Pilotwings 64 - Development

Development

Pilotwings 64 was co-developed by the Texas-based graphics company Paradigm Simulation and Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis and Development (EAD) and Integrated Research and Development (IRD) divisions. Due to Paradigm's experience with Silicon Graphics workstations, Nintendo contacted the American company in 1994 concerning it becoming one of the Nintendo 64's "Dream Team" of first developers. Paradigm worked directly with a team at Silicon Graphics and spent nine months developing a technology base for Pilotwings 64 and Paradigm's other Nintendo 64 releases. Development on Pilotwings 64 began in earnest during June 1995, with Nintendo working on the game design and Paradigm working on the technical production. Nintendo's Genyo Takeda and Makoto Wada acted as Paradigm's primary technical and design contacts individually. Wada, the game's director, was also involved in design aspects such as modeling and animation. Shigeru Miyamoto, the producer of Pilotwings for the SNES, reprised his role for Pilotwings 64 and oversaw the project from Japan. Miyamoto's involvement was more removed than with the SNES game due to his simultaneous work on the platformer Super Mario 64.

It's difficult to explain, but the feeling of the flight simulation is very realistic. You can glide down from the top of a mountain, then turn around and look back up at the peak and say, 'Hey, I was just up there.' It's that real.

According to Miyamoto, Pilotwings 64 was designed to allow gamers to experience free flight in realistic 3D environments on the Nintendo 64. Prior to the game's conception, Paradigm had worked on military vehicle and flight simulators, but not video games. Dave Gatchel of Paradigm disclosed that with regard to creating the game, they began with a "physics-based approach", but deviated from this in order to gain a balance between accuracy and fun for players. He indicated that there was never an issue as to whether Pilotwings 64 should be more of an arcade game or a simulation, as their goal was to "always have a more arcade feel". The technical team studied the original Pilotwings extensively during development. Pilotwings on the SNES makes use of the power of the 16-bit console, principally its Mode 7 capability. Similarly, Pilotwings 64 prominently demonstrates the graphical features of its own console. Gatchel suggested that just as design elements present in the game generated its production requirements, these same elements were influenced by the Nintendo 64's technology during development. The large islands within the game were created using Paradigm's own 3D development tool Vega UltraVision. Navigation of these environments is relatively smooth thanks to Pilotwings 64 taking advantage of several key Nintendo 64 hardware features. Conventional level of detail and mipmapping were used to reduce the computational load of distant landscape objects and terrains when they were rendered. The processes respectively substitute simpler geometrical shapes for more complex ones and less detailed textures for more detailed ones, lowering the polygon count and 3D rendering time for a given frame and thus putting less demand on the geometric engine. Pilotwings 64 also applies z-buffering, which keeps track of an object's depth and tells the graphics processor which portions of the object to render and which to hide. This, along with texture filtering and anti-aliasing, makes the object appear solid and smooth along its edges rather than pixilated.

As Nintendo was in charge of its actual game design, they dictated the aircraft and characters that would be present in the game. The six playable pilots in Pilotwings 64 are all named after various birds. The character Lark is modeled after Nester, a mascot for the North American Nintendo Power magazine. The female character Robin is called "Hooter" in the Japanese version. The soundtrack for Pilotwings 64 was composed and arranged by Dan Hess. The tracks were produced to compliment each level, such as a "soothing" jazz-inspired musical piece played during the exploratory Birdman mode. A now out-of-print CD soundtrack was released by Pony Canyon in Japan on December 16, 1996.

Pilotwings 64 was one of thirteen Nintendo 64 games shown at Nintendo Space World in November 1995 when the console was first unveiled to the public as the "Ultra 64". The game was later displayed at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles during May 1996.