ClayFighter: Sculptor’s Cut and Body Harvest Return on N64 Cartridges

A famously scarce Nintendo 64 release is getting a new boxed-cartridge edition. ModRetro has re-released ClayFighter: Sculptor’s Cut alongside Body Harvest, with both games designed to work on the company’s M64 hardware as well as an original Nintendo 64.

The immediate headline is ClayFighter. The game has become an unusually expensive proposition on the vintage market: one copy reportedly sold for $175,000 in 2024, while a cartridge-only copy recently changed hands for $1,700. The new boxed edition is listed at £46/$49, a dramatic difference from those resale figures and a meaningful option for people who simply want to play the game without treating a cartridge like a museum artifact.

Body Harvest carries the same £46/$49 listed price. Its return is less about escaping a single eye-watering resale price and more about restoring an ambitious, oddball N64 game to a format that suits the original platform. Both releases include a full-colour instruction booklet and box; ClayFighter comes on a purple cartridge, while Body Harvest uses red.

Why Sculptor’s Cut became such a costly N64 game

ClayFighter: Sculptor’s Cut is the expanded, definitive edition of ClayFighter 63 1/3, a fighting game built around clay characters and clay-style scenery. Its roster includes the living Statue of Liberty and Earthworm Jim, making the game’s tone every bit as deliberately ridiculous as its title suggests. It is a one-on-one fighting game, meaning players select characters and battle through matches using each fighter’s moves and abilities.

Its price history is tied to how it originally reached players. Sculptor’s Cut was a Blockbuster Video exclusive, which made it substantially less common than a standard, widely distributed retail release. That distribution detail matters: scarcity in the second-hand market is not the same thing as a measure of a game’s quality, importance, or playability. It means fewer original copies are available for collectors and players competing for them.

Over time, a game caught in that situation can become difficult to approach on two fronts. A complete original copy can be too expensive to buy casually, while opening or regularly using one may feel risky to an owner who has paid a premium for condition and completeness. A new cartridge release changes that equation. It gives people a playable, physical version without implying that an original Blockbuster copy has stopped being historically distinct.

That distinction is worth keeping clear. The re-release does not turn the original retail artifact into something else, and it does not make a high-dollar sale a useful benchmark for every copy. Condition, packaging, provenance and demand can all affect collector prices. What it does do is separate the act of playing Sculptor’s Cut from the increasingly costly business of pursuing an original copy.

A physical release for M64 and original N64 owners

Compatibility with both the M64 and the original Nintendo 64 is the practical centerpiece of these editions. For an N64 owner, that means the cartridge format is not confined to a new device. For an M64 owner, it adds another pair of games to a platform positioned around playing N64 software and new or revived cartridge releases.

Cartridges remain a particularly direct format for this kind of revival. There is no suggestion here that owners need a download, a subscription, or a separate modern console version to access the games. Insert the cartridge into compatible hardware and the games are available in the way N64 players expect. The included manuals and boxes also preserve an important part of the period-style package, rather than treating the cartridge as an isolated object.

That presentation will appeal to different audiences for different reasons. Some players want the uncomplicated convenience of an affordable game they can use. Others value having a boxed release that occupies a shelf rather than a digital library. And collectors who already own original editions can view the new run as a play copy, keeping an older item out of routine use. None of those uses requires pretending a modern reissue and an original distribution-era copy are identical.

It is also a useful reminder that retro preservation is not limited to software files. Packaging and printed instructions can explain controls, establish the game’s visual identity, and recreate the physical rituals surrounding older console games. That does not replace the historical significance of original packaging, but it makes the newly manufactured edition feel like a complete product rather than a bare cartridge.

Body Harvest brings a different kind of N64 curiosity back

The second release, Body Harvest, is a 1998 open-world shooting game with an unusually large-scale premise. Players travel through time to stop aliens from finishing a campaign that threatens humanity. Its settings span different countries and periods across the 20th century, and its structure allows players to decide how to explore areas and which objectives to tackle first.

Open-world is a term often used broadly, but the important idea here is player-directed exploration. Rather than moving only through a single fixed path, Body Harvest lets players navigate sizable environments and make choices about their route and order of activities. The game also includes 60 vehicles, covering cars, tanks and planes. Vehicles consequently are not a minor visual flourish; they are part of how players move through and interact with its spaces.

Body Harvest has another point of interest in its development background: it was created by the team that later made Grand Theft Auto III. That does not mean the two games should be treated as interchangeable, nor does it establish any unmentioned shared feature. It does, however, place Body Harvest in an intriguing context for players interested in earlier work from a team that would go on to make one of gaming’s best-known open-world titles.

For N64 fans, that makes this reissue complementary to ClayFighter rather than redundant. ClayFighter is a stylized, character-based fighter whose rarity has dominated discussion around it. Body Harvest is a science-fiction shooter built around time travel, broad environments, vehicles and flexible objective order. One arrives with collector-market notoriety; the other arrives as an opportunity to revisit a game with a notably ambitious design for its platform.

What the reissues change—and what they do not

The major practical change is accessibility. At £46/$49 apiece, these editions offer a clear retail route to two Nintendo 64 games that may otherwise be difficult or costly to obtain in physical form. ClayFighter’s case is especially stark because the market price of an original can overwhelm any reasonable play-first decision.

The releases do not erase the differences that collectors care about. An original Blockbuster-exclusive Sculptor’s Cut remains an original item from that limited distribution history. A newly issued purple cartridge with a new box and booklet is a different edition intended to get the game into more hands. Those facts can coexist without requiring a false choice between preservation and access.

For prospective buyers, the useful question is simple: are you looking for an original-era collectible, or a legitimate new physical way to play on compatible hardware? The new editions appear aimed squarely at the latter, while retaining the tactile details—coloured carts, printed manuals and boxes—that make cartridge collecting and playing appealing in the first place.

There is a broader retro-hardware angle, too. New physical software gives systems and compatible devices a reason to remain active rather than merely decorative. That same impulse can be seen in other attempts to keep older hardware relevant, including efforts to give classic devices a new purpose. In this case, the focus is admirably straightforward: put two N64 games back on cartridges, make them compatible with original hardware, and include the sort of packaging players remember.

ClayFighter: Sculptor’s Cut and Body Harvest are available to order now. For anyone whose interest begins and ends with actually loading an N64 cartridge and playing, that is the significant part of the story: two games once separated from many players by age, scarcity or price now have a new path back to the console.