Mickey Mania's 3D Rotating Tower - How Was It Possible?

In this episode of "Coding Secrets" I explain how we achieved Mickey Mania's 60 FPS 3D Rotating Tower Levels on the SEGA Genesis. Original video with an error here: • Video Ver 0.1 (contain...
Is That You or Are You You by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (creativecommons.org/licenses/...)
Source: chriszabriskie.com/reappear/
Artist: chriszabriskie.com/

[@Shadownnico]

Ver. 1.01 changelog - Fixed tower sprite being accidentaly mirrored - Stability improvements

[@KARLOSPCgame]

- Adjustments have been made to make for a more pleasant gaming experience...wait wrong dev.

[@TheMrDeeJay]

Further improvements to overall system stability and other minor adjustments have been made to enhance the user experience

[@McBoccher]

-Updated the localization files.

[@s_SoNick]

Ha, you beat me to it!

[@probablypatchouli]

-No random critical hits.

[@lankyfella]

Thanks KZbin algorithm, don't think I'd ever search for something like this but it's truly fascinating, watched the whole video

[@dizzym9554]

As a coder myself I just love how simple these tricks are when it comes down to it. It's inspiring.

[@TheALPHA1550]

*programmer

[@SrPaisano]

@@TheALPHA1550 shut

[@CatTheRoundEarther]

"The software itself cost $30,000" meanwhile today Blender is completely free.

[@cheaterman49]

AFAIK at that point Blender was still close-source and you'd have to pay for it. If it existed at all, that is! Actually I just looked it up, and it was made in '95 (and open-sourced in 2002). They could have been using Traces, the ancestor of Blender Internal raytracing renderer, but they still would have needed Sculpt3D for the modeling - and owning one of those SGI powerhouses, I guess they had very decent rendering options available!

[@houstonhelicoptertours1006]

Blender wasn't available in 1994. Paying for a license isn't of much concern to a studio. It pays for itself. Also, you want that sweet priority support as a studio when things go belly up, something the Blender Foundation can''t provide to this day.

[@gljames24]

@@houstonhelicoptertours1006 @The Cheaterman He was just trying to show how far the industry has moved since this game was released. It's pretty amazing that we can get professional quality software for free, but only a couple decades ago it would cost the same price as a car.

[@cheaterman49]

@@gljames24 Totally! :-) I didn't miss the point, I'm just saying Blender was either also commercial around that time, or more specifically just a raytracer back then! The industry made progress as a whole, but Blender made a lot of progress itself too! Been loving it since 2.47 when I started, but 2.5 was a game-changer and 2.8x makes it pretty much commercial-grade if not lead!

[@cheaterman49]

@@houstonhelicoptertours1006 I'm fairly sure an ecosystem already emerged providing support and consultancy as required :-) it's the same thing with most FOSS!

[@tiernanmccarthy]

You and your team are beyond inspiring. Seriously. You all did ridiculously clever things with such limited hardware, as a aspiring developer right now in university, you make me think how the most basic struggles are quite simple if I just sit there and think about it. This channel is beyond fascinating, I hope you continue it.

[@furqueue9590]

If you look at a rotating tower and think its 'beyond inspiring' you need to open up some new horizons. Also, no-one cares about your university or respects you for it - it just doesn't matter in a field where all tutorials you could need are free and online.

[@MMoer]

@@furqueue9590 wow toxic much?

[@adorjanbalazs6751]

Yea same here, those guys had lots of fascinating ideas. @Fur Queue's comment is just retarded and useless

[@TheALPHA1550]

@@furqueue9590 Why am I Toxic? -DSP

[@gianni50725]

@@furqueue9590 “no-one cares about your university...it just doesn’t matter in a field where all tutorials you could need are free and online” Did you miss the memo, buddy? That’s literally every field of study that has ever been created if you know where to look. If you think the point of university degrees is to learn, you’re obviously a dumb teen or a 20-something who saw self-taught programmers on reddit talking about how easy it is to go it without a degree. Maybe it works if you want to work at an IT shop or a random company as a code monkey, but some people have bigger aspirations than that. It’s technically possible to get a job anywhere without a degree, but hell if I’m ever going to go through that process.

[@AlexeyFilippenkoPlummet]

I like how GameHut say "I hope this made sense for some of you" after presenting a very visual and digestible video. But when he was speaking about how the DSP in Sega Saturn worked, after 8 minutes of an absolute brain-loading horror he said "OK, pretty straight-forward up until now"

[@RarefoilB]

I like that Jon doesn't delete the outdated incorrect videos when he makes the corrected video. It's completely understandable why other content creators do so, but it is deleting history in some little respect, and deleting any discussion that occurred in the comments. So keeping the videos up and just amending the title preserves history, and I appreciate that.

[@Mrvideosandgames]

Should probably make it unlisted though.

[@Kippykip]

I'm 7 months late but it is still there, just unlisted.

[@mattiviljanen8109]

@@Kippykip What is this unlisted video you speak of? I would like to watch it. Edit: Oh the link is in the video description. Nevermind!

[@EposVox]

Were the original SGI-rendered graphics kept? Have they been shown anywhere? Might be neat to see them before super compression. I realize they wouldn't have been super high res back then, but still might be neat

[@technology4617]

@Random Cow🗸 no he didn't

[@wesleymcneese8554]

Mickey Mania was a visually marvelous game. It still holds up today.

[@kingstarhowl2235]

For those wondering about the error; In the original video he mentioned that flipping the left half of the tower created a perfect match, while in this version, he stated that it was close, but not a perfect match, so they didn't use the flipped image. Also, the rest of the video talks about the correct resolution of the animation, as well as the correct number of bytes. The change is at 1:27

[@bengineer8]

Thanks.

[@solarflare9078]

This reminds me of the rotating tower effect from Battletoads and Kirby's Adventure, but this looks like a PERFECT upgrade from those two. Fitting seeing how BT and KA were on the NES. Not only is the tower 3D, but EVERYTHING is 3D as well, and they're much more fluid as well! This is how you upgrade these kind of visuals from 8-bit to 16-bit. Well done!

[@bryanvickers]

And Super Ghouls N Ghosts

[@TAVI1S]

And Castelian

[@marceltiel7919]

Yes, the C64 game Nebula I had in mind as well, seeing this for the first time. Man, that game impressed me back them with the smooth scrolling

[@PresStar2Play]

I actually guessed this was how you did it! Rendering 3D models and then converting them into smoothly animated 2D graphics! But even though it's pre-rendered, that doesn't make it less impressive, the fact that you still managed to make it rotate so smoothly is still SUPER impressive, and getting everything to move accordingly with each other must've been hard. Plus the effect is just so freaking nice to watch! Anyway, thank you a lot for this video, this is honestly one of my favorite graphical effects of all time.

[@achiladrien2295]

Wohohow, quick correcting, there! Well, still impressive as always!

[@TheSektorz]

I see the striking resemblance of this and the DOS game Tower Toppler, which was either a port or a clone of the game you mentioned. It was really cool for the time. And as usual, awesome episode.

[@roxair1]

Exactly and this goes back to the 8-bits as well. Albeit much simpler, you basically had the same effect on a C64, Amstrad CPC and alike years before that with Tower Toppler or Nebulus (as it was called in Europe). The Tower game mechanic and idea behind the visuals had been invented so much earlier.

[@andrewgwilliam4831]

I'm neither a gamer nor a programmer, but I still find these videos fascinating!

[@WangleLine]

Their content is very well made and they explain every topic very clear!

[@sparkshot]

I'm in my 30's yet remember being a nipper when this came out on the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive. I was really impressed back then at the 3D effects. You did a great job of fooling me! Thought they were indeed polygon based. Great game too, one of the best on the console.

[@therealseanw.stewart2071]

Oh, I've been waiting for this!! One of Mickey Mania's most memorable moments, to me. It looked so cool back in the day!!! Still does!! ;>

[@Afaik777]

Your visualizations are awesome! As is the information provided. Thank you so much for this series.

[@ArifDiamanta]

This is my new favorite chanel, I love to know people made special effect on older games. Thank you.

[@saraha180]

Fantastic as always. This is one of the best series on KZbin.

[@RydalS]

I'm stinkin addicted to these awesome videos.

[@JacobHollis96]

The amount of work you put into these videos is astounding! Kudos to you!

[@Shishizurui]

remember how back in the day when game makers had to pull out all the stops and be mega creative to make impressive graphics and not grab a kid out of university and slap him infront of a workstation?

[@NosAltarion]

Stumbled across one of your video by pure luck. Your content is stunning. And the format of those small lenght video (that and the fact that you are talking slowly) make them totally accessible even for non native speaker. Ty for your work.

[@KokoRicky]

Thanks so much for shedding light on this amazing visual trick. I had a lot of fond memories of playing this game as a kid and I was always really wowed by its many effects.

[@DaveGamesVT]

Always interesting to see how this stuff was done. Thanks.

[@tidytibsgmail]

I love these videos. It's amazing how much work it took to make things work back then but even more amazing when you see things like this happen.

[@Everett-xe3eg]

Incredibly well executed. I love this channel.

[@Visuwyg]

I remember being in awe, seeing this run on a demo station in Toys'R'us as a child. So cool to hear the creator talk about it!

[@Ray_2097]

Fascinating... Mickey Mania was one of the best looking games ever and still is. Just beautiful.

[@nonchip]

"just 24K" dude, you're talking to a GBC developer here, stop mocking me :P

[@cheaterman49]

You have 8MB of ROM on a Game Pak, what are you complaining about? :-D

[@Chron0ClocK]

@@cheaterman49 What does that have to do with VRAM? It doesn't matter if there is 8mb of read only memory on the cartrige the GBC can only hold 16kb of data TOTAL in VRAM and base is 32kb RAM.

[@cheaterman49]

@@Chron0ClocK Well, you can hold what you can display :-) isn't that all that matters? Hahaha! But more seriously, 8MB of ROM is generous, my comment was mainly referring to the fact that GBC isn't that constrained when you squint very hard :-)

[@alexanderhugestrand]

24K for that simple effect is a lot. Here is a 4k intro to compare with. kzbin.info/www/bejne/oHOTp3WjnrmlbNE

[@0xbenedikt]

@@alexanderhugestrand But that Demo used DirectX, which contains massive amounts of code already. You could fill a lot of cartridges of Mickey Mania with that supporting code. It is still a very impressive demo!

[@alasyon]

That was amazing!!! And I also recall being in awe of Nebulous on the C64

[@rexykik]

Thank you, I appreciate the brevity of these videos

[@Milennin]

I always loved the tower part. It looks amazing for a 16-bit game.

[@yorgle]

AAAAH! That makes A LOT more sense! I LOVE these vids!

[@s_SoNick]

Mr. Burton, you are amazing! Thank you for sharing your knowledge with all of us.

[@Kj16V]

Thanks to all your other videos, this made perfect sense! What will you do when you've finished talking about Mickey and Sonic? I hope you discuss other games new and old. Love this channel!

[@TOUKOretrotaku]

As usual excellent explanations, thanks ;-)

[@TheStolken]

I had a hunch that the mirroring strategy didn't work.

[@allurhatrbelongtome]

Porkey Pig's Haunted Adventure for the SNES did a similar effect!

[@NoxiousLynx]

That is so cool. I didn't know there was another rotating tower besides the one we see in Battletoads.

[@mayamanign]

This is such a good game and a work of art. Thank you for creating it. I worked in Softimage and migrated to MAYA.

[@ZarkOner]

This is really helpful from an animation point of view for all the people who work with 2.5 d or fake 3d

[@edgarector]

Is this a channel of an ex Traveller's Tales developer?! If so,I sincerely want to thank you for one of my best memories from my childhood!Traveller's Tales made the most advanced 16 bit games of the era!They really made things never before seen and considered impossible on this hardware. Toy Story,Sonic 3D Blast,Mickey Mania,Legend of Galahad and so on.

[@startedtech]

Thanks! I was confused when you talked about mirroring Then again I'm confused by a lot of stuff in your videos. But I love them

[@Lugmillord]

Wow, this is really impressive!

[@MishKoz]

A glorious, 3D rotating reupload.

[@Introbulus]

Seems like a pretty straightforward set of animating tricks to conserve memory - but it all blends together very nicely for the full effect.

[@AgsmaJustAgsma]

Like I mentioned in the original upload, the sole fact that TT had an Indigo machine at their disposal shows that Mickey Mania must've been one of the most expensive games at that time.

[@digimaks]

That was super awesome effect to see on Megadrive!

[@MattLacey]

Loving these videos. Would also love an SGI machine still but they :) I need to give MM another whirl, tried beating it last year but the water part of the ghost house was driving me to insanity!

[@TheRidiculousR]

i remember playing mickey mania on the ps1 and i thought the 3d was nothing special but now knowing how it works and it being like this on the sega genesis as well suddenly makes it quite special!

[@higgins007]

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

[@strydom666]

I was really curious about this! Great to see it explained. Not too long ago I saw Nebulus and pondered how they did that great effect. So I opened Blender, made a cylinder and put the camera directly at its side in orthographic view. Squished the cylinder so the faces are square and placed a seamless texture with bump map on every face. After rotating the cylinder and fiddling around, I finally got that cross-section frames (19 frames). I looped the cross section up and finally got the exact effect and the memory usage wouldn't have been that high in a game. Thank goodness I didn't need a SGI Indigo workstation and desktop PC's progressed so far. My wallet simply wouldn't have made it.

[@porvoonosho]

I enjoy your videos very much, and I have no coding experience what so ever.

[@GabrielAidley]

I'm not the only one who was reminded of the rotating tower(s) in Kirby's Adventure when I saw this in my feed, right?

[@X1erra]

Fascinating work. I admit I went to that tower in the Playstation version and thought it's just a 3D model. Well, to hell with that, now that I know 3D models were simply impossible back then, it would be a marvel for me to see such technique.

[@Ashley-wu3uc]

very interesting! I always wondered how it worked

[@RoadStuffUK]

I would like some more info (maybe an entire video) about the SGI box and SoftImage, and the process of transferring graphics to the Mega Drive. I had an SGI box at around that time so it would be nostalgic for me :)

[@electronash]

Road Stuff I love the SGI stuff, ever since seeing some animations in the late 80s, then on films like Terminator 2 (1991), and Jurassic Park (1993). I dabbled in 3D Studio MAX, Maya, Lightwave, and Softimage for a number of years, and owned and SGI O2 and Octane for a while (with Maya installed). I was never very good at the 3D stuff, but it was a lot of fun. lol Would be great to see a vid on more of the process, yep. I recently started making a basic Mega Drive game with two friends, and I know how hard it is to reduce the colours of the tiles down to only 15 colours (as a base level, with no extra tricks atm). I'm wondering if Mr GameHut had some controls on the software tools which could adjust the colours in realtime, to see what looked best?

[@electronash]

Road Stuff I'm thinking of maybe getting another Octane, Indigo, or Onyx machine, but then sometimes the novelty can wear off quite quickly, and the nostalgia itself is enough. hehe The SGI machines are very well built, but need a lot of power, and weigh a ton. I had the Octane sat next to my PC at the time, and quickly realised how much faster the PC really was for rendering etc. (like a factor of 20 or more, but then the Octane only had a Solid Impact gfx card, and I think an R5000.) I'd love to find a relatively "cheap" Onyx or Indigo though. Seeing the Onyx being showed off on "Bad Influence" is such a vivid memory for me.

[@electronash]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/kGWYn5WwgrGeb5o

[@killerb2099]

It made sense to me, but even if the viewers can't make sense of it they can always watch your video again, giving you another view. :D

[@googlewolly]

Very interesting. Thank you.

[@jaymzjulian]

I'm glad that I'm not the only one who remembers the publicity videos calling it "soft imaaaage 3d" rather than "soft image 3d" :)

[@litjellyfish]

Jaymz Julian well it was a Canadian (French) software right? :)

[@OliHarris]

So cool! Thankyou

[@oscarnemo8084]

Really cool. I remember this game from when I was a kid, and how impressive it looked then. And even now, it's neat how it all stems from so simple building blocks. The music in the videos are really loud and resonant though. Maybe turn that down a tad.

[@doomfatlikesbluesphere9984]

Very neat!

[@qojte]

this music makes me wanna jump off a skyscraper in a good way though thank you again for these videos

[@adrias3]

It's incredible that in some point in history a Mickey game was a Videogame tech innovator

[@Katosepe]

I had nightmares of these levels when I was a kid! Cool to see how it works though!

[@MischaSMK09]

I came here, because the preview reminded me of Nebulus and was not disappointed! :)

[@Zefrem23]

C64 Nebulus was massively ahead of its time. Bastard hard as well.

[@Triple222Two]

Am I right in thinking that the bit where the rotating strip was has changed to now be the entire strip (196px), rather than the first half (92px) mirrored then reversed? Is that what the re-upload is for?

[@swampflux]

Well that just made 12 year old me very happy. Thanks for answering all my questions... Like.. 20 years later!

[@SpectrumAssociates]

I think recreating this is kinda hard in Anime Studio. But I want to break some barriers here if I'm gonna get known for my animation.

[@Wrenchy247]

This game was WAY ahead of its time!

[@benbaez6044]

I love how I know if you're going to commentate just by the song you start the video with :D

[@32bitsmug55]

Huh. Had no idea these effects were in the 16 bit versions as well. (I only played the PS1 version) Really impressive!

[@eyokfla]

Your videos are so goooooooooood

[@starphaser]

This channel is so damn cool

[@piratapan]

Really cool

[@fireaza]

I think this is the first one of these videos where I've fully understood the trick after watching the video. Probably because I studied design and I suck at programming.

[@karisasani7006]

The PS1 version of the tower areas looked like you were actually in one because well now the graphics of the back screen looked more like an actual tower. Also the door looked like an actual one as well.

[@claudiocosta7547]

Amazing

[@James-fo8rf]

Magic! Thanks

[@Jeremy_Hopkins]

First of all, holy crap! $30,000 just for that software?! Secondly, I've been trying to remember the name of Nebulus for years. I knew it by Castelian on NES, but it's the same game (judging by the wiki article).

[@cheaterman49]

I would hope it came bundled with the machine, they were expensive enough!

[@callumkenny5147]

I remember this as Mickey's Wild Adventure on PS1. Loved the game but by god was it challenging, the last level makes me scream like James Rolfe, even as an adult.

[@joemama945]

This is so badass.

[@gFamWeb]

This is pretty cool 👍

[@Chaingun]

not a disney fan, but found myself loving this game back in the day

[@maxamillion2140]

Please go into more detail regarding Mickey Mania, this was an important game to me as a child.

[@bombshellie8549]

AHHHH YES I GET TO WATCH THIS VIDEO 2 TIMESS

[@marcelofrau8818]

I am not even mad..

[@WangleLine]

Huh? o:

[@GlenKStraughn]

Yeah, that bit about the reversing the animation in the previous version of this video had me really confused, seeing as the bricks weren't symmetrical.

[@LordXsi]

Thank you for these amazing videos! I remember only three games that really blew me away with visuals and sound on the Genesis back then. Two of them are yours - Toy Story and Mickey Mania. The third one - Adventures of Batman & Robin. Would you be able to give us an educated guess as to how the Mad Hatter boss was done in that game? that's one of the most visually stunning things the Genesis has ever seen. Thank you!

[@GameHut]

Yeah, it's a simpler version of this: kzbin.info/www/bejne/pKWQcqt3ptGlhdE to move the checkerboard towards you and then using horizontal interrupts to shift the image left and right per scanline (like this: kzbin.info/www/bejne/sHaldaqGbqmFmtU ) and then either skip lines or fetch lines more than once per scanline to make it move up and down

[@KiyokaMakibi]

Wow. I’m getting history on my childhood games from the very people who made it! 🤩

[@deceseze]

the ammount of effort put into making this game look absolutely stunning makes me believe disney was gonna cut his fingers off if it looked slightly below average

[@SwitchRetroGaming]

Great vid, I wished the Mega CD version made more use of the ASIC chip. Hope Jon will soon make a vid on how he made Sonic R track look transparent

[@SyntheticFuture]

Always impressive to see how they worked with the technical limitations of the day

[@PaSanGaming]

Hey, interesting video - loved it. Could you please touch on how the hit boxes would work for the floors and obstacles? I can only assume they're perhaps laid out as a normal 2D level, and offset as the player "moves".

[@theignaciortega]

This is amazing. It's even better than the spiral staircase in Megaman X4

[@Kippykip]

I'm thinking of getting this game on the PS1 again sometime, is it any good? The copy I had as a kid was scratched to the point where rarely the first level would even load.