>>11815532
Ohhhhhh boy. Sit down. Buckle up. Grab a snack (or don’t, I’m not your mom). Because apparently we have to talk about this again. It’s 2025, and somehow people STILL think that the characters in Mario Kart 64 are fully 3D models. Like, actual, real, polygonal, bendy, flexy 3D models.
No. No, no, no. They are not.
The characters in Mario Kart 64 are sprites. Beautiful, crispy, deliciously pixelated, pre-rendered sprites. Yes. Like it’s still the Super Nintendo era, but the sprites have snuck onto the shiny new Nintendo 64 like they own the place. Those Mario, Peach, Yoshi, and DK you’re watching zoom around? Not models. Not low-poly models. Not ugly early PS1-style disaster polygons. Nope. They are flat, billboarded, two-dimensional images, lovingly (and sometimes weirdly) rendered in 3D elsewhere, flattened into a bunch of pre-cooked frames, and then made to spin and scale in fake 3D space like cardboard cutouts at a school play.
Yes, even Donkey Kong. Especially Donkey Kong. Go watch him from behind next time. Notice how his fur is somehow always perfectly visible no matter what angle you drive at? Yeah. That’s because his entire body is a two-dimensional flat surface that the game rotates to face you at all times. Ever wonder why you never see a side view of Wario’s head that looks like an actual 3D shape? That’s because there IS no side of his head. He is an eternally front-facing demon god of flatness.
It’s called billboarding, kids. And it was (and still is, sometimes!) a clever way to fake 3D without eating up the precious, precious N64 processing budget. Want to draw eight Mario poses and spin them to pretend it’s a real thing moving in space? Congrats, you’ve done what every N64 dev who was underpaid and tired in 1996 did. It worked. It was faster. It saved memory. And the N64 needed that memory BAD, because 4MB was all you got unless you ponied up for the Expansion Pak.
