Comment by CoryOndrejka
7 hours ago
Very cool. In 1998 (oof) we built Road Rash 64 which was accidentally open world -- even though you had race on a particular road, with a start and finish line, you could drive anywhere, see traffic all over the map, jump off of mountains, etc. The r4k plus reality coprocessor was quite potent -- we got to over 750k shaded triangles per second in optimized testing -- though finicky because you had to manage audio during vblank, etc. Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug that made it really tricky to use.
if you were on the development team of that game I send my biggest thanks out to you. it was one of the few things me and my (hard to bond with) father bonded over growing up. We would play I think ..course 2 or 3 with the insanity level bikes ALL night trying to get out times down to something like 1 1/2 minutes. within ms of each other's times. run after run. so thanks.
Thank you! I’m cracking up because that’s something we all did while building it, too. It’s part of how the insanity bikes ended up so hilariously overpowered.
Road Rash 64 is a really underrated game. As you say, the environment is alive, and nearly every race has a lot of potential for wacky slapstick fun. The driving feels really nice and is rewarding to learn.
Thank you! We had an absolute blast building it and we just kept playing it. I need to look up the full unlock cheat code.
There is a nice video by Kaze Emanuar demonstrating N64 easily pushing 300k shaded triangles per second without special optimizations in a game engine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC_jLsxZ7nw
Comments like this are why I just love Hacker News
I just loved road rash, I had the demo version initially, I used to call it demo rash. Once in a race I accidentally jumped on a building, it was first open world experience for me!
The THQ testers figured out you could launch bikes out to the sailboats, too
> Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug that made it really tricky to use.
What was the bug?
Well, in deeply technical terms, it didn’t work at all and just had like one setting that almost worked. The hardware engineers working on the ASIC tried to slam it in at the last minute and they almost pulled it off. Except the didn’t.
Aaah, the worst kind of bug. The "better to have just not bothered" kind.
Massive fan, would love to hear some details about the culture in the office at that time!
We were subleasing from 3Dfx at the time, working on JetMoto, RR64, and Nuke Strike at the same time. It was old school game development — dumb hours, too much coffee, grabbing tubes of Oreos from the 3Dfx micro kitchen, late night In N’ Out runs for animal style and fries well done. Mix of ex-EA, ex-arcade, and all of us thinking how smart we were to not be leaving games to go to Internet startups. Oops.