STUNT RACE FX
Developer Nintendo EAD Publisher Nintendo Format SNES Release 1994
That was great, because we had all the framework from Star Fox, in regard to tools and workflows. We could experiment with new ideas in Stunt Race, like splitscreen and more textures. The FX chip could do sprites just as well as it could do polygons, so Stunt Race FX was very much a way of mixing in sprites and polygons. It was a very small team. We were next door to the Star Fox 2 team, so we were doing two games at once, sharing code and ideas.
One of my favourite games at the time was a game called Stunt Car Racer by Geoff Crammond. It was an extremely well made, really fun car game. You’re on a rollercoaster-type course, you’re jumping, the physics are really nice – bumpy, with nice suspension – so I wanted to make that kind of game. Nintendo wanted to make a more cutesy Nintendo-ish game, so what we ended up with was a cross between Stunt Car Racer and Mario Kart.
When I designed the physics for the car and the explosions it was for a, maybe, 20 frames per second update rate, but when we started putting everything in, it went slower and slower. It felt more gloopy and more sticky. Then they put eyes on the front and it suited the gloopiness; everything looked like it was made out of jelly. So actually it was a case where they worked around the limitations of what we had to make something out of it. They took the slow gloopiness and they made it cute.