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[Thick Thighs Save Lives]

Portal64 is a port of Portal - the 2007 first person puzzle game developed and published by Valve to the Nintendo 64 which launched 10 years even before Portal was released. In this episode we take a closer look at this truly impossible port.

 

[John Bilbo]

 

[Heimdall_Xtreme]

Curious fact.

The legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time, was ahead of its time, and they were going to implement a system similar to Portal

 

[Grildon Tundy]

Love seeing just how far old hardware can be pushed. It's like getting a view into an alternate timeline.

Also, if this guy can pull this off on an N64, where are the mind-blowing new gameplay possibilities the exponentially more-powerful current-gen systems can provide?

 

[IbizaPocholo]

Curious fact.

The legend of Zelda: Ocarina of time, was ahead of its time, and they were going to implement a system similar to Portal

Opinion - Game Dev - Ex-Nintendo programmer reveals Zelda 64 had portals a decade before Portal

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/ex-nintendo-programmer-reveals-zelda-64-had-portals-a-decade-before-portal/ In an interview with MinnMax, Giles Goddard explained that while he was working at Nintendo in the ’90s he was making some tech demos for the Nintendo 64 to see what the...

www.neogaf.com

Here I talk about how I optimized the game, the challenges with rumble pak, and translations

 

[skit_data]

This is pretty damn impressive, I wish I had the knowledge to have a grasp on exactly how much work has been put into it. Must take quite a lot of clever tinkering of pretty much everything?

 

[Deerock71]

How?

 

[Moses85]

I need a everdrive! Where can I get one?

 

[Ikutachi]

Resident Evil 2 was the impossible port.

 

[RoboFu]

gaming should reset and go back to the playstation, Saturn, and N64 consoles.

 

[John Bilbo]

gaming should reset and go back to the playstation, Saturn, and N64 consoles.

Let's do it. But what are we doing exactly?

 

[mrcroket]

This man is crazy. You guys need to see this. Fucking megatexture on a n64

 

[cash_longfellow]

Let's do it. But what are we doing exactly?

Going back to Ps4 and Xbox One with all the recent garbage ass remasters apparently.

 

[ManaByte]

Resident Evil 2 was the impossible port.

 

[CamHostage]

Love seeing just how far old hardware can be pushed. It's like getting a view into an alternate timeline.

Also, if this guy can pull this off on an N64, where are the mind-blowing new gameplay possibilities the exponentially more-powerful current-gen systems can provide?

It's not really a matter of horsepower that ever allowed Portal to exist though.

Mind-blowing gameplay possibilities mostly come from mind-blowing game designers making stuff they envision before it's ever put into a computer, high-powered or otherwise.

(It does however take some complicated camera and perspective techniques which benefits from having powerful computers and fast data to help realize it and work with it to make a fun game of the tech; I'm not sure how the planned Zelda would have worked completely or what limitations it would have dealt with even though they did get it prototyped, but I could see it being a lot harder to work with even after they got the base two-levels-connected-by-portal concept prototyped. This Portal demake benefits a lot from the tech being worked out already on other machines, allowing the designer to work backwards from an understanding of the technique to reconceive it on the lesser hardware.)

Even if a game used exponentially more powerful hardware for mind-blowing gameplay possibilities, would people notice? Gamers are mostly hung up in AAA production values (where the exponentially more powerful hardware gets used, on mind-blowing gameplay or otherwise,) there's indie and off-beat stuff out there which has really cool experimentations with tech yet it goes unnoticed often if there's not stars or brands or a big marketing push. LEGO Builder's Journey has some very advanced lighting systems, but it looks like a phone game. Teardown has some phenomenal simulation systems, but it looks like Minecraft. Superliminal is a fascinating combo of physics and angle manipulation to build mind-bending puzzles, but it can port down to Switch. Dreams and Crayta and Fortnite Create and other game-makers are phenomenally, unfathomably flexible realtime game making apps, but most of the games made using any of those apps tend to end up resembling bad copies of other games we're familiar with.

 

[Grildon Tundy]

It's not really a matter of horsepower that ever allowed Portal to exist though. (

Mind-blowing gameplay possibilities mostly come from mind-blowing game designers making stuff they envision before it's ever put into a computer, high-powered or otherwise.

(It does however take some complicated camera and perspective techniques which benefits from having powerful computers and fast data to help realize it and work with it to make a fun game of the tech; I'm not sure how the planned Zelda would have worked completely or what limitations it would have dealt with even though they did get it prototyped, but I could see it being a lot harder to work with even after they got the base two-levels-connected-by-portal concept prototyped. This Portal demake benefits a lot from the tech being worked out already on other machines, allowing the designer to understand the technique and reconceive it on the lesser hardware.)

Even if a game used exponentially more powerful hardware for mind-blowing gameplay possibilities, would people notice? Gamers are mostly hung up in AAA production values (where the exponentially more powerful hardware gets used, on mind-blowing gameplay or otherwise,) there's indie and off-beat stuff out there which has really cool experimentations with tech yet it goes unnoticed often if there's not stars or brands or a big marketing push. LEGO Builder's Journey has some very advanced lighting systems, but it looks like a phone game. Teardown has some phenomenal simulation systems, but it looks like Minecraft. Superliminal is a fascinating combo of physics and angle manipulation to build mind-bending puzzles, but it can port down to Switch. Dreams and Crayta and Fortnite Create and other game-makers and phenomenally flexible realtime game making apps, but most of the games made using any of those apps tend to end up resembling bad copies of other games we're familiar with.

Ah, I forgot about Superliminal. It's probably the closest to mind-blowing I've seen in the past few years. Really inventive and well-executed.

 

[Esppiral]

I wish he ported it to the Dreamcast instead

 

[Dr.D00p]

It makes you think how many truly groundbreaking games each generation of console misses out on because coders never truly get to know what the hardware is capable of before commercial obscelesence kicks in.

 

[THE DUCK]

For a second there I thought they hacked the ps portal to play N64 games already....

 

[nkarafo]

I wish he ported it to the Dreamcast instead

Why? A demake becomes more interesting as the target platform gets less powerful. That's the point of demakes. To see how a much less powerful system is pushed to handle a more modern game.

A Dreamcast port would be a bit easier to make and look a bit closer to the original. But where's the fun in that? The N64 has many more obstacles and bottlenecks that make such port a much more difficult task so if he can pull it off (which looks like he can) the end result will be a much more impressive achievement.

 

[IbizaPocholo]

Portal 64 first slice is out of beta. I really polished up the portal gun, rounded the portals, fixed some z fighting issues.

 

[RAIDEN1]

I would like to see just how much of a task would it have been for the Dreamcast to have Metal Gear Solid 2 from 2001

 

[Davevil]

 

[IbizaPocholo]

 

[YCoCg]

MVG curse strikes again!

 

[Skifi28]

Making PC mods is one thing, but valve is probably too scared of n64 sales picking up and eating their lunch.

 

[//DEVIL//]

I didnt play portal wih full path ray tracing, sure as fuck not gonna play it a Nintendo 64. ( There was no controller support last time I checked and I do not know how to play with keyboard and mouse that accurate. and no I do not want to learn at 42 thank you )

 

[nkarafo]

Fuck this industry.

Ok, I don't understand what's the issue here. It appears Valve is afraid of Nintendo, but why? The mod is not on STEAM. Nintendo can't do anything to Valve if they don't host it. It's a similar situation with Dolphin, VALVE refused to host it for the same reasons but the emulator still exists outside STEAM. So why did VALVE ask James to take the project down completely? I don't get it.