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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

I seem to recall reading that Nintendo forbade 2D games for the N64, because they were desperate to keep up with the 3D hype around the Playstation, and didn't want it to be seen as somehow less capable than the Playstation (which, ironically, had many 2D games)

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That's not true. There were several 2D games made for N64, including Yoshi's Story, which was made by Nintendo themselves, as well as Bomberman 64 (Japanese version), Bust-A-Move 2, Worms Armageddon, Mortal Kombat Trilogy, etc. It's just that most developers chose to go with 3D at the time because it was the new hotness. The vast majority of the library of both systems were 3D.

The N64 was an expensive platform to launch on though. It was a lot more capital intensive to do a game on the N64, because the cartridges had wholesale costs of $15-20 to produce, plus licensing fees to Nintendo. Sony on the other hand had a cheaper licensing model and CDs could be mass produced at pennies per copy.

The problem is simply that the RPG genre was dominated by Square and Enix. And Square famously abandoned Nintendo after they abandoned the CD format that was originally planned for the N64. In fact, Nintendo had licensed the CD tech from Sony for early prototypes of the N64, and may have inadvertently created their most formidable competitor by doing so. The CD format was superior for doing large pre-rendered graphics and for higher quality sound tracks and audio files. Since these components were more useful for complex storytelling and cutscenes, Square decided to stick with Sony after the split with Nintendo.

In fact, the PS1's 2d games tend to stand up much better to modern sensibilities than its 3d games.

You can still play Castlevania: Symphony of the Night now and it looks pretty fantastic, whereas something like Tomb Raider has some compromises you'll need to accept...

Some further examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Nk2lTRD5Y

SOTN is one of the best games on the PS1 and arguably one of the best games of all time. It’s an absolute work of art!

That's not an issue of modern sensibilities. 2D games look better than 3D games. This has been true continuously since people first started trying to release 3D games.

The fourth Monkey Island game used extremely ugly 3D graphics. There was no good reason. The 5th, much later, was licensed to Telltale and they used ugly 3D graphics. There was an improvement from 4 to 5, but neither game can be compared favorably to 3.

The point of 3D graphics is to make things nicer for the developers, not the players.

One of my other favorite point and click adventure games also suffered from this transition to 3D: King's Quest. King's Quest 7 was a beautifully hand-drawn animated storybook that looked like an old school Disney feature film. King's Quest 8 was hideous 3D garbage that looked bland and worse, they changed the whole premise of the series to focus more on combat than puzzles and storyline.

That being said, I think modern 3D games look fantastic when done correctly. It's just not the best format for some genres.

That was actually Sony. In the USA the marketing was focused on the PlayStation as the cutting-edge 3D successor to old-hat 2D games, so SCEA did not license the development of sprite-based games for PlayStation, which means we missed out on some great sprite games that never got localized.

There were exceptions, of course; big-name publishers could publish sprite games for tentpole franchises, so we still got Street Fighter, SotN, Mega Man 8, etc. Rules only apply when the rulemaker can afford to enforce them. That's still true today, as we found out when it came out that Google waived the app store fees for Spotify.

Yeah, Bernie Stolar made some interesting decisions over the course of his career. I do think he catches too much flak for his SEGA tenure, since it was impossible to save SoJ from itself.

Ironic that now, in hindsight, we see that the N64's 3D hardware is more sophisticated except for the texture size limit. The PS1 doesn't even have a z-buffer. But that would probably be hard to explain to the general public.

Lack of z-buffer proved not much to be an issue. On the N64, late games didn't even use it because of the stress it put on bandwidth.

However, lack of perspective correct texture filtering on PS1 was already ugly at the time.

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