The Nintendo 64 may be nearly 30 years old, but that hasn’t stopped dedicated fans and tinkerers from still finding new ways to push the hardware’s limits.
James Lambert’s Open-World N64 Experiment
Gamers who are old enough to have lived through the N64 era remember how groundbreaking and exciting things felt when Nintendo made the leap from the Super Nintendo to the Nintendo 64. The launch lineup, the colorful controllers, and a stable of titles that would go on to become classics.
Recently, a popular YouTuber named James Lambert who specializes in coding games and retro consoles decided to toy around with the idea of an open-world game optimized for the N64 as part of a game jam project. The experiment started by trying to push the limits of the N64’s draw distance restrictions. Some gaming fans may recognize Lambert’s name as the creator of the Portal 64 project that was shut down in 2024 due to copyright concerns involving Valve and Nintendo.
While exploring the best coding solutions to allow a Nintendo 64 game to draw further into the distance, Lambert found himself developing a custom open-world engine for the N64. The impressive creation allowed Lambert to build out a demo of a massive open world game as big as Skyrim (in terms of spatial size, not in terms of things to do in the world), where players can stand at one edge of the world and look off in the distance and actually see the distant mountain peaks at the other end.
The video is very technical and Lambert walks through the various problems he encountered and the coding solutions he and his team used to tackle them and get the world to render in the way he hoped it would.
Lambert wasn’t alone on this project and also credits the rest of his team for their help on the open-world engine:
- Pyroxene: https://x.com/pyrox3ne
- Caitlin G Cooke: https://cgcooke.itch.io/
- terzdesign
- Kælin: https://betadynast.bandcamp.com/
Interested fans can check out the custom open-world engine for the N64 at Lambert’s GitHub. Take note that to actually play the game that Lambert created, Junk Runner 64, gamers will need to run it on real hardware or a highly accurate emulator.
Lambert plans to use the lessons learned from this game jam experiment to develop his next project, which will be a full game that runs on the original N64, Analogue 3D, and ModRetro.
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