Image: James Lambert
The Nintendo 64 may be turning 30 later this year, but there’s still no shortage of developers putting in the hours to try and push the hardware and see what’s possible in the modern day.
James Lambert, for instance, has made a bit of a name for himself over the last few years for his astounding work on projects like Portal 64 and other projects, such as getting RAGE-esque MegaTextures and VR functionality working on the 64-bit console.
His latest project could be his most impressive yet (at least in our eyes), with the developer having worked with a team of individuals, including Pyroxene, Caitlin G. Cooke, terzdesign, and , to create a new N64 game, called Junk Runner 64, featuring a truly astonishing Skyrim-scale open world (h/t: Notebook Check!).
Junk Runner 64 was developed for the N64brew 2025 game jam and is a truly impressive project, which you’d possibly be forgiven for mistaking for a Nintendo 3DS or Sega Dreamcast title, thanks to its stunning graphics and large open world. But it actually runs on real N64 hardware, with the team employing several clever tricks to make this possible, which Lambert has now gone over in a recent video.
The explanation Lambert gives is rather technical and detailed, so we won’t go into all the ins and outs here, but what you need to know is that the recent draw distance is so difficult on the console is that at distance, it becomes hard for the N64 to know which object to draw first based on z-distance (that is, the distance an object is from the camera on the z-plane), so instead objects begin to be prioritised based on draw order, not actual distance. This causes z-fighting, where objects that are supposed to be behind one another end up being drawn in the wrong order.
To combat this, the developer opted for a solution that involves drawing the world twice, rendering everything that’s far away and everything close up in two different passes, and dividing the world into a bunch of tiles that can be drawn in multiple levels of detail, depending on how close they are to the player (and whether they are visible). Lambert also disabled the z-buffer, intentionally drawing these tiles from back to front.
We wholeheartedly recommend watching the full video for the proper detailed breakdown. Also, if you want to give Junk Runner 64 a try, you can download it here for free. As Lambert notes, you’ll either need real hardware or a highly accurate emulator like Ares to run it.
[source youtu.be, via notebookcheck.net]
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Hailing from Manchester, Jack has a particular fondness for point-and-click adventure games. In the past, he’s written about lost games from studios like Sony Manchester, Genepool Software, and DMA Design, and has made a habit of debunking video game rumours.