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Comment by scott_w | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure if you were around but, at the time, there wasn’t really the concept of being “console exclusive,” it was just the default. PlayStation, PC and N64 were all so different that making a game cross-platform was a real challenge that only really happened after its success was proven on one platform.

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Or if it was a movie franchise or something. For instance Batman was released on Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum 48k, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, MSX and PC.

But the games were often developed by completely different teams, sometimes the gameplay was extremely different between platforms.

Haha yes I remember being very confused as a kid that The Addams Family for the NES was a sophisticated game and the SNES game felt like an arcade game. They were developed by totally different teams and were different games that sort of rhymed but the SNES one wasn’t nearly as cohesive or fun.

Even then, cross platform generally meant the same game concept implemented differently. Sometimes the differences were minor enough that it could be hard to tell there were any if just viewing ads for the game. Other times the differences were massive, potentially even shifting the genre of the game.

Aladdin and The Lion King are two games that come to mind from this time.

plenty of games released on multiple consoles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banjo-Kazooie

> The franchise debuted on the Nintendo 64 and subsequent entries in the series also appeared on Game Boy Advance and Xbox 360.

This is but one example.

To be fair, Banjo-Kazooie on the GBA is effectively a completely different game. It bears only a passing resemblance to the N64 games, and is 2-D. The 360 port came ten years later, and the significant effort needed to do so was justified by the game's proven appeal.

I can't speak to the GBA version, but the point is that that generation was the first generation to start getting cross-platform games.

What is being said was true of previous generations, but not that one. N64 even had starcraft ported to it.

Yeah ports existed but they were far more rare then, because as OP said, it required devs to build an entire game engine from scratch for each platform. After the early 2000s, projects like Unreal engine and Unity engine started to take over game development and allow for lightweight porting efforts across all game consoles and PC.

N64 had very few ports and vice versa with the PS1. PS1 had a catalog of over 1000 games but N64 had somewhere around 300, with Nintendo franchises probably forming about 20-25% of the total catalog.

This was also partly because games engineered and designed for the N64's strengths were not suitable for PS1 and vice versa. Porting Resident Evil 2 to the N64 took heroic efforts by Capcom to compress the game into a size suitable for cartridge, for example, and even then they had to create a custom cartridge design for it. StarCraft 64 was clearly quite different gameplay-wise from its PC counterpart as a result of a lack of mouse and keyboard, which are especially important for RTS. It also required a 4MB (RAM) expansion pack to be installed onto the N64 in order to play the full game. Other differences included a lack of voice acting in campaigns as a result of cartridge size limitations.

Ports existed in the SNES and Genesis era (NBA Jam, Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, Earthworm Jim, etc come to mind). I would argue they were far more common then as the two consoles were not far off in specs and 2D game engines were already mature by then.

> it required devs to build an entire game engine from scratch for each platform

No it didn't, please stop saying untrue things.

Often they did.

N64 is a different generation to both GBA and XB360, so you’re not counteracting my core point which is “platform exclusivity wasn’t a thing so much as it was the default position.” The consoles were all too different from each other to start from a cross-platform position. Ports took a lot of additional work, thus the reason they usually happened after success.

GBA was released during that generation, you might as well say XBox wasn't in the same generation because its release date was different than the Playstations.

You can say it and I'll defend your right to say whatever nonsense you want. But it doesn't refute jack.

But if you're really fussed about it, pick one of the other myriad examples. Tony Hawk, SC64, etc.

I already went through your list in another reply. I’ll not waste my time doing it again.

These are ten years apart!

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