Very cool. In 1998 (oof) we built Road Rash 64 which was accidentally open world -- even though you had race on a particular road, with a start and finish line, you could drive anywhere, see traffic all over the map, jump off of mountains, etc. The r4k plus reality coprocessor was quite potent -- we got to over 750k shaded triangles per second in optimized testing -- though finicky because you had to manage audio during vblank, etc. Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug that made it really tricky to use.

if you were on the development team of that game I send my biggest thanks out to you. it was one of the few things me and my (hard to bond with) father bonded over growing up. We would play I think ..course 2 or 3 with the insanity level bikes ALL night trying to get out times down to something like 1 1/2 minutes. within ms of each other's times. run after run. so thanks.

Road Rash 64 is a really underrated game. As you say, the environment is alive, and nearly every race has a lot of potential for wacky slapstick fun. The driving feels really nice and is rewarding to learn.

There is a nice video by Kaze Emanuar demonstrating N64 easily pushing 300k shaded triangles per second without special optimizations in a game engine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC_jLsxZ7nw

I just loved road rash, I had the demo version initially, I used to call it demo rash. Once in a race I accidentally jumped on a building, it was first open world experience for me!

Comments like this are why I just love Hacker News

> Plus, the reality coprocessor fog had a brutal hardware bug that made it really tricky to use.

What was the bug?

Massive fan, would love to hear some details about the culture in the office at that time!