Open world on the Nintendo 64
Thanks to a Hacker News thread about an impressive open-world demo, I have been taking a stroll down memory lane. In 1998, we built—somewhat accidentally—an open-world game on the Nintendo 64: Road Rash 64.
Aside, thanks to the miracle of emulation, you can play RR64 today in a web browser, which captures almost 20 years of progress rather nicely.
My Second Almost-Invention
Coming off of Magic: The Gathering - Armageddon—where we sort-of, kind-of invented the action RTS for arcades—Road Rash provided an absolutely joyous sprint of development. Despite having only a 9-month development cycle, we managed to cram a lot into the game.
- Thanks to the incredible Leif Terry, we created way better motorcycle physics than anyone had a right to expect on the N64.
- OCD reverse engineering: Nintendo did not release Reality Engine specs to third-party developers during that era, so we played a giant game of “how big is the vertex cache for triangle strips?” (answer: 16). We hit north of 750,000 textured triangles per second, which gave us long draw distances and a ton of motorcycles on screen at once.
- John Grigsby had the idea to name opposing riders and created AI with a nemesis system (strangely never cited as prior art) so that enemies you knocked down during a race targeted you.
All of this combined with the N64’s four-player mode to create a truly demented—and hilarious—party game. During development and testing, many friends and colleagues burned hours hooting and hollering at the screen.
Open World
We ended up with an open-world game (sort of) because of how Road Rash 3D—a PS1 title—streamed its geometry. Unlike prior Road Rash games, RR3D used polygons and streamed the tracks from the CD. This approach provided nearly infinite storage (okay, 700 MB) and a very cool experience. When Don signed the EA contract, he had not fully considered the architectural differences between the PS1 and N64. He assumed shifting from 700 MB of streaming world data to a 16 MB cartridge would not pose a challenge (we ultimately convinced THQ to approve a 32 MB cartridge, but that mostly supported the 8 songs we included—hello Soundgarden and Mermen in 1999!).
The RR3D team at EA had already disbanded, making it an adventure simply to obtain the world geometry. However, once we successfully rendered the environment, we realized driving around the entire world felt just as easy as loading a single level. We kept the open-world nature and placed traffic everywhere. The result was pretty cool, but we were not smart enough to make it a true open-world game—Rockstar Games accomplished that with GTA 3 a few years later.
The game remains a fun project to remember. We subleased office space from 3Dfx (another MtG: Armageddon connection) and felt oh-so-smug about not leaving the games industry for dot-com startups. Oops.
The Full Cheat Code
Digging through some old boxes, I found an RR64 box that everyone on the team had signed, alongside a scrawled sticky note containing the “unlock everything” cheat code. For future emulator developers, here is how you unlock everything in Road Rash 64 (from the main screen):
Control Up
Control Up
Left Trigger
Control Down
Z Trigger
Left Trigger
Z Trigger
Control Up