Games That Push the Limits of The Nintendo 64

In perfect dark you can shoot out the lights and it affects enemy behavior. Even today most games don't do that.

No Wave Race? The water effects in that game were truly amazing.

I make video games for a living (R&D programmer at tri-Ace, senior graphics programmer at Square Enix, GPU performance engineer at Apple Inc.) and I have a lot of friends from Rare. I was speaking to Graham Smith, who was a Rare programmer from the days of Diddy Kong Racing up until the end of Perfect Dark, and he told me what he did to really optimize the graphics (of Perfect Dark), and it’s something that even Nintendo didn’t know. The game was not originally running at anywhere near a decent FPS, even with every other trick and optimization they were pulling out of their hats, so he did a deep dive and found that the RSP command lists were all firing at once and starving each other of resources. Not just CPU resources but resource access etc. He looked to see if there was a way to insert a stall/wait command at the front of command lists to get them to run in specific sequences and he found it! His work in allowing the command lists to execute mostly sequentially rather than all at once is the only reason Perfect Dark was able to get above 20-25 FPS (maybe it was even down to 15 most of the time; it’s been a while since he told me this story). He shared this detail with Nintendo and it seems even they didn’t know about this. Here’s another tidbit from a programmer on Chrono Trigger for Super Nintendo Entertainment System. I used to do language exchanges with the programmer of the opening clock in Chrono Trigger and he told me a lot about his work in the game. In particular, he had to make the bike race completely branchless in order to fit within the frame budget. Yep, for all the bike controls, enemy AI, contact physics, etc., there is not an “if” statement in sight!

With regards to lights, a lot of N64 games do use a form pre-built lighting: it's baked into the vertex colours. By this, I mean that every point on a 3D model can be assigned a colour value, which then smoothly combines with the assigned texture to tint it. It's not as sharp as burning these effects directly into textures but, considering the blurriness of the graphics, it looks fine on the N64. This technique is also very handy for getting around the memory limitations of the hardware (both the system itself and the cartridge): games like Goldeneye would use greyscale textures for a lot of surfaces and then add colour using the vertices, as black and white textures take up less space (one channel of data rather than 3 - red, green, and blue).

Digital Foundry has a video on Resident Evil 2 on the N64 for their DF Retro series. It's absolutely fascinating how they managed to compress a game that clocks in at 600MB (the devs said they could've fit everything on a single CD if they weren't pressed for time.) into a 64MB cartridge.

2:07 Notice how the car's wheels and grill aren't rendered if they are occluded by the rest of the car. It's that kind of detailed optimization which really shows how dedicated they were to pushing the hardware to its absolute limit.

The Leslie Nielsen-sounding voice actor from Infernal Machine is Douglas Lee. He also voiced Indy for Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992 PC)

"realistic locations" He says as he immediately enters a cave full of 20 foot tall glowing crystals with a road in it.

16:59 omg that speech about the lava gets sampled by Boards of Canada on the track Dandelion

Such a fascinating era for games! Really amazing the difference between N64's first and last games. And it was fun to grow up in the thick of it =D

f-zero is fascinating, because it's a glimpse into what the world of gaming could have looked like if developers had prioritized FPS just like the 8 & 16 bit generations. sure, it's incredibly simple, but I think there's a certain charm to it. it's funny because I actually think the framerate & minimalist art direction makes it one of the best aged games on the console.

Great video! But why isn't Conker's BFD on this list? That game I think absolutely pushed the N64 to its limits as well as being a great swansong title to a great console. It's got high-res textures (well, for an N64 title anyway), full voice acting clip on every single character who can talk, high-poly character models (especially on Conker the main character), great lighting effects all around here and there, and a sh*ton more. But most important of all, it's a fantastic game made by Rareware.

One of the most impressive aspects of all Factor 5 games is the audio. They developed their own audio middleware, MusyX, for the N64 that was also used in Resident Evil 2 for the N64. The N64 had no audio hardware, so audio really taxed the system. The higher quality and more channels used the more resources it took. Somehow MusyX used fewer resources and also compress the audio files to not take up too much space in a cart. Eventually they ported the MusyX middleware to the GBA and GameCube.

turoc 3 was really surprising. the character models in the real time cut scenes are kind of insane for n64 with mouths that were convincingly animated.

There is another game that also significantly pushed the limits of the N64's hardware. One that featured incredible draw distance, ambient texture mapping and hours of spoken dialogue with moving speech patterns for each character's mouth. Acclaim Studios - Teeside "Shadow Man," which ran on the more powerful 'Vista' engine. Showcasing massive environments without the use of fog, it also supported the expansion pack for hi-res textures. Acclaim gave tons of support to the N64 and deserve the recognition, not just Rare.

Rares Jet Force Gemini and Conkers BFD are absolute stunners too.

Hey, thanks for the mention of the technological marvel Nuclear Strike 64. It's so cool that you recognized just how much was going on per-frame in that game, like the fact that the entire landscape is a gigantic unique texture projected over the kilometers of terrain or that every vehicle on-screen was texture mapped, too. Also, if you had the expansion pack, you could use it to up the resolution to 640x480 or run it the way I liked, which was in the normal res of 320x240 but at 60fps. Anyway, thanks for the shout out and your recognition. ;)

Great examples, but to me World Driver Championship is a much more impressive racing game on the N64 than Beetle Adventure Racing. It has really great visuals, runs smoothly with barely any fog or pop up, offers High Resolution modes without the Expansion pack that still run smooth and on the Audio side it has things like Doppler Effects that where very rare on the N64. The whole package really looks and feels more like a very early PS2 game than a N64 one. BTW, I loved the wireframe scene you showed for Beetle Adventure Racing, never expected that it stops rendering whatever front tire you can´t see anyway, always assumed that the player car is always rendered in it´s entirety in those games.

Again very well done. The N64 is one of my favorite consoles and a big reason why I am a retro gamer today. Thanks for showing Indiana Jones some love. I don't think that game gets enough attention. It was even better than the PC port of the game. Turok 3 is another game that really pushes the system. In some places, it almost looks like an early Gamecube or Xbox game. Keep up the great work!

I really love this sort of videos because it really gives you ideas for creatively overcoming limitations when developing your own games. Even if they're not the same limitations, it just inspires that kind of clever thinking.