Turok 2 convinced Factor 5 and LEC?

[Guest Rogue15]

IGN64: When did you decide to use the 4MB Pak with Turok 2?

 

Dienstbier: When we originally got our 64DD development kits they came with the 4MB Expansion Pak. The 64DD was actually kind of cool, but it wasn't going to fly -- at least in the States. That was only because of the time. You know, it was very late coming. You're two years into a four or five year life-cycle on a piece of hardware, it's kind of late to start developing software [for add-on hardware]. It just didn't feel right. It didn't feel like it was going to happen and Nintendo was still telling us it was.

 

Nintendo put a lot of time and effort into it [64DD] and it actually presented some very cool creative possibilities. But one of the coolest things about it was this 4MB RAM Pak. It was pretty well understood that we weren't really going to push the 64DD, but the RAM Pak was kind of cool. So one of the first things that came up was, "Yeah, we can run this game in high-resolution." And we did. We got it running in high-res because we had the Pak and it looked amazing. It looked incredible. This was, of course, early on and we hadn't made all of the optimizations we've made in the engine so it was kind of choppy, but it was high-res and it still played pretty well. So we were like, "Holy cow. There's something big here."

 

So we kept totally quiet about it. We didn't tell anybody we had done that and then it came time to get ready for E3. Now what most consumers hear about E3 is that there are lots of games to be seen and lots of little seminars to go to, but what they're less aware of are all the meetings that people have. And these tend to be very, very important people talking about very, very important stuff. What became very apparent from a developer's standpoint was, "Take one of these RAM Paks, plug it into a Nintendo 64, take Turok 2 and show it to Nintendo! Tell them they really, really, really need to sell this!"

 

We did that not knowing whether they were planning to do it or not, but that we thought it would be a really good idea. I can't say if seeing Turok made them decide to release the Pak, but we think it helped -- a lot. And it definitely got other people doing it. I mean, Rogue Squadron hadn't planned on using that until they heard Turok was. And then they did it. If you look at T2 on a television with a RAM Pak in high-res, you're like, "Holy sh*t. PC product there." High-res, real-time-lighting, environmental lighting, etc.