never really died, most console/japanese games still have arcade DNA in them, and the fighting genre saw a renaissance with SF IV.

um, smash?

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>>4125614
not a "real" fighting game, reee, etc.

>>4125612
Each Nintendo console would progressively get less and less arcade-oriented, first-party-wise. Ocarina of Time and Pokemon killed the Old Nintendo off desu.

>>4125620
I actually consider N64 to have a very strong 1st party arcade-style offer, Wave Race, F-Zero X and 1080 Snowboarding are amazing titles that I would rank up with AM2 games.
And again, I think it wasn't just Nintendo, the industry as a whole changed and left arcade-style games behind.

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>>4125620
ok

>>4125623
and all those midway games too

>>4125636
LMA wasn't actually developed by Nintendo though. Capcom still makes arcade games, but rarely.

Killer Instinct Gold was the shit but yeah that's like the only one I can think of.

>>4125612
Pretty much this. Also fighting games don't really take advantage of the N64's more advanced 3D rendering because the perspective is fixed, don't need to draw big landscapes, etc so there was no incentive for developers to deal with cartridges and make an N64 fighter.