Hey, here's a fun fact, did you know that GoldenEye on the N64 actually supported widescreen?
But why would a game on the N64 need to support widescreen back in 1997?
And were they really expecting everybody to adopt widescreen so quickly?
Actually yeah. Turns out, widescreen TVs started rolling out as early as 1993 and most of the world.
And Rare's home country of England in 1994, Channel 4 actually began broadcasting select
movies and TV shows in a format called PAL+, which is an analog format that supported 16x9.
It made sense that TV would eventually make its way over to 16x9, just as movies had done
in the 1950s because they just needed something to really spruce things up.
People were tired of 4x3 movies, so they made them widescreen.
Don't know why. By 1998, the UK had introduced digital terrestrial television, which included more channels,
more selection, and anamorphic 16x9.
Clear signal was the part that I was missing. It also had clearer signal. Time is running off.
Yeah, this is what happened when we don't have a prompter.
Realistically, I should just have something on my laptop scrolling through things, but
I don't. So this is what you're getting. So we've covered the UK, but that's the UK.
Realistically, if you're outside of the UK, you probably don't care about the UK.
Let's be real. Who was on the cutting edge of consumer electronics in the 90s, though?
Japan. Especially the NHK.
The NHK. Well, and you want me to put what it means, huh?
Yeah, because I don't know what the NHK means. I know NHK.
First one is probably Nippon, then two other words.
They had come up with, and we covered this a little bit in Laserdisc, they came up with
High Vision, which was 1080i all the way back in, I think, as early as the late 80s or early
90s. That's where the really expensive Laserdisc Muse players came in.
That was all from the NHK, because what they really wanted to do was broadcast in 1080i.
Actual answer, 1994. I didn't look it up. I had it written down, but the lack of prompter, you know, it's not the greatest to read off
of a script like this. Yeah, so 1080i TVs came out as early as 1990 in Japan.
1994 was HD Laserdisc, and NHK really wanted to kind of corner that whole market as much
as they could. So, if we're actually looking for the earliest instance of widescreen gaming, we're not going
to be looking at Goldeneye or even Quake.
No, we're going to be looking a lot earlier than that, and we're going to be looking in
Japan. So, by most accounts, the first real visibly widescreen game available to consumers was
Virtua Fighter on the Sega 32X. Yes, the 32X is good for something.
And that came out in 1995, and real key phrase here is available for consumer purchase, because
there was an instance two years before that where there was a console that could play
widescreen. PC gamers don't get on me, because, yes, PC gaming at the time did have widescreen,
but 200 by 600 only counts as widescreen if your pixels are actually square, which back
then a lot of PC pixels were not square, especially the 600 by 200 aspect ratio displays.
What is the first widescreen game that was really available to consumers?
Well, Bomberman. So Hudson Soft, they make Bomberman.
At the time, they were also making the PC Engine, also known as the Turbografx 16.
I think David and myself did an unboxing on ShortCircuit of one of those retro companies
remakes of it, Kev Tris' company. I don't remember what it's called.
They had this console, and they had this franchise that was going real well.
I don't think they had come out with Kirby yet, and they weren't working on Mario Party
yet. So Hudson Soft was kind of just banking on Bomberman.
So what do you do when you've got only one big franchise that you really want to succeed
on your one big console? Make a carnival and take it on tour.
For some reason, Hudson Soft decided that what they were going to do was create a new game
for Bomberman. It was going to be widescreen, 1080i.
It was supporting 10 players, and it played on a weird mashup of two PC engines just kind
of wired together haphazardly, really an astounding feat, especially because you cannot find pictures
of it. If you know where to find pictures, please leave a comment with the picture, because
I'm just going to be reading through the comments after this gets released, hoping that somebody has a picture.
I found one partial picture, but it's covered up by something.
This is from their events, their caravan events. I think it was like 93, 94, because they actually kept running this game until 97, I want to
say, and then they gave it to the NHK, because the NHK was really deep into all of this.
The NHK loves 1080i, they were really all in on that, and they were right to do so.
So all of that is great, but was that really the first game available in widescreen, not
counting non-square pixel PCs? No, this obviously wasn't the first widescreen game, because we have arcades, and in the
arcades there were games made by Taito, and what Taito used to love to do was triple monitor.
So they would take three monitors, make them look like one, and make games for that.
So what games did they make for that? On this 36 by 9 aspect ratio, they had a couple, they had Ninja Warriors, they had Darius.
They're also a couple of others, I think. We'll put that rule of all the other games right here, that's a future Tanner issue.
That is a future Tanner issue for sure. I guess I didn't even cover what anamorphic means, it means to just take a regular image
that's square and then just stretch it with no regard for pixel scaling, really.
I mean pixel scaling is dealt with somewhere, but usually not by the thing doing the initial
stretch. So that pretty much covers everything that I wanted to cover here, but what we didn't
get to show in the video that I would really love to show is what Project 64 is capable
of doing on here. Not with GoldenEye. For some reason, GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, even though I think they both had widescreen
options, they don't play well with Project 64's widescreen implementation.
What does play well with it, however, is Mario Kart.
Ba-bam. And of course, this is all legal, of course.
I own so many copies of Mario Kart that if Nintendo wants to come and try and sue me,
I have plenty of things to throw at them. That's not like a challenge.
No, it sounded like a threat.
Mario lawyers, for the sake of legality, that was a joke.
Oh my God, why won't you let me? So this is a problem with this keyboard, is that I want out of this.
This is like, this is, this is, this is Photo Viewer and Windows Picture Viewer.
I don't know what it's called. The default app for looking at pictures.
And I can't get out of it.
Do you need to reset the computer? No, what I need to do is come around.
Come out to the back, step over the light, and grab the backup keyboard.
Whoa. I know. Crazy, right?
You can have multiple keyboards plugged in. Yeah, boot it up and this, this looks like regular Mario Kart, right?
Now we're going to go to options, full screen. Now it's, this doesn't look correct, right?
This looks way more correct.
I unplugged this keyboard before we started doing this, and I've been acting like this
keyboard isn't working right. Oh. It is working right, because it's not working, and it's also not plugged in.
That is a problem. Now this one ain't working, because I set it up with knockoff controller.
So I'm pacifying the controller.
Like all of this is correct, start, start, okay.
Now it works perfectly when I'm testing it.
So we've got our N64 emulation going here, and now it all looks pretty normal until we
go Alt-Enter, and we go into full screen, and you can see this looks pretty close to
correct. We can actually go in and play it.
I would be using a controller, but it's been making me mad.
So I'm not. Oh my God. Look at that text.
Yeah, the text is unreadable. As soon as you get into a race, though, it looks so good.
Oh my God. Yeah, these look horrible. This needs a texture pack.
Something fierce. Let's go. I don't know, Yoshi, why not?
Like you can see so much.
And one thing that is kind of cool about this is that when somebody starts to come in and
out of frame, you might be able to catch it with Luigi here, but they actually disappear
before they fully go off the map.
Because this is like, it looks really nice, it's just so hard to show properly.
Yeah, how do you think I feel playing it this close up?
Like your experience with the camera is not unlike the actual experience.
One thing that Project 64 does super well is that when they were resizing it, they actually
took the UI into account, which even PC games that kind of officially support this don't
properly take into account. And it's just, it's so nice to see.
Because you can see that, like, you can tell what place you're in here.
I can see the mini-map.
That's not the case on Parcatech. I also noticed you were using the normal keyboard.
Yeah. Well, I didn't want to plug that keyboard back in.
I mean, it's a neat keyboard, I guess, but the lack of a number row and also F keys,
surprisingly, makes things frustrating.
Did we mention why we had this keyboard? Oh yeah. Did we mention it in the video?
We do mention it. I really wish I could remember his name. The name of his company is Piketty, or maybe that's not his company, maybe that's just
a screen name. I'm sorry, I didn't do enough research on you, but thank you for sending us a keyboard
for use in this. We will get it sent back to you, I promise.
This is his personal keyboard that he sent over.
Yeah, yeah, because we found out about it just a little bit too late to actually buy
one. I think he made a couple hundred of them, maybe a hundred of them.
Buddy, if you're watching this video, please leave a comment down below.
Oh, should probably censor that email.
The whole email, you just didn't censor it.
I didn't expect to look at the bottom of it, but yeah, if you look at the far left of the
keyboard, I think you added in a little do not drop there. Was that just for us?
I think so, but I don't know. Terrible.
Third place. Third place. I would have won if I had have used the Piketty Longboy 7 foot long keyboard, which may or
may not still be available for purchase, but you probably can do the three foot version.
You might do another run of them, who knows? What you probably shouldn't purchase is this, unless you really need 3,840 pixels by 600.
I would like to see how two-player looks like, because I'm assuming it splits in half.
Oh, you can't. Two players. Right?
Yeah, that looks like two players. I can't tell.
Hi, Andy. Are you busy?
This is awesome.
Preferable vision, eh? Yeah, nothing but.
For recent games, this is the greatest screen ever.
You'd think that. It's great if you only want to focus on this part of the screen.
Anything outside of that, it just gets weird.
I just want to pay extra. I think I'm only using, like, 10% of the screen.
Oh, what? Did you just shoot yourself? No.
No, I did nothing. I just gave me a lightning bolt right away, and then when I tried to slow down to crush you.
It feels like I'm only using, like, 10% of the screen.
Oh, my God, that's great.
I'm so used to playing every Mario Kart that's not this one, because this is the second worst Mario Kart.
Wah, wah, wah.
The screen is great.
Yeah, no, I was saying, I'm surprised it cut horizontally, so vertically instead of horizontally.
Like, vertically, if I have this half of the screen, you have that half of the screen, that would be perfect.
Yeah, that would be perfect. Yeah, it really would have been.
I think that's it. If you guys really like this series, please do leave a comment.
We don't need the interactions. We actually just legitimately want to know whether or not you like it.
Please, please validate me.
Bye.