Video game development has always fascinated me to no end. It’s always an exciting endeavor for me to go look at a game which I know very well and start looking at old materials related to the game which were posted before its release. I nitpick everything from screenshots to gameplay videos in an almost archaeological fashion. Most games tend to at least undergo some sort of evolution over their course of development. The more interesting ones, however, go through whole revisions. (Resident Evil 4 is especially famous for having done that.) It’s the notion of what a game could have been, rather than what it became, is really the intrigue which drives me to this very day to keep on investigating.
Hence, it probably shouldn’t be considered much of a surprise that I’ve acquired some interesting relics over the years. One of the ones of which I’m proud the most is a set of old GameCube software development kits I acquired for less than $100. While some of them are just different versions of the basic software, others cover things such as music manipulation and working with external development hardware (ie: special cartridges made for the system). After attempting to take some of the discs for a joy ride, I decided to go dumpster diving and see what interesting little tidbits I could discover lying around.
Luckily enough, a few piqued my interest. My favorites are a couple of theoretically playable tech demos included in order to acclimate developers to the then-new hardware. One was made by Nintendo in which you could travel to different rooms to see different parts of the hardware being put to work. It mainly focused on visuals, as there are rooms devoted completely to things such as anti-aliasing, texture reflections, and sheer polygon counts. None of it may look like Resident Evil 4 or Twilight Princess, but it’s still neat to see what Nintendo was experimenting with at the time before the GameCube’s launch. (Did I mention some of the software is from the Dolphin days? No?)
The other tech demo was a physic-oriented one which I believe was made by the studio behind The Simpsons: Hit and Run, of all things. Based on a video that I saw on it, I believe objects could be thrown at a basic character who would react to the impacts accordingly. It was physics based on collision, so no ragdoll or other such nonsense in that demo.
The best part about both of those, however, was the fact that documentation came with both of them. Nintendo’s came in the form of some HTML pages which functioned as a “tour” and the other one as a PDF. While they’re definitely written in developer-speak, there’s still enough which is comprehensible to the average intelligent gamer. That’s where this “promotion” comes into play. Because I’m in a generous mood, I thought I should let some people take a gander at part of what I found, specifically the Nintendo demo’s documentation. Let me know what you think of the comments section and, maybe in the future, I’ll do more things like this.
As such, feel free to nab it here. Nothing super sketchy is included, of course. Just extract the files, open up the index HTML file, and have fun. (Oh, and the good stuff is in the the “Technical Information” section of the main page.)
