Earlier this year, Valve asked James Lambert, the developer behind Portal 64, to stop work on the fan game. Instead, he’s now making a brand-new Nintendo 64 game that seems to take a page from the cult classic co-op title that launched Helldivers developer Arrowhead Game Studios.
Valve‘s issue with Portal 64 stemmed from the fact that it used proprietary Nintendo development libraries, which had leaked ages ago but were never officially made public. Lambert has since moved over to open source alternatives, as he explains in the video below, but Valve seemed uncomfortable with the notion of porting Portal 64 because it wouldn’t have a good way of tracking the project – and changing the foundation of the game would be a ton of extra work anyway.
Instead, Lambert is building a new N64 game that looks like a sort of action platformer. “The core concept of the game is that you are a wizard,” he explains. “You learn various runes, and these runes can be combined together to create interesting spells. Everything from fireball to even jumping or flying are all done by combining spell symbols in the right way to get the right result.”
Lambert does not cite this game as an inspiration, but to me, that concept sounds a lot like Magicka, the 2011 co-op game that served as the first release from Arrowhead. And, judging by the YouTube comments, I’m not alone in thinking that. That game has you combining a selection of eight different elements into spells, and each of those combinations features particular results. In practice, it’s a lot like inputting Helldivers 2 Stratagems – it’s just that you get magic spells at the end rather than airstrikes.
Portal 64 certainly showed that Lambert can build a technically impressive N64 title, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing whatever form this magic game ends up taking.
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