DF Retro: why Resident Evil 2 on N64 is one of the most ambitious console ports of all time
With game-makers and publishers building almost all of their games with multiple console platforms in mind, it's worth remembering that things used to be very, very different. Titles used to launch on bespoke arcade platforms before being ported to home consoles, and when hardware like the original PlayStation arrived, titles were specifically built around its strengths. Direct ports to other systems rarely worked owing to massive hardware differences, with some developers opting to create entirely new games instead. But when it came to the N64 port of Resident Evil 2, Angel Studios - now Rockstar San Diego - went for a different approach. It aimed to overcome the N64's most profound limitations, delivering an uncannily accurate port of the original PlayStation release.
On the face of it, an N64 conversion of Resident Evil 2 shouldn't be a problem. After all, at the nuts and bolts level, the action consists of fairly simple 3D characters and objects overlaid on a series of pre-rendered 2D backdrops. An invisible mesh creates the boundaries of the 3D space, ensuring that the characters sit correctly within the environments, while moving through the levels is achieved simply by flipping from one screen to the next once you hit the boundary - there's no scrolling here.
But what sounds simple in theory becomes massively more complex when you look at the implementation. Resident Evil 2 for PlayStation shipped on two CDs. It's true that there's commonality is some of the data between the two discs, but the bottom line is that just one CD offers Capcom the luxury of 700MB of storage. That's plenty for the game's 2D backgrounds, its 15 minutes of full-motion video plus its 200 minutes of sample-driven soundtrack - on top of other in-game audio, including character voices. The N64 version has to somehow contain all of this data within one 64MB cartridge - less than 10 per cent of the storage available on one of Resident Evil 2's CDs. Additionally, even if the storage situation could be resolved, N64 doesn't have any hardware-accelerated video decompression - something Capcom utilised extensively in the PlayStation game.
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