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Comment by pupppet | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder if the original devs ever find these videos and are like oh shit we should've done that.

It would certainly be interesting to see their reaction.

Mario 64 is a bit of a worst case as the game was being developed at the same time as the hardware and had to get out on day one no matter what. Between the Japanese and US releases I believe they even fixed some bugs.

Some of the things he did seem quite obvious, like cutting down the repeated calculations for every single coin on the screen. You have to think they would’ve thought of that if they have the time.

It would be interesting to see a series like this on a number of games over the console’s lifetime. Especially if it highlighted the tips and tricks the developers started to learn to get more out of the hardware over time.

> You have to think they would’ve thought of that if they have the time.

Stuck forever in the issue tracker as "priority: low"

Can't even imagine being a dev back when you only had one shot at your game going gold and couldn't update it after the fact to patch bugs.

Tbh it made things much riskier for the game companies, but a lot better for the players.

For example: It was almost impossible to profit on the “make a killer trailer, presell, then deliver junk and ‘patch it later’” model that’s unfortunately popular these days.

These days, I see this as a subsidy for us older folks who wait a few years to buy a game. The clueless pre-order folks are funding my gaming experience!

The subreddit /r/patientgamers [0] is exactly about this philosophy. Games get simultaneously better and cheaper over time and all I need to do is wait? Sign me up.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/

Eh, its just the agile development process coming to gaming. Deliver the minimum viable product, work out which parts of the game people care about most, and perfect those bits. Rather than trying to guess what the market wants and spending the entire budget before the game actually gets real usage. If you just wait 6 months after release you end up with a better product than if the game just came out 6 months later.

There's definitely a balance. Yes, they needed to test their games a lot more, but no amount of testing will equal millions of people trying all sorts of weird things you would've never thought about. That being said, games have been also getting a lot more complex in multiple ways. Lastly, PC games also have to deal with an exponential number of hardware variations that is very hard to test exhaustively in house.

At launch, yes. But revisions were quite commonly slipped into newer production runs in a general industry sense.

Speedrunners famously need to hunt down first press cartridges on the US release because the Shindou release fixed the bug that allows BLJs (backwards long jumps).

This explains a lot for me; since I kept trying to achieve a BLJ but for whatever reason I couldn't.

Now, years later, you comment explains a lot O_O

it's worth noting that the virtual console (wii, wii u) releases are built off of the original nstc edition, meaning backwards long jumping is in play. but the most recent 3d all stars edition is based off of shindou, meaning blj's are not possible.

One thing mentioned in the video is his memory tricks require the RAM expansion module. Mario 64 being a launch title couldn't have used the RAM expansion. The RAM module came out two years after the console launched if I remember right.

The vast majority of what he does is a combination of benefitting from hindsight with 30 years of industry learned best practices, a vastly superior development environment (including compiler), and just having the time, with minimal pressure or demands, to dedicate to these problems. What he did was impressive, but something someone experienced with developing on these platforms could achieve reasonably well.

Just to be clear for anyone that doesn't watch it, he explicitly acknowledges most (if not all) that in his commentary. His overall tone is quite deferential to the original devs and the time, tool and technique constraints they were operating under.

I didn’t work on Mario 64 but I did work on other N64 games years ago. And yes I did have that reaction :)

Oh good sir can you please share your story?

there are often dev reaction videos on youtube as well!

in response to mods, as well as speedruns (that may/may not use mods). sometimes the commentary from them is interesting.

Do you have any favourite dev reaction videos?

The Cuphead devs commenting on speedrun tricks they didn't anticipate being possible.

Psychonaut's dev reaction is my favorite one because they had one-to-one with a speedrunner talking about every game exploits used to get the fastest time possible.[1]

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsDc1YVxHA0

Not the same game, but there is this for half-life https://youtu.be/sK_PdwL5Y8g

Or do they just sigh in exhaustion that, even so many years later, people are still demanding more out of them, despite them being underpaid and overworked already? Then take some heart medication and go back to work?

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