ONM Remembered – #432
“The game will also come complete with 3D models of Mazza and all your favourite Nintendo heroes which you can bend beyond belief.”
from Official Nintendo Magazine issue 64 (January 1998)
I’m disappointed that I’ve talked so much about the 64DD, but never with the excerpts that got me so excited as a kid. That N64 Pro article was informative and all, but why care about that when you’ve got all these info-graphics?! Look at the cross-compatibility between software! You can doodle up stupid textures, slap them on your hand-crafted 3D models and then export them into Talent Maker to make them dance or whatever the hell! And who’s to say that’s the limit of its capabilities? What’s stopping you from copying level data between games and having unholy crossovers between Glover and Goldeneye?!
… at least, that’s the way I interpreted it as a kid. Now you can look up footage of those games on YouTube and see it for what it is – the logical extension of Mario Paint and nothing more. Despite all the games proposed for the 64DD, very few of them made it to the platform, so all the fancy ideas of sharing data between them went nowhere. And in hindsight, the idea of sharing data between games might’ve been me embellishing the notion of trading creatures in Pokemon and Tamagotchi. (well they shouldn’t have been referring to the creatures as “data”. they have names, you callous cretins!)
On the bright side, all those wild ideas of crossovers and building games out of ganked assets were satisfied the moment I discovered fangames, modding, and the internet in general. And it didn’t require me mail-ordering some doomed peripheral from Japan. Can’t argue with that!
