this post was submitted on 07 May 2025
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Meh, those are just the programmers that are remembered.
They did lots of dumb shit too. Mario 64 was a super-innovative game at the time with its free 3D platforming. There's also tons of weird code in there, and the developers also fucked up by shipping a debug build of the game, costing a not insignificant amount of performance.
Is that true about the debug build? I had it on the N64 way back when and don't remember it being especially laggy. OTOH I was young, and relatively shit at computer games
Yup, they shipped a debug build. Here's a video that shows the build side-by-side with one that was compiled with compiler optimizations: https://youtu.be/9_gdOKSTaxM
It was quite laggy in certain areas, particularly the submarine sank the framerate quite considerably.
I heard somewhere more recently that they probably did it on purpose because they didn't know if the game would be stable using the different settings. Nintendo was known for quality back then so if the game crashed, even a bit more, they thought it would hurt their bottom line.
True, there were several programming mistakes that caused undefined behaviour. Most of these the compiler warns about though, so they could have easily been fixed.
The issues were "masked" so to speak by the debug build (even if not fully gone, the game could still crash). But decompiling the game let modders fix those issues fairly easily, after which it could be recompiled with the proper optimizations.