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  • Hacker News
  • The page from the magazine: https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/s/3WVUtqH2om
    by HelloUsername
  • At the time, I owned and ran a video game store, and Super Mario 64 was a real watershed moment. Seeing Mario's face deform in real time made a lot of jaws drop.
    by SIMPL_Language
  • I appreciated the detail about the silent work environment, as opposed to today (in the US at least), where if you want silence to concentrate, the burden is on you to defend against noise rather than the other way around
    by olivierestsage
  • > How many people were on the Super Mario 64 team?

    > Probably about 15 people in the end.

    Whoa, a much smaller team than I imagined! It must have been fun working in this group!! The rest of the interview is also cool but was impressed with this small number!!

    by a1o
  • >Giles Goddard (born 30 March 1971) is an English video game programmer. He was one of the first Western employees at Nintendo

    >[Argonaut Games, Giles's first job] produced a 3D graphics demo for the Nintendo Entertainment System and collaborated with Nintendo [0]

    To my uninformed self, this sounds extremely impressive to get a 3D graphics demo on the NES. Oh I would love to see how that looked. All I could find is that it was based on Argonaut's Starglider title from the Amiga [1]

    0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Goddard_(video_game_prog...

    1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20080613053018/http://blametheco...

    by asimovDev
  • > What’s the secret behind that Mario ‘feel’?

    > I think that is fine-tuning. Many, many, many hours and days spent actually sitting down and playing the game.

    Turns out quality takes time. Who would have thought. Very few games reach this level of fine-tuning, because it takes dedication (and budget).

    Funnily, it's almost conflicting with this answer:

    > Was much changed during development?

    > Apart from the number of polygons use, the characters were first-off – once they were designed, they went straight into the game. There wasn’t really a lot of changing, artists just kept supplying stuff that just got put in the game, conveyor-belt style. That was more or less because of a very, very tight deadline – it had to be out right when the N64 came out.

    So it's more nuanced. You fine-tune the fundamentals, but not necessarily everything.

    by Aissen
  • If you are interested in Mario 64 have a look at Kaze Emanuar's YouTube channel.

    https://youtube.com/channel/UCuvSqzfO_LV_QzHdmEj84SQ

    From Wikipedia:

    > Starting from 2022, Emanuar would begin uploading videos discussing Nintendo 64 technical details and optimization techniques,[15] along with outlining Super Mario 64's bugs, technical shortcomings and poorly optimized features, fixing them in the process.[16][17][18][19] He would heavily rework the game's source code in 2024 and use it as a base for his collaborative ROM hack Return to Yoshi's Island, which resulted in increased frame rate and improved graphical fidelity compared to the original game, even when running on the original Nintendo 64.

    by okeuro49
  • I often think about how crazy it must have been to be a game developer around this period. Almost every bit of design, math, coding knowledge was flipped on its head. Overnight developers who were managing relatively simple XY coordinates suddenly had to discover the complexities of 3D rotations, perspective math, and probably more linear algebra than they ever really expected to know.

    It’s even crazier we got masterpieces like Mario 64 so early into the first 3D console generation.

    by deltaburnt

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