Comment by CoryOndrejka
5 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.
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.
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
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!
Comments like this are why I just love Hacker News
Massive fan, would love to hear some details about the culture in the office at that time!
> Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug that made it really tricky to use.
What was the bug?