FOR A TIME IN THE LATE-NINETIES, NINTENDO BOASTED OF HAVING “THE FASTEST, MOST POWERFUL GAMES CONSOLE IN THE WORLD”, AND REVOLUTIONARY 3D GAMES TO RUN ON IT. BUT WHAT MADE THIS POWERHOUSE TICK? WITH THE HELP OF VETERAN DEVELOPERS, WE DELVE INTO THE MACHINE TO FIND OUT

WORDS BY NICK THORPE

In 1993, Nintendo was a company in an interesting position. While it was undoubtedly a leader in the videogame console market, it could no longer boast the virtual monopoly it held during the late-Eighties.What’s more, the industry was already planning to transition away from the 16-bit console market, and rival manufacturers were beginning to show their hands. NEC had experienced success in Japan with the PC Engine, and had already shown off the 32- bit Tetsujin, while Atari had announced the Jaguar in August 1993 and was gearing up for a holiday test launch. The much vaunted 3DO, from former Electronic Arts executive Trip Hawkins, was also scheduled to launch for the holiday season and had the backing of electronics giant Panasonic.

Nintendo wasn’t particularly concerned with most of these companies – at the time, Sega was its biggest rival, having been the first company to bring serious competition to the console market. As the two biggest players in the console market, either of them could have been behind what ultimately became the Nintendo 64. The hardware was primarily engineered by Silicon Graphics, Inc, a huge name in movie special effects technology which had recently bought MIPS Technologies, the designer of the CPUs used in its workstations. Having developed a low cost, power-efficient version of the latest MIPS processors, SGI put together a design proposal for a games console. In September 1993, the rivals had signed the contracts and made their announcements – Nintendo would partner with SGI and launch its 64-bit home console in late-1995, while Sega would use Hitachi’s 32-bit processors and launch in the autumn of 1994. Sony, Nintendo’s former partner on the SNES CD-ROM project, announced its intention to launch a home console of its own the following month.

Being the last to market wasn’t an unfamiliar situation for Nintendo, as it had done the same with the SNES and been able to retain a substantial market share regardless. The tactic here was the same – simply put, Nintendo bet on having the best technology. Project Reality, as it soon became known, was also an easy machine to hype. With SGI on board, Nintendo Magazine System claimed that the machine had “the potential to provide graphic images such as those seen in Abyss, Jurassic Park and Terminator 2”. At a time when more bits was better, being a 64-bit machine was a big deal. Total emphasised that “[Sega’s] next generation machine, Saturn, is a 32-bit console – fairly powerful, but nowhere near as fast as the Silicon Graphics hardware”. By the time the console had received its Ultra 64 name in 1994, Nintendo had decided on an extensive advance marketing strategy, working with Midway to create Ultra 64 branded arcade games and taking out advertising to encourage players to wait for the console. They needed plenty of patience, as the Nintendo 64 was delayed repeatedly prior to its Japanese release in June 1996. “It’s hard to do hardware full stop, and this was a totally new platform – new chipset, new CPU, new GPU. On top of that, we were trying to make a flagship Mario game,” says Giles Goddard, a programmer working for Nintendo at that time.

“They just wanted to get it right – there was no particular big problem that happened that caused a delay or anything.”

While working on the planned launch game Star Wars: Shadows Of The Empire, Eric Johnston had a privileged position in seeing the system take shape. “I loved the N64 hardware. Mark Blattel and I had a desk at SGI during its development, running it through its paces as it progressed. At the time, the only machine we could simulate it on was a $250,000 SGI Onyx, which was a purple and black box the size of a small desk, which required its own 16-amp power outlet,” he tells us. Giles also remembers this setup. “There were changes all the time basically, we rarely saw actual hardware. There were two levels of emulation – the API side emulation where you could recompile your game to run on SGI hardware natively, with very little changes to your code you could run either the native one or build it for the emulator. Most of the time we were developing on the native version of the game, and then occasionally we’d recompile it for the Onyx to see if it still worked in the same way. We rarely saw actual N64 devices.”