Chapter 1
London Gatwick Airport, September 1998
Tim Stamper was not a happy man at this point. Stuck in customs with the only development kit in Europe for Nintendo's next-generation console, the N2000, known internally at Nintendo as the Dolphin, Tim was stuck while the customs inspectors tried to assess the value of the one-of-a-kind machine. The ink had barely dried between Nintendo, IBM and Silicon-Valley graphics startup ArtX, and this beige box was the earliest prototype of what the N2000 machine that was tentatively planned for an October 2000 release in Japan.
After what seemed like hours of back and forth between Tim Stamper and customs, he had somehow managed to convince them that it was a worthless non-working PC, and sent him on his way.
One of the most well-known studios that was making games for the Nintendo 64, Rare sat in a small village called Twycross. They first rose to prominence for making one of the most visually gorgeous games for the SNES, Donkey Kong Country as well as the arcade fighting game Killer Instinct. More recently, however, they had produced a first-person shooter for the N64 called Goldeneye 007, which, along with Half-Life on the PC had redefined the first person shooter genre.
More recently, however, Rare had shipped a game called Banjo Kazooie, the platformer starred a bear named Banjo and a bird named Kazooie who rode around in a backpack on Banjo's back. Perfect Dark, a sci-fi themed followup to Goldeneye had been supposed to ship that year, however, schedule slip and a frankly unrealistic timetable set by marketing had caused them to miss that release date.
This year, Rare was pushing hard to get the 3D follow-up to Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong 64, out the door, as well as the Third-Person Shooter Jet Force Gemini, and platformer Twelve Tales: Conker 64, who's lead character had made his debut 2 years ago in Diddy Kong Racing. Further down the road was the adventure games Dinosaur Planet and still in the early conceptual phase was Kameo: Elements of Power.
Walking in to Rare's offices with the priceless hardware, Tim Stamper took the opportunity to walk around the different development barns. Perfect Dark was slated for a winter release next year, but the ambitious project had already slipped on its release date once, it could easily happen again. Jet Force Gemini was on-track as well. Twelve Tales though... Conker's first appearance had been criticized for being too similar to Banjo and Mario, and the game was put on the back burner to be retooled after Donkey Kong 64 shipped.
Checking in on the Donkey Kong 64 barn, Tim Stamper was met by Chris Marlow, a programmer at Rare.
"I finally fucking did it Tim." Grinned Chris. "I fixed that memory expander bug." [1] This bug had recently cropped up for the DK64 team, for whatever reason, if the game was played on a console without the Expansion Pak, the game would lock up and crash and random times, Tim and Chris Stamper had even considered eating the cost and shipping an expansion pack with every copy of game. "There was an occlusion culling bug in the RSP stack that were causing memory leaks."
Tim was relieved this bug had been caught. Low-level bugs like this were hideously difficult to solve since they could manifest randomly or in different ways, so solving this was a huge relief for the Donkey Kong team.
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- Geocities fansite, circa 1999
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Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Retro Gaming Megathread: Finding new and exciting ways to electrocute ourselves.
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Unseen64 - Beta, Unreleased, and Cancelled Games
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1: This is the POD: IOTL they were never able to fix this bug, forcing them to ship it with the expansion pack, which nintendo's marketing spun as the game being so big it could only be played with the expansion pack.
Tim Stamper was not a happy man at this point. Stuck in customs with the only development kit in Europe for Nintendo's next-generation console, the N2000, known internally at Nintendo as the Dolphin, Tim was stuck while the customs inspectors tried to assess the value of the one-of-a-kind machine. The ink had barely dried between Nintendo, IBM and Silicon-Valley graphics startup ArtX, and this beige box was the earliest prototype of what the N2000 machine that was tentatively planned for an October 2000 release in Japan.
After what seemed like hours of back and forth between Tim Stamper and customs, he had somehow managed to convince them that it was a worthless non-working PC, and sent him on his way.
One of the most well-known studios that was making games for the Nintendo 64, Rare sat in a small village called Twycross. They first rose to prominence for making one of the most visually gorgeous games for the SNES, Donkey Kong Country as well as the arcade fighting game Killer Instinct. More recently, however, they had produced a first-person shooter for the N64 called Goldeneye 007, which, along with Half-Life on the PC had redefined the first person shooter genre.
More recently, however, Rare had shipped a game called Banjo Kazooie, the platformer starred a bear named Banjo and a bird named Kazooie who rode around in a backpack on Banjo's back. Perfect Dark, a sci-fi themed followup to Goldeneye had been supposed to ship that year, however, schedule slip and a frankly unrealistic timetable set by marketing had caused them to miss that release date.
This year, Rare was pushing hard to get the 3D follow-up to Donkey Kong Country, Donkey Kong 64, out the door, as well as the Third-Person Shooter Jet Force Gemini, and platformer Twelve Tales: Conker 64, who's lead character had made his debut 2 years ago in Diddy Kong Racing. Further down the road was the adventure games Dinosaur Planet and still in the early conceptual phase was Kameo: Elements of Power.
Walking in to Rare's offices with the priceless hardware, Tim Stamper took the opportunity to walk around the different development barns. Perfect Dark was slated for a winter release next year, but the ambitious project had already slipped on its release date once, it could easily happen again. Jet Force Gemini was on-track as well. Twelve Tales though... Conker's first appearance had been criticized for being too similar to Banjo and Mario, and the game was put on the back burner to be retooled after Donkey Kong 64 shipped.
Checking in on the Donkey Kong 64 barn, Tim Stamper was met by Chris Marlow, a programmer at Rare.
"I finally fucking did it Tim." Grinned Chris. "I fixed that memory expander bug." [1] This bug had recently cropped up for the DK64 team, for whatever reason, if the game was played on a console without the Expansion Pak, the game would lock up and crash and random times, Tim and Chris Stamper had even considered eating the cost and shipping an expansion pack with every copy of game. "There was an occlusion culling bug in the RSP stack that were causing memory leaks."
Tim was relieved this bug had been caught. Low-level bugs like this were hideously difficult to solve since they could manifest randomly or in different ways, so solving this was a huge relief for the Donkey Kong team.
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Nintendo Prepares for its Fiercest Battle
Sony's Playstation came out of nowhere and basically stole the video game market with nary a true competitor in sight. If Nintendo wants its market back, it needs to make some dramatic changes to the way it does business. Though Sega fired the first shot in the upcoming next generation console wars with Dreamcast, Sony's PS2 announcement was a bombshell. What's Nintendo's next move?
If the rumored Game Boy connectivity turns out to be real, we could see the N2000 using the Game Boy Color as a way of continuing your game on the go. Play one level on the N2000, save it to your GBC, continue the game there, bring it back to the gamecube to pick up where you left off from the GBC. The other possibility is just to provide some extra information, like showing the dungeon map in a Zelda game orbiting able to pick football plays on the game boy screen without anybody seeing it.
"So, we’re recognizing that we can’t just do a certain genre of games," Howard Lincoln stated in an interview. It's about damn time they realized this. Nintendo alienated older gamers with an opening lineup of N64 games geared mainly toward the young. Although they've worked hard to fix their skewed targeting, N64 will ultimately forever remembered as being more the child's toy than the Playstation. Part of Playstation's success can be attributed to its being marketed toward a more adolescent and adult audience. With darker, more mature games and a strong line of sports titles, Sony captured the attention of gamers 18 years and older while Nintendo chased 6-12 year-olds.
Sony's Playstation came out of nowhere and basically stole the video game market with nary a true competitor in sight. If Nintendo wants its market back, it needs to make some dramatic changes to the way it does business. Though Sega fired the first shot in the upcoming next generation console wars with Dreamcast, Sony's PS2 announcement was a bombshell. What's Nintendo's next move?
If the rumored Game Boy connectivity turns out to be real, we could see the N2000 using the Game Boy Color as a way of continuing your game on the go. Play one level on the N2000, save it to your GBC, continue the game there, bring it back to the gamecube to pick up where you left off from the GBC. The other possibility is just to provide some extra information, like showing the dungeon map in a Zelda game orbiting able to pick football plays on the game boy screen without anybody seeing it.
"So, we’re recognizing that we can’t just do a certain genre of games," Howard Lincoln stated in an interview. It's about damn time they realized this. Nintendo alienated older gamers with an opening lineup of N64 games geared mainly toward the young. Although they've worked hard to fix their skewed targeting, N64 will ultimately forever remembered as being more the child's toy than the Playstation. Part of Playstation's success can be attributed to its being marketed toward a more adolescent and adult audience. With darker, more mature games and a strong line of sports titles, Sony captured the attention of gamers 18 years and older while Nintendo chased 6-12 year-olds.
- Geocities fansite, circa 1999
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Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Retro Gaming Megathread: Finding new and exciting ways to electrocute ourselves.
My Uncle Who Works at Nintendo Posted:
I wouldn't worry too much about the expansion pack, the only game that actually requires it is Majora's Mask, and that game out pretty much at the end of the N64's lifecycle. It makes some games look nice, but for most of them, the difference between the two is pretty much unnoticeable.
I wouldn't worry too much about the expansion pack, the only game that actually requires it is Majora's Mask, and that game out pretty much at the end of the N64's lifecycle. It makes some games look nice, but for most of them, the difference between the two is pretty much unnoticeable.
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Unseen64 - Beta, Unreleased, and Cancelled Games
Perfect Dark [N64 – Cancelled]
Perfect Dark was originally slated to be released on the N64 in the fall of 1998, and then the fall of 1999, before it because a Gamecube launch title. This delayed it AGAIN when the Gamecube slipped from a fall 2000 release that would have been able to compete with the PS2's launch, to a 2001 launch competing head to head with Microsoft's Xbox.
Martin Hollis, the director of GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, described the development of the game in an interview with Retro Gamer magazine. He explained that Rare rejected the prospect of working on the GoldenEye sequel Tomorrow Never Dies “without hesitation”, as the development team felt they had spent too much time immersed in the James Bond universe.
One of Hollis' goals for the game was to make the difference between light and dark a significant feature of the gameplay, and the title was intended to reflect this focus. Steve Ellis (responsible for much of the multiplayer mode in GoldenEye) had even managed to implement a flashlight into the game.
Looking at the gameplay videos of the cancelled N64 version, the framerate regularly dips into the single digits, compared to what we got on the Gamecube, it hardly looks like the same game.
Perfect Dark was originally slated to be released on the N64 in the fall of 1998, and then the fall of 1999, before it because a Gamecube launch title. This delayed it AGAIN when the Gamecube slipped from a fall 2000 release that would have been able to compete with the PS2's launch, to a 2001 launch competing head to head with Microsoft's Xbox.
Martin Hollis, the director of GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark, described the development of the game in an interview with Retro Gamer magazine. He explained that Rare rejected the prospect of working on the GoldenEye sequel Tomorrow Never Dies “without hesitation”, as the development team felt they had spent too much time immersed in the James Bond universe.
One of Hollis' goals for the game was to make the difference between light and dark a significant feature of the gameplay, and the title was intended to reflect this focus. Steve Ellis (responsible for much of the multiplayer mode in GoldenEye) had even managed to implement a flashlight into the game.
Looking at the gameplay videos of the cancelled N64 version, the framerate regularly dips into the single digits, compared to what we got on the Gamecube, it hardly looks like the same game.
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1: This is the POD: IOTL they were never able to fix this bug, forcing them to ship it with the expansion pack, which nintendo's marketing spun as the game being so big it could only be played with the expansion pack.
