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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Playstation became the RPG console back then. Square was the king of the genre, and they wanted to create cinematic experiences with pre-rendered graphics. Only the CD format was large enough to support that.

The N64 also suffered from a margin problem. Game cartridges were sometimes $10-$20 wholesale for producers, while CDs were probably about 10-25 cents. And then they had to pay a hefty licensing fee to Nintendo on top of that.

What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.

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> What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.

I'm pretty sure the hardware would have given developers a real run for their money to create a SNES-level JRPG experience with smooth, good quality sprite-based graphics. As far as I know it has no 2D acceleration like the SNES, and a very small texture buffer, which leaves slow software rendering directly to the framebuffer, or low quality texture-based sprites. The hardware was really not designed for this type of game, so few were made.

Not providing any hardware to handle those types of games was a function of 3D being all the rage, and the hardware being very clearly targeted at that, but it also meant that creating 2D games was not just out of fashion, but impractical.

N64 had several 2D games, it just wasn't common.

Yoshi's Story is prob best example. 2D platformer by Nintendo with gorgeous graphics. However, it was a lackluster, forgettable game. Still it proves the 64 was more than capable of exceeding 2D experiences from SNES.

Other examples are StarCraft 64, Bust-a-Move 2, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, SimCity 2000, Killer Instinct Gold (character models 2D), Magical Tetris Challenge, Rampage 2, Ogre Battle 64, MK Mythologies: Sub Zero, Clay Fighter 63 1/2 (2D character models), South Park: Chef's Love Shack, Mischief Makers, etc etc

It was more than capable of exceeding SNES quality graphics on every metric. The RDP on the N64 already had to render 2D rasters that were pre-transformed from 3D projections by the signal processor chip.

Remove that 3D transformation step and allocate some RAM for buffer and you had a perfectly capable 2D platform.

There's no question it was possible, but the previous generation consoles provided powerful hardware sprite/tile-based engines with layers, smooth parallax scrolling, '2.5D' transformations and more. N64 has none of that, and as far as I know the SDK didn't include anything like a software 2D engine either. If you wanted to make a 2D game, you'd have to implement your own 2D rendering pipeline more or less from scratch. I also think the N64's relatively low memory bandwidth and low amount of RAM would have been an issue to get past for a software compositor.

So yeah, it does provide access to the framebuffer, and has a reasonably capable CPU - more or less like PCs of the time did, so of course it's a 'perfectly capable 2D platform' but in this era I don't think we were quite at the point where brute-forcing the graphics pipeline in software was 'easy', and the 2D hardware capabilities were... let's say 'not exploited' by Nintendo's SDK.

It wasn't preventing anyone from producing 2D games, obviously good games could be made, it was just definitely not optimized for that, and that just put more pressure towards 3D, that already had a lot of cultural pressure towards it. If the culture was there, I'm sure developers would have hacked away at it and developed it into a strong 2D platform, but without that it was a barrier.

A 2D rendering pipeline is trivial. There are numerous hobbysist 2D rendering frameworks for every computer architecture in the past 40 years. It was far more difficult to program N64 in 3D than in 2D. The CPU was more than capable to exceed SNES in every dimension. It was not hard at all. 3D already requires 2D rendering.

You could easily just treat it like Unity does, where the 3d ness is an illusion and everything is actually in 3d space.... Super easy, barely an inconvenience...

The real impediment I believe was Nintendo themselves... Think about it for a moment. What was the process for publishing to N64? That's right, you had to work directly with Nintendo and effectively get thier stamp of approval (good luck getting enough carts otherwise).

Nintendo didn't want 2d games on thier precious 3d focused console. That simple.

This may be partly true, but they themselves did publish Yoshi's Story, a 2D game, in 1997, the second year of N64's existence. More likely explanation is that 3D was so novel and new in the mid 90s that it was difficult to argue for 2D games then from a business and marketing standpoint, even though 3D games usually required larger teams and the lack of mature tooling (a lot of devs would have to make their own physics engines from scratch back then) made it riskier. Today Nintendo puts a heavier focus on 2D gaming, with the New Super Mario Bros series and Mario Maker, etc.

Been ages but wasn't it rather paper Mario-esque with heavy use of the 3d to make the 2d more interesting?

I'd need to go look to recall correctly, but honestly it's 7:30am and I'm waaaay not into doing that rn....

I think that's something that's easy to say in hindsight, but hard to justify at the time.

The switch to 3d gaming was probably the biggest technological leap games ever had. 3d allowed a huge amount of experiences not possible with 2d games. And while early 3d games look incredibly dated now, at the time they were mind blowing and cutting edge. The SNES and Genesis were also too recent to really have any nostalgia, so and thus no real desire for throwback or "retro" titles. Any 2d game on the N64 would probably have felt cheap and dated at the time.

Finally, for Nintendo specifically, they did release 2d titles during the N64 generation. They just released them for the Game Boy (and later, Game Boy Color). There wasn't much sense devoting resources to make a 2d game on the N64 when your 2d-only console is still selling really well.

I'm not talking about Nintendo themselves, per se. They did a phenomenal job with the titles they did make for N64, including of course Ocarina of Time (a masterpiece) and I'll also never forget how revolutionary Super Mario 64 was.

I'm mainly talking about 3rd party publishers and specifically the JRPG genre. The N64 suffered from a lack of games compared to PS1. It was difficult to do 3D development back then, developers were just getting the hang of it.

In fact that you bring up Game Boy dev as a thriving platform for 2D content is an important point. Pokemon came out during this era. And a 2D N64 based Pokemon would have sold like hotcakes. Instead they built these half baked 3D Pokemon experiences like Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Stadium, which featured no storyline and no overworld.

Even something resembling Super Mario RPG with prerendered graphics on a isometric view would have been fine. It just wasn't generally done on N64. Everyone wanted to mimic Mario 64. The few RPGs N64 did get, like Quest 64, felt so empty, that it would have been much better to just ship it in 2D.

I always assumed it was the memory problem. There is more memory for 2D sprite maps on the CD than the cartridge, and it is easier to cull the landscape to fit in the small RAM of PS1 than to optimize the texture packing for N64. There is Ogre Battle 64, but noticeably the textures look much worse than Final Fantasy Tactics. I thought maybe it is too difficult to get nice textures on the N64, even Paper Mario looks nice, but the textures are not that complex.

The N64 had almost 40 times more RAM than the SNES. Plus you could create custom ROMs with more memory if needed in the cartridge itself.

If textures looked better in FF Tactics vs Ogre Battle 64, it is purely due to storage on CD vs cartridge, a notable 10x plus advantage.

Square used a ton of prerendered graphics in their PS1 games. That is to say, they'd farm out the graphics to super computers and then store them as rasters on disc.

It is a mistype - by memory I meant disc storage, not RAM

You’re right that Pokémon on consoles would have been great, but you’re conflating some stuff that easily explains why it didn’t happen. First is the idea that Pokémon is a Nintendo franchise. It’s convoluted, but let’s say Nintendo has a stake that allows them some control but they cannot control Game Freak, the developer of Pokémon, directly.

Second is Game Freak proper. They have always valued a small headcount. This has been a problem consistently. They never had the staff to make a console game. They always had the same difficulty with building new ideas. And when they were forced to move to consoles with the Switch, they released their worst games yet, absolutely dispiriting games that probably soured millions of kids on the franchise.

What percentage of The Pokemon Company does Nintendo own? They must have some exclusive arrangement in writing or a 50% or more ownership because it's never been hosted on a non Nintendo platform.

They certainly had the staff to make Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Snap. Most 2D games in the SNES era only needed like 4 to 7 developers. It would have been fine and trivial even to pair Nintendo game artists with Pokemon developers for a true console Pokemon game. It just wasn't done. It took until the Switch to see a true console Pokemon game.

Pokémon Snap and Stadium were made by other companies, not Game Freak.

We don’t know everything about the Pokémon corporate structure in the English-speaking world. Presumably Florent Gorges is researching this as we speak. But the common theory is that when Nintendo invested in Game Freak in the early 90s to bail them out, there must have been a requirement of exclusivity for the franchise in the contract. Game Freak made games for other consoles after Pokémon, and the Pokémon cards had Windows games, but the main RPG series that’s been both only on Nintendo and only done by GF. Last year was the first time another company touched the mainline RPGs: another company did the remake of Pearl and Diamond.

From a YouTube video I watched, the bigger advantage of disks was the manufacturing lead time.

With carts, you had to know how many you needed weeks in advance, and were stuck with excess units if the game flopped. Whereas you could have a run of ps1 disks pressed and in your warehouse in two days.

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