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Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

This is a good lesson about the benefit of time when it comes to software development. Mario 64 could have been a much much better game on the same hardware, but the time cost would have resulted in a release late enough that the entire game might have been considered irrelevant.

Game consoles have had the benefit of the platform freezing for a few years allowing improvements to accumulate and later titles utilizing knowledge gained from the earlier titles.

Much of the software we use every day could benefit from this level of scrutiny but the pressure to deliver on time means we won't get to see such benefits unless it becomes a crazy persons labour of love.

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There are externalities to consider that make a later release less likely, too - it was a launch title, to match the pack-in of SMB in the NES and Super Mario World as one of two games available when the SNES launched.

Wikipedia’s entry on SM64 tells me that the N64’s launch was delayed because Miyamoto wanted more time to polish the game. I don’t think a later release would have been possible. This was the flagship title, the system seller. Come play Mario. In 3d.

>This was the flagship title, the system seller. Come play Mario. In 3d.

And I think they were right. I bought it just because of Mario64. Otherwise I'd have gone for Playstation.

I decided to buy it for Shadows of the Empire, but Mario64 was actually great (while SotE was not).

You take that back. SotE was rough, but had some excellently varied gameplay and interesting, fun levels with cool enemies. Also some losers in there, but every great game has a bad level. :)

I watched the video through only once, but unless I'm mistaken (the video is a little confusing on this point), the claim is that the original game did run consistently at 30fps (the design framerate of the console), and the point of these hacks is to improve framerate for mods and devices that can play the game at higher rates. Unless I misunderstood something, it sounds like the original game was exactly as good as it needed to be, as released. And that's before you get to the fact that the mods require the RAM expansion pack.

The original Mario 64 would suffer lower framerates in certain areas (e.g. Dire Dire Docks). We can also imagine that if the artists had had more headroom to work with, then they would have spent it on making levels larger and more detailed.

Wasn't that because it had compiler optimizations disabled, due to a bug in the compiler that was subsequently fixed after the initial cartridge release?

That’s particularly why performance in dire dire docks was bad, but Kaze goes WAY beyond just enabling -O2 in the compiler.

No, it wasn't compiler flags. Put simply, there are too many objects on the screen in that particilar part of the level, and the engine has wasteful code that computes a certain piece of physics three times for every object on the screen iirc, among other things

It wasn't the only reason, but -O0 was a contributing factor. -O2 alone improves things, but doesn't bring the frame rate in DDD up to 30

Is it only a techno limitation concerning the size and details of the levels ?

Mario 64 was already pioneering basically everything in the 3D platformers, and maybe even 3D games as a whole.

Given it was a launching title, they had to stop somewhere and ship the thing. So, like any software with ever, they had to make tradeoffs.

And, well, here we are talking passionately about this game 26 years after. For me it’s an amazing proof that they made amazing tradeoffs.

Because, yes, we now have plenty of time to analyse the thing and find issues with the game. But, the 6yo me, the player me, they have nothing to criticize about this game.

For me it is still a perfect masterpiece given its era and technical context. I don’t think the game could have been really better than it is without breaking something and I’m pretty sure that the engineers at Nintendo considered the game as « finished » and liked the result themselves. It shows in the game. The better would have been the enemy of the good.

But in the meantime you are also right because Mario 64 DS was a really good extension. I miss this game, it really deserve to have its remake. But this version hugely benefited from the evolution of the Mario universe and the technical superiority of the DS so I’m not even sure it could have been done in the 90’s.

I hope we’ll today be able to play a newer version of this game. Be it official or not, I crave for SM64DS with the original controls.

Quake launched a day before Mario 64, so I think 3D games would be fine without M64.

I have nothing against Quake, it’s also a wonderful game. But Mario 64 solved more complex problems of the 3D nature : huge scenes with a lot of (moving) objects, moving in all directions, complex move set, camera, camera, camera…

Quake is a nice game as it is but it’s much simpler when the player is the camera.

Quake supported cameras, as you put it. People made movies in the Quake engine with literal camera shaped models floating around. Also, Quake levels could be huge, much larger than Mario 64. Take a look at Ziggurat Vertigo [0][1], for example. Mario 64 was much more colorful, though, Quake had an intentionally limited color palette.

[0]: https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/E1M8:_Ziggurat_Vertigo [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a72k_XBi2ls

They practically bruteforced all technical problems, using dedicated hardware. And simply ignored some others, like lighting.