> Starting from 2022, Emanuar would begin uploading videos discussing Nintendo 64 technical details and optimization techniques,[15] along with outlining Super Mario 64's bugs, technical shortcomings and poorly optimized features, fixing them in the process.[16][17][18][19] He would heavily rework the game's source code in 2024 and use it as a base for his collaborative ROM hack Return to Yoshi's Island, which resulted in increased frame rate and improved graphical fidelity compared to the original game, even when running on the original Nintendo 64.
I often think about how crazy it must have been to be a game developer around this period. Almost every bit of design, math, coding knowledge was flipped on its head. Overnight developers who were managing relatively simple XY coordinates suddenly had to discover the complexities of 3D rotations, perspective math, and probably more linear algebra than they ever really expected to know.
It’s even crazier we got masterpieces like Mario 64 so early into the first 3D console generation.
Doom had been a few years before but what Mario 64 really bought to the table was a super intuitive analogue control stick rather than tank controls and tons and tons of polish
Yeah I meant less that 3D games were invented out of nowhere when the PS1 or N64 released. It's more that a large majority of developers, especially ones on console, were thrust from 2D to 3D development.
> I think that is fine-tuning. Many, many, many hours and days spent actually sitting down and playing the game.
Turns out quality takes time. Who would have thought. Very few games reach this level of fine-tuning, because it takes dedication (and budget).
Funnily, it's almost conflicting with this answer:
> Was much changed during development?
> Apart from the number of polygons use, the characters were first-off – once they were designed, they went straight into the game. There wasn’t really a lot of changing, artists just kept supplying stuff that just got put in the game, conveyor-belt style. That was more or less because of a very, very tight deadline – it had to be out right when the N64 came out.
So it's more nuanced. You fine-tune the fundamentals, but not necessarily everything.
Yes, fine tune the fundamentals of "is this thing fun to control". Content is a separate thing which I personally think is where a lot of modern games have gone wrong.
Nintendo are known for developing prototypes to figure out what is fun. Unlike modern "implement the design doc" process. There's a YouTube interview with someone from retro studios who explains this, Nintendo weren't interested in their design docs for metroid. I am hopeful remembering this correctly.
I haven't read this Goddard interview yet, but he was responsible for one of the best games of all time, 1080 snowboarding! What is completely bananas is that him and his mate ended up working at Nintendo and showing them how to do 3d graphics when they were teenagers.
The invested time consistently into the things that were important to improve. If the art was good as-is (and it was), they didn’t waste time “perfecting” it further.
But as long as the gameplay itself still felt fuzzy or like there was friction, they spent time improving it up until their deadline. This was not a lack of project management, this was project management actually done well, for once.
In fact they accidentally optimized Super Mario 64 around its debug-mode performance, and shipped the game in that state, with debug symbols and everything. But they could get away with that because the game they shipped still landed in the performance budget they needed for the gameplay they were after.
> How many people were on the Super Mario 64 team?
> Probably about 15 people in the end.
Whoa, a much smaller team than I imagined! It must have been fun working in this group!! The rest of the interview is also cool but was impressed with this small number!!
It's incredible how small the teams were on some of Nintendo's best games.
Ocarina of Time & Majora's Mask were 40-50 people. If you look at the credits for modern games, they scroll for minutes at light speed. The entire credits are ~100 people on those games.
I appreciated the detail about the silent work environment, as opposed to today (in the US at least), where if you want silence to concentrate, the burden is on you to defend against noise rather than the other way around
Proponents of in-office working and open plan talk about the benefits of spontaneous conversations. For me I find I just can’t get anything done in these environments and I prefer much more deliberate communication. I wonder what the situation is like in tech companies in Japan today?
>Giles Goddard (born 30 March 1971) is an English video game programmer. He was one of the first Western employees at Nintendo
>[Argonaut Games, Giles's first job] produced a 3D graphics demo for the Nintendo Entertainment System and collaborated with Nintendo [0]
To my uninformed self, this sounds extremely impressive to get a 3D graphics demo on the NES. Oh I would love to see how that looked. All I could find is that it was based on Argonaut's Starglider title from the Amiga [1]
Based on that, I believe Giles is mistaken in the Eurogamer interview cited by Wikipedia. The demo was on Gameboy, not NES. The also-linked NintendoLife article also mentions the demo was on the Gameboy. But I guess maybe that's actually more impressive!
Hadn't heard about that before. Argonaut and Nintendo also co-developed a 3D game called "X" on the Game Boy, that might give us an idea of how it could've looked.
N64 and the Wii follow ups actually are one of the few consoles linage, that after the move to C/C++ SDKs, that actually has a quite visible OpenGL influence, including the shaders.
99% of the game is concerned with [Mario's movement]. most of Miyamoto’s time is spent on that, and the movement of the camera.
I had to put down too many early 3D action games because of clunky controls and not being able to see what was going on. Maybe horror games (like resident evil) could get away with awkward cameras in the service of jump scares, but it's frustrating when you have to make a jump and the camera, and thus the controls, don't cooperate with you.
Miyamoto's talent has always been in his relentless technical execution and polish. Particularly with the move to 3D, every modern platformer and adventure game owes its basic camera and control to Mario 64. Every modern action game owes its lock-on system (the ability to target individual enemies and move/strafe in relation to the target) to the Z-targeting system from Zelda: OoT.
In hindsight, the movement in the early Tomb Raider games was really awkward. It didn't feel very human... it felt like an endless loop of rotating a circular tray then putting your foot on the gas.
Late Mark Haigh-Hutchinson wrote a great book about real time game cameras "Real Time Cameras: A Guide for Game Designers and Developers". Anyone interested in the topic ought to check it out.
One thing he doesn't mention explicitly is that someone working on Mario 64 invented modern third-person controls for games with free camera. Games which started development before Mario 64 came out, had "tank controls" where the movement was relative to the direction the player character was facing.
In Super Mario 64 this was different: pressing "up" on the controller didn't let Mario walk forward from his own perspective; rather, it made him walk in the direction the camera was currently facing. Basically every third-person game today now uses the Mario 64 control scheme.
It is interesting that another game which had a similarly huge influence on character controls was also a Mario game: Super Mario Bros for the NES. It introduced character acceleration, dynamic jump length based on character speed, dynamic jump-height based on how long the jump button is held, and character steering in the air. Basically every 2D platformer uses this control scheme to this day. Games before that had fixed jump arcs and fixed running speed.
https://youtube.com/channel/UCuvSqzfO_LV_QzHdmEj84SQ
From Wikipedia:
> Starting from 2022, Emanuar would begin uploading videos discussing Nintendo 64 technical details and optimization techniques,[15] along with outlining Super Mario 64's bugs, technical shortcomings and poorly optimized features, fixing them in the process.[16][17][18][19] He would heavily rework the game's source code in 2024 and use it as a base for his collaborative ROM hack Return to Yoshi's Island, which resulted in increased frame rate and improved graphical fidelity compared to the original game, even when running on the original Nintendo 64.
It’s even crazier we got masterpieces like Mario 64 so early into the first 3D console generation.
> I think that is fine-tuning. Many, many, many hours and days spent actually sitting down and playing the game.
Turns out quality takes time. Who would have thought. Very few games reach this level of fine-tuning, because it takes dedication (and budget).
Funnily, it's almost conflicting with this answer:
> Was much changed during development?
> Apart from the number of polygons use, the characters were first-off – once they were designed, they went straight into the game. There wasn’t really a lot of changing, artists just kept supplying stuff that just got put in the game, conveyor-belt style. That was more or less because of a very, very tight deadline – it had to be out right when the N64 came out.
So it's more nuanced. You fine-tune the fundamentals, but not necessarily everything.
Nintendo are known for developing prototypes to figure out what is fun. Unlike modern "implement the design doc" process. There's a YouTube interview with someone from retro studios who explains this, Nintendo weren't interested in their design docs for metroid. I am hopeful remembering this correctly.
I haven't read this Goddard interview yet, but he was responsible for one of the best games of all time, 1080 snowboarding! What is completely bananas is that him and his mate ended up working at Nintendo and showing them how to do 3d graphics when they were teenagers.
The invested time consistently into the things that were important to improve. If the art was good as-is (and it was), they didn’t waste time “perfecting” it further.
But as long as the gameplay itself still felt fuzzy or like there was friction, they spent time improving it up until their deadline. This was not a lack of project management, this was project management actually done well, for once.
In fact they accidentally optimized Super Mario 64 around its debug-mode performance, and shipped the game in that state, with debug symbols and everything. But they could get away with that because the game they shipped still landed in the performance budget they needed for the gameplay they were after.
> Probably about 15 people in the end.
Whoa, a much smaller team than I imagined! It must have been fun working in this group!! The rest of the interview is also cool but was impressed with this small number!!
Ocarina of Time & Majora's Mask were 40-50 people. If you look at the credits for modern games, they scroll for minutes at light speed. The entire credits are ~100 people on those games.
>[Argonaut Games, Giles's first job] produced a 3D graphics demo for the Nintendo Entertainment System and collaborated with Nintendo [0]
To my uninformed self, this sounds extremely impressive to get a 3D graphics demo on the NES. Oh I would love to see how that looked. All I could find is that it was based on Argonaut's Starglider title from the Amiga [1]
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Goddard_(video_game_prog...
1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20080613053018/http://blametheco...
https://gamehistory.org/eclipse-the-demo-that-sold-3d-to-nin...
Based on that, I believe Giles is mistaken in the Eurogamer interview cited by Wikipedia. The demo was on Gameboy, not NES. The also-linked NintendoLife article also mentions the demo was on the Gameboy. But I guess maybe that's actually more impressive!
Due to its SGI influence.
I had to put down too many early 3D action games because of clunky controls and not being able to see what was going on. Maybe horror games (like resident evil) could get away with awkward cameras in the service of jump scares, but it's frustrating when you have to make a jump and the camera, and thus the controls, don't cooperate with you.
In Super Mario 64 this was different: pressing "up" on the controller didn't let Mario walk forward from his own perspective; rather, it made him walk in the direction the camera was currently facing. Basically every third-person game today now uses the Mario 64 control scheme.
It is interesting that another game which had a similarly huge influence on character controls was also a Mario game: Super Mario Bros for the NES. It introduced character acceleration, dynamic jump length based on character speed, dynamic jump-height based on how long the jump button is held, and character steering in the air. Basically every 2D platformer uses this control scheme to this day. Games before that had fixed jump arcs and fixed running speed.