As part of its massive upload of past E3 documents and footage, The Video Game History Foundation has just uploaded a snippet of footage from Star Fox 64’s 1996 beta. Shown off at the second annual E3 convention, this footage did previously exist online, but was always of really poor quality. We now have some clean capture of the demo, and it gives us some insight into how Nintendo originally intended the game to look and feel.
As presenter John Rairdin mentions, there’s almost a ghosting or blurring effect going on with motion in this demo. While initially thought to be the result of poor source capture, Rairdin posits that it might be an early attempt at motion blur. This was a common trick used in games during the fifth console generation, though I’m not a fan of it. Nintendo clearly wasn’t, either, as it only appears briefly in the final game for specific enemies.
The demo focuses on a battle with Granga, who is the first boss in Star Fox 64. The introduction of all-range mode, it seems Nintendo initially had a much more limited play space to work with. Fox doesn’t even fly for more than a few seconds before getting turned around, which seemingly was taken from a similar boss fight in the original Star Fox. Clearly, this was a prototype and Nintendo would iterate on the idea until we got to the final game. It’s mostly interesting to see how far Star Fox 64 came along in just one year.
This clean footage follows a similar update from the Video Game History Foundation yesterday. As part of its initial blast of lost E3 promotional material, the VGHF uploaded high-quality capture from the VHS tape for Conker’s Quest. It’s a rare look behind some lost Nintendo history, which there is bound to be more of hiding within this recent batch of material.
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Written by Peter Glagowski
Peter has been a freelance gaming and film critic for over seven years. His passion for Nintendo is only matched by the size of his collection.
