alt Hacker News>Giles Goddard (born 30 March 1971) is an English video game programmer. He was one of the first Western employees at Nintendo
>[Argonaut Games, Giles's first job] produced a 3D graphics demo for the Nintendo Entertainment System and collaborated with Nintendo [0]
To my uninformed self, this sounds extremely impressive to get a 3D graphics demo on the NES. Oh I would love to see how that looked. All I could find is that it was based on Argonaut's Starglider title from the Amiga [1]
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giles_Goddard_(video_game_prog...
1 - https://web.archive.org/web/20080613053018/http://blametheco...
Replies
Hadn't heard about that before. Argonaut and Nintendo also co-developed a 3D game called "X" on the Game Boy, that might give us an idea of how it could've looked.
I'm assuming they're referring to NESGlider, which became Starglider on the SNES. But I can't find anything but textual references to it.
The 6502 can do wireframe and pseudo-3D. 3D has a lot of different types and levels, but prior to this there already wireframe and pseudo-3D products out there.
NESGlider was a wireframe demo. Of course very impressive technically but just a tech demo. The 6502 chip spent almost 100% of its processing power just calculating the 3D lines, leaving very little room for smooth gameplay or filled-in polygons.
The Video Game History Foundation did a video & accompanying article about Argonaut's relationship with Nintendo a few years back:
https://gamehistory.org/eclipse-the-demo-that-sold-3d-to-nin...
Based on that, I believe Giles is mistaken in the Eurogamer interview cited by Wikipedia. The demo was on Gameboy, not NES. The also-linked NintendoLife article also mentions the demo was on the Gameboy. But I guess maybe that's actually more impressive!