valve portalreleased in 2007 (!), is one of the last games you’d expect the humble little N64 to pull off, and yet here we are in 2022 and seeing it pull off quite well.
Programmer James Lambert has been working on one portal demake for Nintendo’s system for a while, but in his latest development video, he reveals that not only has he made some “major advances behind the scenes of the game engine,” but that he’s got the most important thing up and running: the Portal Pistol.
The video below shows a rough demonstration of Lambert’s progress, but even at this stage it looks incredible. The portals are attached to the walls – with some smart detection tools to get around corners – and when you walk towards them you can look right inside and everything reflected in them moves exactly as it should.
To give you an idea of how far this is pushing the hardware – remember, this isn’t to make it look like the N64, it’s actually being developed for the N64 and this video was shot on N64 hardware – says Lambert in the video He would normally have some in-game sound effects by now, but wanted to “check if the Nintendo 64 can do portals at all” before doing it here.
In terms of how many views through a portal the N64 can actually support – meaning how many times the room you are in is repeated by looking through a portal – in this video you can see how it maxes out at four , although Lambert says the final game will likely need to make a smaller number to keep things running smoothly.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, it’s because portal was also recreated – at least partially – by fans for the Nintendo DS a long time agowhich was also an impressive achievement.