One Hour of N64 Game Facts

the gaming market's transition into 3d was not an immediate steady success there were rough patches along the way in part due to a lack of defined industry standards for 3d game design but these lack of standards also birthed a huge wave of fresh and creative games that defined the second half of the 90s gaming space the n64 was nintendo's big push into this space and although it hugely underperformed compared to sony's playstation it was by no means a complete failure this console with its odd looking controller and minimal third-party support managed to squeeze out some defining classics and hidden gems and after all it's the games that make a system good or not games like the legend of zelda ocarina of time spin-offs like pokemon snap and even third-party titles like dma design's body harvest are all remembered fondly and we'll be talking about these games and a few more in this episode but let's kick off with diddy kong racing for a spin-off game in the donkey kong series diddy kong racing was a surprisingly well made competitive racer but in retrospect one element of the game seems a bit odd what makes the game seem somewhat unusual is its roster of characters diddy banjo conquer and even crunch was a nod to the donkey kong country titles but the rest of the characters that fleshed out the roster were well yeah one of these characters is the fairly forgettable bumper the badger my name's bumper not much information surrounds bumper in the game itself with his character bio being fairly sparse reading unlike most of his kind bumper the badger prefers speed and thrills to a quiet nocturnal lifestyle he gets even more worked up than his friends when he realizes how much racing and excitement will be involved in the crusade to get rid of wiz pig a 2004 public address by rare was written in character from conquer to promote the release of conquer live and reloaded in this address conker makes mention of where characters wound up after the events of diddy kong racing stating it goes without saying that you wouldn't catch me hanging out with any of those freaks these days last i heard at least one of them was in jail anyway while conker never mentioned who this character might be in response to a fan letter in 2012 rare revealed some more information about what happened to bumper and it seems bumper's thrill-seeking attitude may have been seduced by the cheap thrills of crime rare responded to a question from aaron pinky h who asked whether your beloved characters like cameo and banjo go when not used in any games for the next decade is there some kind of nightclub or perhaps a prison cell or are they dead their response was that all these characters are having adventures far too expensive to adapt into games with the exception of bumper the badger who is in jail with that said rare did send out a tweet in 2021 stating that bumper has actually been free for a while now or at least on parole and that he is superficially sorry for all the bad things he did what bumper did to find himself behind bars remains a mystery but based on those cold dead eyes we can only assume the worst speaking of causing mischief mischief makers was a much beloved title on the nintendo 64. while there's a number of games which are known to let players input their age such as with dead or alive most famously where doing so will adjust the game's jiggle physics mischief makers actually have the option but having it serve an entirely different purpose when first starting up the game it will ask the player for an age between 0 and 99 most might assume that this age choice is simply referring to the player's age but it actually uses this input to select the age of the main protagonist marina light years the purpose of this choice isn't very clear during the bulk of the game but it does have a single effect on one frame of the game's true ending if the player sets marina's age to 15 years or younger her true human form will be physically closer to that of a child while if her age is set to 16 years or older her true human form will be closer to that of an adult it's unclear why the developers would put effort into a feature that only affects a single frame of the game but there you go another cult title was body harvest which came from the team at rockstar before the team at rockstar would become known as the team at rockstar everyone over at the then named dma design were super enthusiastic about the n64 and most of all working with nintendo the studio's previous publisher cygnosis didn't show much interest in dma's games but nintendo frequently directed them to make major changes to body harvest's gameplay and visual style in order to improve its chances on the market while everyone had a huge amount of respect for each other and wanted an open conversation about how to improve the game the language barrier between the japanese publisher and british developer made implementing these changes difficult as the devs sometimes struggled to understand what nintendo wanted from them one developer cited an example where nintendo told dma to make the game's graphics more materialistic dma's head david jones described their relationship with nintendo saying it's a very hard relationship because their quality is so high that it's so hard to match the quality of the products they do and they really want you to focus on making nintendo products it's very hard to write games that you're not writing for yourself which is traditionally what i've done and basically we just have to listen to them because we're not as good as they are nobody in the world is as good as they are so we'd be daft to try and say we think you're wrong so we just have to work with them and we implement everything that they ask for the two companies would ultimately drift apart and dma became rockstar north part of the rockstar games label one more highly respected n64 title not made by nintendo themselves came from rare blast core it wasn't just things like camera controls that became an issue with the budding 3d developers when producing games for this new console when developing blast core the team worked hard to make sure the game didn't face any performance issues as a result of topping out the nintendo 64's graphical capabilities so they chose to set a polygon limit for character models in the game this limit helped to ensure that gameplay remains smooth however while creating the thunder fist robots model rare managed to accidentally go over their self-imposed limit as a means of trying to reduce the amount of polygons the robot would use the dev simply removed one of the robot's arms resulting in the character's design changing into something a bit more unique few other devs have realized that an easy way to reduce the polygon count is simply by maiming their characters pokemon snap is arguably one of the franchise's most popular spin-off titles taking away the typical enslavement and battle mechanics of pokemon and instead putting the player behind a lens while the player might not take on an active role of pummeling pokemon or rather commanding other pokemon to do so they're given a variety of tools which can either elevate the creature's mood or frankly piss them off it's your mission to take great photos but in doing so nintendo gave the player an option of throwing a pester ball at pokemon to spur on some more irritated expressions or behaviors while this is of course a work of fiction the idea of hurling noxious purple gas with the sole intent of pestering the creatures whilst they enjoy their natural habitat does seem a little unusual for the pokemon series as a result when it came time for the game's sequel these balls were removed as well as the apple which was replaced with a fluff root new pokemon snaps director haruki suzaki stated the pester ball was an important element to bring out pokemon's reaction in the nintendo 64 pokemon snap so we decided to add the role of the pester ball to the fluff fruit in new pokemon snap even though fluff root doesn't hurt when it hits a pokemon it makes sense that some pokemon don't like being hit by fluff root so we designed the item to leave it up to players whether they place it near a pokemon or throw it at a pokemon so it seems developers were still all for pissing pokemon off a bit but they prefer being a bit more tactful about it as we mentioned at the start of this video the n64 was a new adventure for nintendo and having to start developing games in 3d was no small task plenty of new complications come along with the addition of the third dimension and so it was important during development to have a greater understanding of what mistakes had been made what's interesting however is that a debugging tool which shows more information on why a game has crashed or encountered an error is actually still present in the final retail copy of zelda after the game crashes for whatever reason inputting a series of button combinations will result in information being thrown up on screen about the game and the environment that was present at the time of crashing an odd curiosity can be seen from ocarina's debug menu however where the game's version information doesn't simply contain the version information but also an additional message of seemingly no purpose i love you i mean we aren't complaining about being told that at least something in the world loves us but we didn't exactly think it would be a copy of ocarina of time that would show us more love than our parents did today we're taking a look at some trivia for several nintendo 64 games and what better way to kick off the video than with some secrets from a few of the n64's most beloved titles the original mario party trilogy all three titles have one peculiar unused scenario that can still be found in their data and even put back into the game using game shark codes the scenario in question is an unused instance of there being no mini-game to play if there isn't a mini-game to play when a character's turn ends the panel behind their icon and stats will turn yellow and a large no game graphic will pop up on screen the game will continue to the next round completely skipping the mini-game segment however if it's the last round of the game a large game over graphic will pop up on screen instead and the game will end as it normally would this data is still within mario party 2 and 3 and can also be triggered with game shot codes but it acts a little differently the scenario plays out the same way but the graphic for no game doesn't appear if it's the last turn of the game not only will no game over graphic appear but the game actually continues onto a new round that shouldn't exist for example turn 20 of a 20 turn game will become turn 21 mario party 3 also has another interesting secret under normal conditions when starting the game for the first time all characters are unlocked from the offset this is despite the fact that the back of mario party 3's game box alludes to how players can even unlock new characters in the one player challenge something which is just entirely not true what's interesting is that should the game be forced into the main menu with an unutilized save which means the player has managed to bypass the game's attempt to load any sort of save file data both waluigi and daisy will be unselectable during a match setup not only this but they'll appear as otherwise unused question mark icons furthermore from within the game's debug settings menu it's possible to enable the characters making it clear that the intention was for both of these characters to initially be unlockable rather than playable from the offset it's likely that this idea was dropped fairly late during development as it was used as an advertisable feature on the game's box one of the big reasons that the n64 is so fondly remembered today is because of rare and the games they created we all know that rare made great n64 titles like conker's bad fur day perfect dark and banjo-kazooie and that rare owned the rights to all of these franchises but this wasn't always the case unlike conquer and perfect dark rare actually created the banjo franchise for nintendo this means banjo-kazooie was a first-party nintendo ip as shown by this trademark approved in may 1997 for banjo-kazooie showing that the owner was nintendo of america inc and not rare nintendo owned the franchise for five whole years until 2002 when ownership of the ip was transferred from nintendo to rare this lines up with the microsoft acquisition of rare which was likely linked to nintendo giving the franchise rights back to rare and in some ways this news is a bit surprising considering what red did with the ip especially in the sequel with some of the humor not exactly being family friendly in banjo-tooie there's an extremely rare chance for a slightly dirty bit of humor to make an appearance inside grunty industries whilst progressing to the worker quarter of the facility there is a 1 in 1 000 or perhaps an even slimmer chance of a rare event occurring involving a spotlight emitting from the inside of a restroom if the player gets close it's possible to hear one of the building's worker rabbits having what can only be assumed to be a rather intense bout with either constipation or the runs another beloved rare creation is diddy kong and the characters n64 title diddy kong racing but before trying their hand at a karting title rare were actually trying to make a real-time strategy game and after some experimentation ended up throwing in the towel rare's lee musgrave told nintendo life just before diddy kong racing there was a month's worth of work on a strategy game that i did with chris stamper but that was in the style of command and conquer and not related i rendered a few catapults but other than that it didn't go anywhere and died after a month we had a go at it but in the end it looked like the racing game had more legs musgrave stamper and a few other developers set their sights on a racing game they called wild cartoon kingdom this game actually drew a lot of inspiration from disneyland including the park's layout and attractions after a lot of trial and error the team implemented an adventure mode similar to that in the final diddy kong racing before the game's title was changed to adventure races it would then be reworked into the less fantasy inspired pro-am 64 and reworked yet again into diddy kong racing while working on diddy kong racing rare also had the chance to create what would later become one of the most highly praised person shooters for home consoles goldeneye 007 the game wound up having some alterations made to avoid comparisons to real world events that occurred when asked by censored gaming about why the hunting knife isn't in the final japanese game martin hollis the game's director revealed more details about why the weapon was removed from the japanese localization he stated that it was related to the kobe child murders a horrific incident in japan which involved both child murder and knife attacks in order to not upset japanese players it was decided that the knife should simply be removed from the game entirely this decision also carried over to the japanese localization of perfect dark which is a sort of spiritual successor to goldeneye perfect dark's combat knife isn't usable in the japanese game presumably for the same reason perfect arc had a few more alterations made though this was after its release and even long after the n64 had been discontinued with perfect dark's xbox live arcade iteration the n-bomb weapon had its name changed to the n-grenade it's generally agreed that the reason behind this change must have been because the term n-bomb is almost exclusively used in modern times to refer to someone using a racial slur from one way of causing offense to another this time with konami's mystical ninja starring goemon some changes had to be made with the game's script during localization with the japanese version of the game having a fair few instances where characters refer to the flake gang and peach mountain shoguns using the term okama a homophobic and transphobic slur within the japanese language depending on the context the word is considered to be derogatory and refers to not just gay men but transgender women male crossdressers or just effeminate men the members of the in-game organizations are all men who dress or act in a flamboyantly effeminate manner when the game was localized to the english language all instances of the word okama were either completely removed or replaced with a phrase that's frankly no more accepting the rather detrimental term weirdo while most of the games we've mentioned so far have been well received one game we want to talk about wasn't so highly praised wwf no mercy suffered from a notorious issue involving a massive memory glitch which would result in the player's save data being deleted randomly at any time the issue wound up being fixed with the release of a second edition of the game which customers could request to replace their old copies though this new version came with its own caveats in pal regions for some reason when creating this new release it was decided that wrestlers would no longer be able to bleed though animations were left intact what is also strange is that despite the characters not being able to shed blood first blood match types still remained in the game from a cut to an addition when resident evil 2 was ported to the n64 it included 16 new in-game documents known as the x-files not only were these documents a sly reference to the popular sci-fi show x-files they serve to expand the lore of the franchise and tie resident evil 1 3 and code veronica together however two of these x-files incorporate something else two non-canon audio dramas released exclusively in japan the files robert's note and op instructions acknowledge places and events from both the little runaway sherry and the female spy ada lives dramas these audio dramas were released in march and april 1999. about six months before the n64 ports debut or in other words they were probably in production before the x-files were even considered for the port another thing worth noting is that the file chris's report roughly summarizes the plot of resident evil 1 including key story elements and plot twists since the first resident evil never released on the n64 this entry basically spoiled the story of the first game for any player that only had a nintendo 64 and might want to go back and play it did you know the nintendo 64 had over 350 officially licensed games during the console's lifespan while games like super mario 64 and the legend of zelda ocarina of time remain revered classics today some games aren't so fondly remembered it may surprise you that a lot of poorly received titles had an interesting production and in many cases a game's lack of quality or polish wasn't the fault of the developers time constraints budget cuts last minute changes and even meddling from out-of-touch executives can all profoundly impact a game's production today we'll be looking at some of these titles to see what went wrong and where possible talk to the developers who worked on them when talking about n64 games that received little praise there's one title that sticks out among the rest superman the new superman adventures better known as superman 64 has the distinction of being rated the worst n64 game by numerous outlets and is perhaps one of the worst games of all time the man of steel flew onto the n64 to poor reviews with fans criticizing the controls level design and presence of numerous glitches that held the game back the title was largely based on the tv show superman the animated series as a tv tie-in it seemed like a lucrative endeavor for developers titus interactive as well as license holders warner brothers titus already had experience with game development and at this point had made a few n64 games so what went wrong eric khan one of the founders of titus originally approached warner brothers licensing to get the rights to superman shortly after making a deal warner brothers licensing staff was shuffled around and friction between titus and warner brothers began to heat up the original plan was for titus to release an n64 playstation 1 and a game boy game based on superman the animated series the game boy version was completed in a short time but the n64 game is where the situation got complicated originally eric khan and his team wanted to make a game that resembled tomb raider where players would control superman in an action-adventure title involving some real-time strategy the game would be open world and let superman fly fight and include all his superpowers despite these goals the team quickly ran into the limitations of the n64 and had issues realizing their scope the technical limitations weren't the only thing holding them back however warner brothers made increasingly drastic requests which hindered development the licensing team wanted the game to resemble sim city and have superman be the mayor of metropolis khan fought back against these demands later saying the mayor idea was pathetic the micromanagement from warner brothers licensing continued to hold back development with warner brothers and dc comics questioning khan and his team's vision for the game at every step the team at titus had to fight for basic functions with warner brothers refusing to sign off on ideas like superman being able to swim and would use superman comics to back up their points titus at one point even made parts of the game destructible but dc was against the idea of superman destroying things in the environment as quote superman could not act like a bad person the playstation version was nixed by warner brothers despite being 90 percent complete in late 2020 a prototype of the ps1 build would be unofficially published online eric khan maintains that the primary reason he and his team had so many issues was that a new team had taken over at warner brothers licensing and these new hires thought a bigger company like ea would make a better game so they held titus back as much as possible to kill the project the next n64 title may have gotten bad reviews but some versions of it are highly prized clay fighter sculptors cut is sought after by video game collectors and often sells for over 2 000 us dollars at auction the title was released as a rental only game at blockbuster in the us making it difficult to find these days especially in mint condition what some casual fans might not realize is that sculptor's cut was actually based on clay fighter 63 and a third a title that then ign writer matt casamasino stated would remain a prominent title for n64 libraries for years to come because it's so terrible it sets the standard for bad play fighter 63 and a third certainly didn't live up to the hype and left some fans disappointed as it fell behind the standard of the first two games clay fighter and clay fighter 2 judgment clay were both released for the snes penned as parodies of street fighter the games were well received and sold well so it only made sense for interplay productions to release a new version on nintendo's next generation console the nintendo 64. founded in 1983 interplay had many successful games under their belt before tackling clayfighter 63 and a third the studio developed the earthworm gym series the bard's tale and had lucrative projects like mario teaches typing and several star trek titles despite their successes in 1998 interplay was nearing bankruptcy while interplay's money issues would only come to light after clay fighter 63 and a third's release it might have caused management to rush clayfighter's development we talked to didier malinfent one of the game's programmers to get more info malinfant was brought on board in december 1996 in the middle of clayfighter's development he told us he was originally brought on to port the game to the playstation as interplay had plans for a dual release in the end however they decided to axe the ps1 port interplay originally hoped this new clay fighter would be a 3do m2 title before they shifted focus to the nintendo 64. but this was a small blessing as the team had issues working on the m2 and welcomed the change to nintendo's new console scheduling became something that management focused on and to remain on time they pulled their resources into the main platform the n64 while malinfent didn't know the exact reason why the playstation port was cancelled over the n64 port if he had to guess it was because the n64 was the newer platform and there might have been more potential for sales interplay had published carmageddon developed by stainless games for the n64 a couple of months before clayfighter but clay fighter was fully developed in-house at interplay meaning it was also the team's first real experience with the hardware clayfighter 63 and a third continued the series stop motion technology for its graphics and brought in an all-star cast to voice the game's fighters dan castellaneta best known for his role as homer simpson would voice a few of the game's characters and michael buffer would be the announcer malinfent also told us that fitting all of the game's data onto a cartridge was a struggle and this led to several characters being cut from the roster while some of these characters would be brought back for sculptors cut other fighters were not so lucky speaking of games with an adult sense of humor south park rally and south park chef's love shack were both released for the n64 to fairly negative reviews especially compared to other versions of these games on competing consoles acclaim studios published both titles with tantalus interactive developing rally and acclaim studios austin developing chef's love shack these games which came out earlier in south park's run seemed like love letters to fans they both had a plethora of references and featured the voice talents from the show however they also had extremely rushed developments with some characters being cut from rally and the amount of content in chef's love shack being noticeably low compared to other quiz titles of the era chef's love shaq on n64 in particular cut out audio such as when chef reads questions and had some lengthy load times so what went wrong with these two titles well matt stone and trey parker addressed the less than favorable southpaw games on the official south park blog in 2001. matt stone stated the claim did such a good job of the games that now no one is really that interested in the license i will say this trey and i had little to nothing to do with the first games and if we do another video game it will be r-rated we wanted to do that in the first place but everyone said it was impossible now everyone is doing adult-themed games trey parker would have similar comments as well one developer joked to den of geek that chef's love shack was the highest quality you could get with only five months of development time rally was also developed in a huge time crunch with only seven months being spent on every version of the game it seems that the reason for the poor quality of the first few south park titles could be boiled down to a couple of points the lack of editorial supervision from the original creators and acclaimed studios rushing out the games for some quick cash now that we've experienced the stick of truth and the fractured butthole it's hard to see these early south park games as anything other than wasted potential mortal kombat mythologies sub-zero was a 1997 action-adventure rpg spin-off released for the original playstation n64 and surprisingly tiger electronics the game was intended to be a full sub-series but due to its critical reception midway and avalanche studios abandoned plans to continue it in theory the title sounds great expand the deep lore of mortal kombat while providing midway an opportunity to break into the side-scrolling beat-em-up genre the spin-off would also use live-action full-motion video and featured the actual fighting actors from the game to show the console's capabilities over the arcade cabinet there was a lot of care put into the title story as john tobias the co-creator of modern combat headed the project new characters like quan chi would be explored in the title creating a richer storytelling experience that wasn't doable in a traditional arcade title however when it came time to bring their vision to the n64 the team ran into issues due to the cart size the live action cutscenes one of the biggest marketing points for the game had to be replaced with still images and text this was due to issues fitting all the movie data into the somewhat restrictive n64 cards in the end the title was just too ambitious and the team was too inexperienced with the beat-em-up genre the devs wanted to include mortal kombat's fighting system in a side scroller which sounds good on paper but had issues with implementation the team opted to stay faithful to mortal kombat's fighting game style which meant they needed a button to turn around as the directional inputs would also be used for moves as you might expect this made the controls very awkward the rpg system also felt tacked on and the levels suffered from poor design and a serious lack of polish we tracked down tab mock 99 a long-standing member of the mortal kombat community who gave us additional insight into the development process during mythology's production the mortal kombat team was apparently spread too thin ed boon the other co-creator of the series was absent from mythologies altogether as he was busy working on the next main installment in the series mortal kombat 4. according to tab mach 99 mythologies was midway's first venture into a proper console title previously games were ported to the console after the devs finished making the arcade game the team's inexperience with the hardware led to some difficulty as levels and power-ups were cut what's worse is that despite the scope of the project the team was small and spent just 14 months in development there were five artists two programmers and a single sound designer the team was also trying to work on multiple ports of mythologies at the same time including one that was cut only a single page from a dutch magazine exists of the cancelled pc port mortal kombat mythology sub-zero would prove to be so disastrous for avalanche software that midway stopped using the team for mortal kombat titles and the mythology sub series was scrapped all together avalanche studios would continue to produce rampage titles for midway but after two titles the studio would produce licensed titles almost exclusively in 2005 disney interactive studios acquired the company and avalanche studios has produced disney titles since then in 2020 it was revealed they will be the primary studio developing a new harry potter title hogwarts legacy another title that isn't so well remembered was monster truck madness 64. released in 1999 the title was largely based on the pc game monster truck madness 2. the n64 title was co-published by two unexpected partners on a nintendo platform rockstar games and microsoft the game's production was ambitious aiming to add more courses more trucks including a tie-in with world championship wrestling various weather and lighting conditions like fog and night courses side modes and more content from the first monster truck madness despite the high hopes from rockstar and microsoft the n64 port fell flat in gamespot's review of the title writer nelson tarik said playing monster truck madness 64 is like driving a lemon you really want to get somewhere with it but something short breakdown along the way and scored the game a 3.9 out of 10. critics generally complained about the difficult single player campaign and the game's controls the n64 version has elements that align it more with an arcade racer such as items while also trying to be a simulated monster truck experience the balance of realism and franticness was difficult for the developers at edge of reality to achieve not only this but monster truck madness 64 was the team's first n64 port and they were unfamiliar with the system we got in touch with mike paniff the game's lead programmer and producer and asked him what challenges the team faced panoff told us that monster truck madness 64 was actually edge of reality's first project ever not only were they porting the game at this time but they were also setting up all the structures for the company proper while stretched thin the team quickly ran into the technical limitations of the nintendo 64. while monster truck madness 2 ran well on pcs the team discovered that making it work on the n64's 4 megabytes of ram and on an 8 megabyte cartridge was a tall order edge of reality was also building their own engine which was difficult that same engine would later be used in other titles such as the n64 ports of tony hawk's pro skater from their experience with monster truck madness 64 the team was able to improve the engine and deliver higher quality titles on the n64 panoff told us we had to sacrifice visual fidelity to make it work however we were able to add some cool features like 4 controller multiplayer and some mini games panoff wishes that edge of reality had more time for polish but says that he enjoyed making and playing the title another car based game carmageddon 64 is possibly the worst reviewed nintendo 64 title we're talking about today karmic edom was a series produced by stainless games and published by interplay which we touched on earlier in the video the series has some inspiration from the mad max franchise and even planned on using the license unfortunately the team was unable to find who owned the license and settled on death race 2000. the first car again was a success and work began on a sequel very quickly carmageddon 2 was released for the pc and interplay wanted to release a version on the n64 however interplay was going through several changes at the time and was bought by titus interactive titus wanting to get a return on their investment decided to rush carmageddon 64 out the door in an interview producer ben gunstone stated that getting karmageddon 64 working on the nintendo 64 was a real challenge he later said the biggest challenge was getting carmageddon 64 out on time and within budget the game also had to be changed in numerous regions due to the violent nature of the title pedestrians that could be run over were changed to zombies and in germany they were even changed to dinosaurs the result was a mess ign gave the title a 1.3 out of 10 and declared that it was even worse than superman 64. reviewers also said that carmageddon 64 featured terrible audio and sound design unresponsive controls and terrible visuals which made the game virtually unplayable all because titus interactive wanted to make a quick buck did you know many classic nintendo 64 titles were originally very different to what gamers ultimately got their hands on though some n64 games only had minor alterations in gameplay and visuals as is the case with titles like super mario 64 and ocarina of time some other games on the system would completely switch genre or even end up with an entirely different cast of characters in this video we're showcasing some of the most interesting and drastic examples of nintendo 64 games that completely changed from concept to final product so let's kick things off with a title from one of the most important developers on the platform british developer rare is behind some of the most iconic and well-regarded games on the n64 including the third best-selling title on the system goldeneye 007. interestingly enough goldeneye didn't start as an n64 game at all in early 1994 rare co-founder tim stamper and designer greg males arrived at a golden eye press conference at leesden studio in london the two came to the set to meet with the film's art director andrew aclan snow and discuss an official tie-in game they were making for the super nintendo as reported in nintendo power magazine rare had just begun working on a side-scrolling snes prototype around february we don't know much about the snes version of goldeneye what it looked like how it played or if it even started full development however it's a safe bet that it would have been very different from the released version directed by martin hollis having an interest in video games since the days of the bbc microcomputer hollis applied for a job at rare in 1993. his first role at the company was as the junior programmer on the arcade version of killer instinct which was a one-year project by fewer than 10 people following the completion of killer instinct in march 1994 hollis began tinkering with the new sgi workstations and wondered what he could do next the snes007 project had peated out by this point and hollis asked tim stamper if he could direct a new goldeneye game for the ultra 64. stamper said yes and work began in early 1995 with a small team of hollis programmer mark edmonds an artist carl hilton and b jones the original nine page document for the game envisioned the title as an on-rail shooter alas sega's virtua cop except in this case there was no light gun at a certain point early on the team decided to do both an fps mode and an on-rail shooter mode in addition to virtua cop the team took heavy influence from doom plus john woo action flicks like hard-boiled according to martin hollis in a 2007 interview with gamer sutra golden eye was intended as a launch title for the n64 in conjunction with the film's november 1995 release but this did not go as planned the n64 got delayed in north america until april 1996 due to the chipsets still being finalized and major concerns about software quality making matters worse the small team working on goldeneye repeatedly missed their deadlines the first year was spent creating an engine and designing art assets with more staff being added later to help move development along david doke who assisted with ai scripting and the overall design was the first new hire junior members such as doke helped give the game a slightly new vision adding more of a mario 64 influence rather than virtual cop elements such as the multiplayer mode added six months before release were being done as development sped up goldeneye's multiplayer mode originally had x-bond actors like sean connery and roger moore a choice nintendo's legal team was not a fan of much to the team's dismay it had to be removed the legal team did not appreciate the use of real world gun names insisting that every gun be renamed by rare the clob perhaps the most infamous gun in the game was named in honor of nintendo producer ken lob who worked with martin hollis years back on killer instinct goldeneye 007 would release in august 1997 roughly 22 months after the film it was based on transitioning from an snes game to an on-rail shooter and eventually taking the form we know today released in north america in early 2001 the original paper mario is widely considered one of the greatest rpgs if not the greatest on the n64 part of the game's appeal had to do with its unique and timeless storybook art style which combined 3d and 2d elements onto a single screen but believe it or not the game wasn't always going to look this way according to a year 2000 interview with nintendo technical support hiroya sasano developers intelligent systems spent close to a year and a half trying out different characters and aesthetics at one point the team tried using polygons via silicon graphics technology but scrapped it as they worried the style would overlap the zelda n64 games they also tested pre-rendered graphics in the style of the original super mario rpg but this quickly got scrapped as well on march 5th 1997 artist naohiko ayama proposed a new art direction utilizing a single rough piece of concept art he had created a simplistic 3d world with paper-thin 2d sprites the team approved the idea and it stuck for the rest of the development it was decided early on that the game should be less of a sequel to super mario rpg legend of the seven stars and more of its own thing despite this the game was previewed as super mario rpg ii as late as the nintendo spacewalk presentation in august 1999. the name super mario adventure was also used for a moment according to a report by a nintendo power source as for the game's badge mechanic the team did not want the plumber to use actual weapons so they opted to use an analogous customization system instead a few batches got scrapped during development one example was the power of rage badge which put mario into a berserk state with an extremely high power level in that same 2000 interview intelligent systems director ryoto kawade remarked for some reason power of rage made him turn green when he was berserk the programmer who created it was a luigi fan and i guess the idea was that if mario became luigi it could be very dangerous but the n64 was popular for more than just its first and second party titles not much is known about the first version of bomberman hero the oft-forgotten entry in hudsonsoft's strategic and literally explosive series of titles surprisingly the first version of the game did not feature bomberman at all instead starring bonk or genjin the caveman kid from hudson's 16-bit side scrollers ia studio a machida based studio founded in july 1990 was contacted to help develop this ultra genjin game ia had previously worked on the bonk games for the turbo graphics 16 snes and nes so the decision to bring them on board made perfect sense production began in june 1995 and ended after just six months according to ia studio planner shoichi yoshikawa in an interview with crv of game developer research institute the team was inexperienced in creating 3d platformers and struggled with turning the 2d elements of bonk into 3d the video game industry was transitioning fast and hudson and ia were having trouble adapting although ultra genshin got scrapped the design lived on in the form of bomberman hero released years later in 1998 with some of the bonk dna still intact the development of nintendo's offbeat pokemon spin-off pokemon snap is a strange one as it started life as an entirely original game franchise in october 2010 nintendo published an iwata asks regarding the then newly released kirby's epic yarn for nintendo wii the interview discussed the initial version of epic yarn pitched in nintendo which starred an original character named prince fluff who ended up in a supporting role in the final game the interview takes a quick shift as satoru awata relates this change to pokemon snap a game that some key epic yarn staff were a part of iwata said originally pokemon snap for the nintendo 64 system was not a pokemon game but rather a normal game in which you took photos but the motivation for playing the game was not clear it took three and a half years until the completion and release of pokemon snap in early 1995 iwata shigeru miyamoto and shigeseto itoi began assembling the jack and the beanstalk team a group of japanese developers outside of nintendo who could make ultra 64 games with new and unique approaches the trio realized that some japanese development houses provided miserable conditions and poor outlooks leaving many talented designers and programmers stuck in a rut but jack and beans could get these struggling developers out of their current positions and into a better job the first day of jack and beans was on august 20th 1995 on the second floor of nintendo's tokyo office dubbed the table tennis room yoichi yamamoto would serve as director and the group began working on a photography game starring original characters designed by team member shizu higashiyama it's unknown what these characters looked like as they didn't stay in the game for very long according to owata jack and beans had trouble figuring out what players would enjoy taking pictures of so they made a somewhat forced switch around 1996 replacing the original characters with ones from nintendo's new sleeper hit pokemon snap was first developed for the nintendo 64 disc drive the japanese only add-on for the n64 however due to long delays caused by poor n64 sales jack and beans jumped ship and moved over to the regular n64 in addition at least two stages would not make it into the final cut of the game a safari level featuring the unused 64th pokemon ekans and a haunted stage presumably featuring ghost pokemon such as ghastly haunter and gengar the german edition of pokemon snap official strategy guide gives us a small glimpse of what could have been revealing concept art for both levels not seen in other guides in 1999 jack and bean's composer ikuko mimori released two unused tracks from the haunted stage proving that the level got far enough to have music composed for it the music you are hearing right now is one of those tracks which mimore curiously lists on her website as a tune for the boss of a stage that was cut for various reasons keep in mind that in the final release of pokemon snap there are no proper bosses as of the writing of this video this is the only evidence we have that they were ever planned for pokemon snap shortly after finishing donkey kong country 2 circa october 1995 the game's team at rare split off into two half started on the third entry in the franchise starring dixie and kiddie kong the other began on a top secret action rpg game planned as rare's greatest snes game known as project dream or dream land of giants the title was made by a 10-man group led by co-founder tim stamper the game was kept secret during its early stages but the known staff includes designer greg males programmers will bryan paul makacek chris sutherland artists ed bryan and steve males writer lee loveday and composers david wise and grant kirkhope project dream starred edson a misfit child in a fairy tale world entangled in a web of pirates in search of building a flying pirate ship on his journey edson discovers dinger a snarky dog sidekick that helps the player dig out hidden items the snes version of project dream was a side scrolling game that took influence from japanese rpgs and lucasarts point-and-click adventure titles such as monkey island however realizing that the project was too ambitious rare decided to move dream to the n64 after just a few months of work in a june 2016 interview with official xbox magazine chris sutherland recalls the conversion process saying rare's first approach was to create flat sprites which were pre-rendered which looked fine as long as you were going in a straight line but as soon as you went in 3d it didn't work project dream was more limited 3d so it would tend to be viewed from above for say a troll race that you're running around in or maybe you're falling down a cavern but there were certain sections where you're moving sideways that were tricky because as soon as you started to tilt the camera around the sprites started to all interweave with each other and didn't quite work we realized that the right thing to do was to move to 3d although we had a lot fewer polygons we could still imbue some character into the characters in the world even though that left us with a much smaller polygon count it was still a lot of learning because we didn't know how to do cameras it's fine when you've got a 2d camera we knew what we were doing there as we'd just done a whole series of games with it but 3d was a whole new world for us project dream was now on the n64 the game took a top down route rather than isometric and the fairy tale setting was replaced with more pirates according to greg males this was done to make it less childish and give the game a broader appeal sadly the ambitiousness of the title came with some problems project dream used an elaborate floor system that stretched the polygons into previously impossible landscapes however due to the n64 hardware limitations the system struggled to run at an acceptable frame rate in addition work on the recently started conker's bad fur day then known as 12 tails conker 64 made rare realize that the tried and true mario 64 route was the way to go rpgs were not the answer despite multiple playable prototypes getting made with over 100 tracks composed for them project dream was being redone from the ground up the first step was to remove the character of edson as tim stamper believed he was just too generic at first the team used a rabbit character that ran on two feet this concept only lasted for a few days before being scrapped greg males recalls the rabbit looking like a man in a suit another character a big skater inspired bear with a magic backpack designed by tim stamper was met with a much better response rare immediately fell in love with the bear and decided to make him the new star of the game here was the creation of banjo banjo sidekick kazooie was implemented a little later as rare needed something to justify banjo's double jump animation at first a pair of wings sprouted from his backpack which didn't make sense within one week the first level of banjo-kazooie was made and it took another 16 months for the game to be complete banjo-kazooie was released in june 1998 and became the 10th best-selling title on the n64 in may 2015 tim stamper began posting old game material on his brand new twitter account among the tweets was an ongoing thread teasing at the idea of a project dream prototype for the snes believed to be the only one still in existence on july 25th stamper posted a single image of the game's title screen proof that his prototype still worked it was soon donated to microsoft where footage of the game was shown on rare's youtube channel the current whereabouts of the prototype are unknown another rare title that was significantly changed was diddy kong racing at least four other versions of the game existed before diddy was even attached after killer instinct 2 got released in the arcade in february 1996 the development team split off to work on two n64 games simultaneously half started on the upgraded console port killer instinct gold the other began on a real-time strategy game similar to the command and conquer series the game starring a caveman traveling through time was conceived by a group of four rob harrison and co-founder chris stamper on programming lee musgrave on art lee schuneman on design this idea did not last long the rts concept got scrapped after a month and only a few 3d renders done by musgrave such as a few catapults and a woolly mammoth were done shortly after the team experimented on a fun racer a super mario kart inspired by the adventure elements of walt disney world going under the name a wild cartoon kingdom the racing game reused 3d assets from the rts prototype musgrave's woolly mammoth render was now riding in a tiny star-spangled moped two more characters a donkey and a crab were also included much like the production of goldeneye more hires from rare helped bring things up to speed wild cartoon kingdom got renamed to the much blunter title adventure races and once again to pro-am 64. a reference to rare's 1988 nes game rc pro-am this version of the game had tricycle style vehicles and starred a new character named timber the tiger it went relatively far into production and in june 1997 a playable demo was privately shown to shigeru miyamoto at e3 miyamoto was impressed with rare's work and offered the company a nintendo ip to use for the game's characters and setting while picking donkey kong was tempting rare chose to focus the game on diddy kong as the character was their creation a choice which again impressed nintendo the development team initially hated the idea but eventually accepted it as diddy's inclusion would help boost marketing keep in mind that until this moment nintendo had no involvement in the project whatsoever in a 2014 interview with nintendo life lee musgrave said nintendo enjoyed the fact that we chose diddy kong over donkey kong i think that it was us trying to build on the fact that diddy was ours and donkey kong was theirs diddy kong racing would release in november 1997 worldwide in addition to diddy kong several familiar faces would make an appearance banjo from banjo-kazooie and conker from conker's bad fur day made their respective cameos timber the tiger the scrap star of pro-am 64 remained playable but got pushed off as a side character and the nameless woolly mammoth created by musgrave back during the rts prototype became taj de genie and their patriotic moped became tarja's magic carpet cheating is pretty great really we all have some fond memories of cheating in games and some of us did it on the n64 too with a little help from the game shark and we're talking about real cheating not just trying to use warps in the race with cooper the quick in super mario 64 and being told off or trying to warp around hyrule in ocarina of time to beat the bigger on sword quest and getting your time cut down to seconds no we're talking about the hard codes gameshark built-in cheat codes hacking the real deal the kind of cheats that make you feel like a genius until ultimately you realize the only thing you were cheating was yourself or in the case of some of these n64 classics the game will straight up tell you itself well perhaps not quite so bluntly is that but we will be looking at some fun trivia surrounding cheats on the n64 which either directly discourage the player from cheating or restricts them for doing the dirty the n64 was awesome and its games were awesome too titles like well essentially the entire rare catalogue let's be honest uh but there were more games on the console than those of course like star wars rogue squadron battle tanks and the turok franchise but rare really did blow everything out of the water with their slick sense of humor and hardcore game development chops we'll start off with one punishment for cheating that was particularly harsh with some consequences being quite permanent donkey kong 64 was an incredible game when it was released bringing the collect-a-thon sub-genre to its logical conclusion but just because a game is good doesn't mean people won't want to cheat in it this seems particularly true with platformer games where young hands may not be able to dextrously perform acrobatics like an ape in the trees one way you might make progress in such a situation is to remove one of the challenges that prevents progress like the entire health system by giving yourself infinite health you'd think that it'd be smooth sailing to get to the end of dk's adventure but let us assure you this is not the case if playing the game with the assistance of a game shark device to enable infinite health everything will be fine until the player attempts to reload the game without the cheat enabled if this is done then the player will find themselves in for a world of chaos the entire game may become corrupted so while it might continue to boot and play it will not be a fun experience characters may fly around the screen vigorously vibrating on the spot arms gesticulating in all manner of disturbing ways this is the lightest of the problems however as the game auto saves regularly which is a bigger problem than it may initially seem many players have reported that these glitchy effects only exist in the save file currently being used but become permanent as soon as the game is saved and with the game auto saving practically every minute this is a surefire way to ruin a save file that said some players have reported that these issues corrupted their entire cartridge and persist even after deleting the save if this is true it means that the entire cartridge is practically unsalvageable especially when other glitches that result from using the cheat are dying in a single hit or being completely unable to pick up items rendering the game an unplayable mess we actually think that this was not an intended result of punishing cheaters from rare but rather a result of the cheat device screwing with the game's code just a bit too much and then the auto save feature making the results permanent but we suppose only the game's programmers will know for certain something that rare very much did intend for however was the mature nature of one of their other titles conker's bad fur day if a developer wants you to know that they don't approve of your cheating habits they don't need to brick your game to do so they can just tell you directly for example there is a full cheat code entry screen within conker's bad fur day but that isn't to say the team wants you to use it to its fullest they will in fact tell you they don't want you to sometimes when the player enters this menu the imp that makes quips as you type will make fun of you saying it back using cheats is one thing but making a mistake is another if an incorrect code is entered the player will be told that somebody must have given them the wrong cheat code somebody told you the wrong key but if the wrong code is entered for a second time then the demon will take a more aggressive approach and say work first time ain't gonna work second time dick we're pretty sure calling players a qualifies as a punishment so there it is rare would often acknowledge their players choice to cheat and with that would try to discourage the behavior so their games could be enjoyed as intended though obviously with rare having implemented the cheats in the first place gameshark notwithstanding it wasn't as though the team never wanted anybody using cheats it's just they don't want people fronting for doing so in games like goldeneye 007 cheats had to be unlocked by performing well in a level but the game would also restrict progress if the player made use of cheats in the campaign as if the player completes a level while the cheat is active neither additional cheats nor the next level will unlock however as an odd side effect of this broadly implemented restriction this included cheats which would actually make the game harder despite giving themselves a handicap using any cheat that made a level harder would still result in no reward perfect dark on the other hand while having the same requirements to unlock cheats was a bit more direct in telling the player they aren't all that when completing a mission with sheets enabled the player's mission status and agent status will display cheated and dishonored respectively as opposed to complete and active if the player finished a level legitimately speaking of first person shooters though we're gonna move away from rare another game which also withheld rewards from players who used cheats was the second churrock entry one of the most simple cheats a player can use in a chapter or stage based game is the good old classic level skip cheat this was a blessing in the age of impossibly difficult titles which had no means of retaining progress but in turok 2 using it would mean you weren't going to get to see the true reward the game's best ending churok 2 had two different endings depending on the player's performance towards the end of the game but if they had used cheats at any stage to get here they won't be able to see the best ending of the game only the bad ending turok 3 also had an anti-cheat measure but took a bit of a different approach if players used cheats they would actually have an additional message at the end of its credit sequence after the final cut scene of the game that is revealed post credits text will appear which reads you finished but you cheated activating cheats can sometimes have consequences as a result of exactly what you ask for battle tanks is a game which entails exactly what you might expect you are battling and you are a tanks the title has a number of cheats for the player to take advantage of such as the most universal cheat of all time infinite health however if the player makes use of this cheat they may find themselves in a situation that the developers might have just never considered or if they did it's a pretty devilish way of punishing the player the campaign mode of the game cannot be completed if the player has infinite health as they will find themselves enjoying the pleasures of a bonus stage at some point which involves surviving for as long as possible while destroying as many enemy tanks as you can before you yourself are destroyed so as you might have guessed because the player has infinite health they will of course never be destroyed as the player is unable to turn cheats off mid game there is no way of getting past any bonus stages while the cheat is active meaning that in this case a simple cheat will soft block the whole game do you remember the beginning of the video where we said we wouldn't be talking about simple shortcut style cheats well i lied rogue squadron doesn't punish the player for using cheat codes but if you take a shortcut which is clearly visible on a map that is unacceptable behavior it deserves criticism in fact which is exactly what the game does during the beggars canyon race the announcer will notice if the player takes a sneaky shortcut across the course and will state that someone's cheating out there we're gonna have to start this race over the number one rule of cheating in a game of course is that if nobody sees you do it nobody has to know if the player attempts to make this quick skip in a more stealthy fashion sticking low to the third dune as you pass over and being as quick as you can be the game will not restart the race perhaps the announcer just didn't spot the faux pas so this is one case where cheating well actually makes a difference going back to rare because rare apparently made 80 of all noteworthy n64 games it seems and one of their most popular franchises of all time banjo-kazooie has perhaps the most definitely intended fully divulged and harshest anti-cheat punishments in this video in the game's original release on the n64 if three or more secret codes are used to unlock levels at treasure trove cove grunty will be most perturbed and will erase the player's entire save file bottles does warn the player ahead of time that this would happen however but even then seems a bit much this mechanic in the game is known as grunty's code vengeance and will only work with codes not given to the player in game like the ones to provide infinite power-ups remove objects transform the player etc etc in the xbox live arcade release of the game this mechanic wound up being disabled but that doesn't mean that there is no punishment for the crime at all instead of deleting the player's save after three codes are entered the game will just disable the player from saving the game after even just one code has been entered as well as disabling achievements and leaderboards there's a similar reaction to entering codes in the xbox version of banjo-tooie as well which had no punishment in the original nintendo 64 release though this makes sense as most modern titles will disable features like achievements if the player uses cheats did you also know that there was a full-on pokemon game on game boy that never left japan or that link's awakening was originally developed in secret for a whole bunch of game boy game facts check out the video on screen [Music]

Channel: DYKG Clips

Views: 190,888

Keywords: nintendo 64, n64, nintendo, nintendo 64 games, n64 games, super mario 64, mario 64, super mario, mario, the legend of zelda, zelda, ocarina of time, oot, diddy kong racing, banjo-kazooie, banjo kazooie, rare, rareware

Id: JVTBF2cKvUw

Length: 64min 35sec (3875 seconds)

Published: Thu May 26 2022