Coders Force 3D onto Nintendo's 2D GBA as Hardware Bottlenecks Mount

minimme

Game Boy Advance software performance proved that titles using 3D sparingly as an accent consistently played better than full polygonal showcases, which sacrificed framerates and mechanics to run on 2D silicon.

AI-assisted summary of The History of 3D Graphics on the Gameboy Advance | minimme — original source. Check the original for full context.

Source published: 2020-02-20

Key ideas

Despite Nintendo formally designing the Game Boy Advance as a dedicated 2D platform without 3D hardware, developers relied on raw 32-bit ARM7TDMI software rendering to produce raycasters, true polygonal engines, and voxel heightmaps. (0:02)
The GBA first-person shooter market surged early with high-water marks like Torus Games' Doom II and Duke Nukem Advance, but genre output collapsed from six releases in 2002 to just one per year between 2003 and 2006. (13:26)
Velez & Dubail's proprietary V3D engine set the system's peak graphical benchmarks, culminating in their 2005 port of Driver 3, which rendered full open-world 3D cities with on-foot and driving mechanics. (25:43)
A negative correlation emerged across the library between visual ambition and mechanical quality: games that used 3D sparingly or as hybrid accents generally played far better than full-blown software-rendered showcases. (31:02)

Detailed notes

## Background Published on YouTube by minimme on February 20, 2020, this video retrospective examines the history and technical evolution of 3D graphics engines on the Game Boy Advance. Drawing from a custom tracking spreadsheet, the video surveys how developers pushed the handheld's 2D hardware beyond its intended limits with software-rendered polygonal, raycast, and voxel techniques.

## TL;DR Despite being built strictly as a 2D sprite machine, the Game Boy Advance became an unexpected battleground for software-rendered 3D technology as developers raced to bring console-style experiences to portable hardware. The retrospective charts this technical timeline from early launch hybrids like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and BSP corridor shooters like Doom, through peak technical breakthroughs like V-Rally 3 and Driver 3, to late-era voxel experiments and unreleased prototypes. Minimme reveals that while technical showcases often suffered from low framerates and compromised gameplay, the titles that used 3D selectively or achieved high performance left behind a fascinating legacy of low-level coding wizardry.

## Atmosphere & style The video features an analytical, nostalgic, and wryly humorous tone, balancing genuine admiration for low-level programming feats with candid critiques of sluggish, muddy shovelware. Minimme's laid-back and personal delivery makes dense rendering concepts feel accessible and engaging as he guides the viewer through historical spreadsheets, obscure engine demos, and retail gameplay clips. Watching it feels like a cozy, deep-dive retrospective that moves from early excitement and competitive technical ambition down to late-stage commercial exhaustion and affectionate preservationist curiosity.

## Bulletin - [00:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=2s) Despite Nintendo formally designing the Game Boy Advance as a dedicated 2D platform without 3D hardware, developers relied on raw 32-bit ARM7TDMI software rendering to produce raycasters, true polygonal engines, and voxel heightmaps. - [13:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=806s) The GBA first-person shooter market surged early with high-water marks like Torus Games' Doom II and Duke Nukem Advance, but genre output collapsed from six releases in 2002 to just one per year between 2003 and 2006. - [25:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1543s) Velez & Dubail's proprietary V3D engine set the system's peak graphical benchmarks, culminating in their 2005 port of Driver 3, which rendered full open-world 3D cities with on-foot and driving mechanics. - [31:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1862s) A negative correlation emerged across the library between visual ambition and mechanical quality: games that used 3D sparingly or as hybrid accents generally played far better than full-blown software-rendered showcases.

## Key takeaways - [01:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=90s) Nintendo explicitly positioned the Game Boy Advance as a 2D-only handheld at reveal to temper unrealistic consumer expectations sparked by leaked tech demos and fake 3D mockups. - [02:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=173s) Early titles relied on hybrid solutions, combining Mode 7 affine scaling or pre-rendered isometric backgrounds with real-time 3D polygon character models, as seen in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2. - [04:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=284s) Developers adapted Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) raycasting algorithms to ship the first commercial corridor shooters on the hardware, establishing viability through Backtrack, Doom, and Ecks vs. Sever. - [06:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=386s) The year 2002 saw an arms race of proprietary 3D tech demos from studios like Graphic State, AGB Games, and Raylight Studios attempting to pitch console ports such as Quake and Resident Evil 2. - [08:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=510s) Rebellion introduced voxel heightmap rendering to the GBA with Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf and Smuggler's Run before abandoning the console following the disastrous failure of Medal of Honor: Underground. - [11:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=677s) Torus Games set the golden standard for handheld first-person shooters with Duke Nukem Advance and Doom II, combining complex multi-level geometry, destructible textures, and stable framerates. - [12:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=725s) Velez & Dubail debuted their V3D engine in V-Rally 3, using dense geometry and clever visual workarounds—such as masking lower-screen affine polygon distortion behind dashboard overlays—to achieve unmatched graphical fidelity. - [13:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=806s) 007: Nightfire broke away from flat BSP raycasters by employing a genuine polygonal 3D pipeline capable of sloped ramps, 3D furniture, dynamic lighting, and mounted turrets. - [14:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=895s) Tantalus Media's Top Gear Rally delivered the largest fully modeled 3D cars and most realistic physics on the handheld, benefiting from rare first-party North American publishing support from Nintendo. - [19:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1158s) By 2004, the gaming press and consumers experienced severe 3D gimmick fatigue, as ambitious engines frequently resulted in compromised framerates and poor gameplay designed mainly for back-of-the-box screenshots. - [19:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1158s) Commercial market saturation left promising tech demos stranded without publisher backing, including Prograph Research's advanced DR Advance racing engine. - [21:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1302s) Late-generation urban action games diverged sharply: GTA Advance used 3D selectively to preserve complex 2D systems, whereas Payback rendered an entire interactive 3D world with real-time dynamic shadows and particle effects. - [25:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1543s) VD-Dev's Driver 3 represented the absolute zenith of 3D engineering on GBA by merging high-speed driving pipelines with full third-person open-world pedestrian mechanics. - [26:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1591s) The twilight years shifted almost exclusively toward licensed children's media, concluding the GBA's commercial 3D era in 2007 with Cars: Mater-National Championship. - [27:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1674s) Post-lifecycle community leaks uncovered lost technological breakthroughs, including a voxel-based prototype of Banjo-Pilot, a dual-layer Mode 7 pitch for Mario Kart XXL, and Cryo's unreleased Dune: Ornithopter Assault. - [31:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1862s) Engineers behind GBA 3D tech leveraged their low-level optimization skills into modern careers, evolving proprietary pipelines into contemporary console middleware and high-profile remaster projects.

## Detailed walkthrough ### [00:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=2s) The 2D Handheld in a 3D World

The Game Boy Advance occupied a uniquely contradictory position in video game history. Arriving at the turn of the millennium, it was fundamentally architected from the ground up as a sprite-pushing 2D powerhouse at a time when the rest of the gaming industry had long since moved into full polygonal 3D. Despite the complete absence of dedicated 3D rendering hardware, the console's 32-bit ARM7TDMI processor proved just capable enough through raw programming wizardry to handle 3D, or at least convincing pseudo-3D graphics. Driven by the industry's obsession with 3D gaming, developers took up the challenge with reckless abandon. As minimme frames it: “It was never a question of whether they should, it was a question of whether they could.”

To trace this peculiar technical evolution, minimme built a comprehensive custom tracking spreadsheet cataloging release dates, Metascores, developers, and publishers across every notable 3D-oriented title on the system. Because no unified wiki or definitive historical archive exists for this specific subset of GBA software, the retrospective draws directly from this dataset to map out overarching industry trends, milestones, and development breakthroughs, while acknowledging the inherent statistical caveats of cataloging edge-case software.

[01:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=90s) Pre-Launch Hype and the 2D Mandate

Before the public had even caught a glimpse of the retail hardware casing, IGN leaked an image of a barebones Game Boy Advance development kit in August 2000. Included alongside the early SDKs was a single-level playable tech demo of *Yoshi’s Story*. Originally a Nintendo 64 game, the demo showcased lush color reproduction, Mode 7-style ground scaling, smooth parallax scrolling, zooming, and a prominent pre-rendered 3D rotating island. While *Yoshi’s Story* was technically a 2D sidescroller, the fact that N64 assets were running on a portable device whipped pre-launch speculation into a frenzy. Popular perception had long pegged the upcoming handheld as essentially a portable Super Nintendo—a rumor seemingly validated by rumblings of a port of *Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island*—so seeing an N64 property running on early silicon signaled far greater ambition.

Nintendo swiftly moved to control expectations. Only days after the leak, the company formally unveiled the console's official pricing, release windows, and technical specifications in Japan. Company leadership went out of their way to firmly squash unrealistic 3D rumors, which had been exacerbated by fake mockups circulating online, such as an impossibly high-fidelity screenshot of a fully 3D purple Yoshi. Looking back at Nintendo's messaging, minimme observes: “Now it’s important to note again here that the GBA was not designed for 3D graphics - with Nintendo’s Executive Vice President at the time specifically pointing out on announcement that the GBA is a dedicated two-dimensional platform in what seems like an attempt to shut down the talk and rumours of it supporting 3D, of which there were many with stuff like this Purple Yoshi screenshot floating around online at the time which just looked far too good to be true - because it was probably fake.”

[02:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=173s) Early 2001: Launch Hybrids and Subtle 3D

Nintendo outlined the Western launch details in early 2001, highlighting a slate of 15 launch games. Among the lineup, *F-Zero: Maximum Velocity* carried the torch for pseudo-3D by deploying high-speed Mode 7 background manipulation identical to the SNES original. While Mode 7 surface warping would become a staple of GBA racing titles, it relied on 2D affine transformation hardware registers rather than true polygon manipulation.

Far more technically revealing was Vicarious Visions’ launch title *Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2*. Instead of relying purely on pre-rendered sprite sheets, the developers rendered the skater as a fully articulated, real-time polygonal 3D model operating within pre-rendered isometric environments. The models blended cleanly against the static backdrops, delivering a remarkably faithful handheld interpretation of the console experience. Similar hybrid approaches appeared across the hardware’s lifespan, from the polygon character models in *Max Payne* to environmental elements and player assets scattered across various sports titles.

[04:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=284s) The First 3D Shooters and the BSP Technique

Third-party development studios quickly realized that showing off 3D on a machine that lacked 3D hardware was the fastest way to turn publishers' heads. Without fixed-function polygon pipelines, programmers had to rely on software rendering and spatial efficiency algorithms—most notably Binary Space Partitioning (BSP), the foundational technique behind early 1990s PC shooters.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Binary Space Partitioning Flowchart accDescr: Diagram illustrating how BSP algorithms determine rendering visibility on GBA hardware.

subgraph SceneSetup["Spatial Partitioning"] A["Level Geometry"] --> B["Recursive Binary Tree Partitioning"] B --> C["Node Visibility Calculation"] end

subgraph Rasterization["Rendering Pipeline"] C --> D{"Inside Player Field of View?"} D -- "Yes" --> E["Draw Visible Wall Segments"] D -- "No" --> F["Cull Hidden Geometry"] end ```

JV Games brought the first notable BSP-style title to the system with a port of the 1998 PC shooter *Backtrack*. By drawing only the walls intersecting the player's viewing frustum, the engine minimized draw calls, though the final product suffered from sluggish framerates and a severely truncated draw distance.

Just weeks later, David A. Palmer Productions and Activision delivered a substantially superior demonstration of BSP technology with their port of *Doom*. Based on the Atari Jaguar conversion rather than the DOS original, the game featured complex geometric architecture, a seemingly limitless horizon, and smooth movement. Although running at a reduced internal resolution that essentially doubled pixel sizes on the handheld's display, it earned critical and commercial acclaim. As minimme recalls while evaluating his past rankings: “Critics and fans loved it and apparently I ranked it as the best GBA First Person Shooter around when I reviewed them all years ago, so it must be pretty good. I need a better memory.”

This initial wave crested with Crawfish Interactive’s *Ecks vs. Sever* in late 2001, demonstrating that fast-paced corridor shooters were genuinely viable on the hardware. Concurrently, Graphic State attempted to apply BSP tech to the racing genre with *Cruis’n Velocity*, though the experiment fell flat due to jarring visual artifacts and floaty vehicle handling.

- *Backtrack*: Port of the 1998 Windows shooter by JV Games; first notable BSP release on GBA, marred by low framerate and short draw distance. - *Doom*: Developed by David A. Palmer Productions; used Jaguar source code, delivered high framerates and complex levels despite half-resolution pixel doubling. - *Ecks vs. Sever*: Original handheld FPS by Crawfish Interactive; solidified BSP corridor engines as commercially viable on GBA. - *Cruis’n Velocity*: Graphic State’s attempt to adapt raycasting/BSP to open-track arcade racing; broadly panned for poor handling and awkward geometry.

[06:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=386s) The 2002 Tech Demo Boom: Graphic State, AGB Games, and Raylight Studios

By 2002, the GBA development scene had transformed into an arms race of competing proprietary engines and speculative tech demos designed to solicit contract work. Graphic State bounced back from *Cruis’n Velocity* by releasing the polished, Doom-inspired corridor shooter *Dark Arena* in January 2002. Behind closed doors, they pushed the hardware further with an ambitious open-world demo that presaged *Grand Theft Auto III*: players could freely navigate city streets on foot in first-person, hop into vehicles, dodge wandering pedestrians against scrolling city backdrops, and even commandeer a fully operational helicopter. In March, Graphic State delivered *Star X*, an unabashed *Star Fox* clone rendering flat-shaded, untextured 3D polygons with impressive stability during frantic aerial battles.

Simultaneously, UK-based AGB Games made waves with their proprietary C2 Engine. Alongside tech demos for sports, racing, and city-driving environments, AGB produced a running proof-of-concept build of id Software's *Quake*. Leaping straight from flat *Doom* corridors to true textured 3D environments with complex angled architecture and animated wall surfaces shocked onlookers who had assumed the hardware was incapable of full six-degrees-of-freedom geometry.

The most celebrated engine architect of this era was Italy’s Raylight Studios, creators of the Blue Roses engine. Raylight captivated the games press with mockups replicating home console titles: - A real-time recreation of the introductory helipad and dock sequence from PlayStation's *Metal Gear Solid*, featuring fully textured architecture and scrolling animated water shaders. - Action scenes mimicking *Resident Evil*, displaying fully 3D character rigs animated using motion-capture data. - A fully playable demo of *Resident Evil 2*, developed independently in an unsuccessful bid to convince Capcom to greenlight an official handheld port.

[08:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=510s) Porting Open Worlds and Rebellion’s Voxel Experiments

The commercial market expanded rapidly from just four 3D-adjacent titles in 2001 to fifteen in 2002. Sennari Interactive pulled off an improbable feat by translating Reflections Interactive's *Driver 2* to the handheld using a heavily customized BSP engine. Despite the hardware constraints, the game captured the core design of the home console version, featuring sprawling metropolitan street grids, real-time foot and vehicle transitions, active police pursuit AI, and rigid-body vehicle suspension physics.

Rebellion Developments embarked on an erratic, wildly divergent technical trajectory across 2002, pioneering voxel rendering on the platform. Based on the raycasting principles popularized by NovaLogic's *Comanche* and *Delta Force* on PC, the technique rendered terrain heightmaps using vertical screen-space columns. Rebellion’s release schedule swung across extremes: - *Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf* (May 2002): Marked the first commercial appearance of voxel rendering on GBA, though it generated only static single-frame terrain backdrops for golfers to strike from. - *Smuggler’s Run* (September 2002): An ambitious real-time implementation of Rockstar's off-road game; it animated full voxel terrain at playable speeds by relying on relatively chunky voxel columns and aggressive horizon fogging. - *Medal of Honor: Underground* (Late 2002): A catastrophic misfire that abandoned voxels for a broken polygon-corridor engine.

Describing the sheer visual degradation of Rebellion's final effort, minimme holds nothing back: “Medal of Honor: Underground is considered to maybe be the worst GBA game ever made, it’s certainly the worst one I’ve personally played, and I think this footage of it just speaks for itself. It’s a slideshow of endless muddy pixels, making it near unplayable. Again, Rebellion had a weird year on the GBA, so weird in fact that I guess they just gave up on the console for good releasing no more games on it from this point forward.”

Closing out 2002, Crawfish released *Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever*, an ambitious movie tie-in sequel. While visually solid, it buckled under feature creep, cramming in sniper scopes, vertical ladders, civilian non-combatants, base alarms, and split dual-character narrative campaigns. Meanwhile, Australian studio Torus Games was quietly stepping up to establish a far more refined standard for portable first-person action.

[11:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=677s) Peak First-Person Shooters and the V-Rally 3 Breakthrough

The first-person shooter genre on the Game Boy Advance hit its high-water mark with Torus Games’ twin releases of *Duke Nukem Advance* and *Doom II*. These two titles raised the technical ceiling for handheld FPS titles to a tier that arguably no other studio would reach again. Torus built complex, multi-tiered level geometry featuring functional sliding doors, fluctuating floor elevations, and detailed wall textures that visually reacted to weapon damage. Despite rendering swarms of active enemy sprites simultaneously, both games maintained exceptionally smooth framerates. Beyond the raw engineering, their enduring legacy rests on their playability and charm: they are packed with character and genuinely fun to play rather than functioning as mere proof-of-concept demos. Alongside the original *Doom*, they established the undisputed gold standard for handheld shooters.

Outside of the shooting genre, Sega partnered with THQ to publish *Super Monkey Ball Jr.* The game adapted remarkably well to the handheld thanks to a minimalist visual aesthetic where the core physics and simple tilt mechanics fully justified using real-time 3D polygons—even if navigating precision stages with a digital directional pad felt, in minimme's humorous estimation, like it “should be a crime.”

The real watershed moment of 2002 arrived courtesy of the French coding duo Fernando Velez and Guillaume Dubail (Velez & Dubail). Having already established a reputation on the Game Boy Color for technically demanding racers, the team debuted their proprietary V3D engine mid-year with *V-Rally 3*. The title delivered an astonishing level of visual fidelity: geometrically dense terrain filled with banks, hills, roadside buildings, and angled surfaces, integrated seamlessly alongside cleanly scaled 2D billboard sprites for foliage. It utilized the GBA's screen real estate to the maximum, ran at a framerate smoother than almost anything before it, and incorporated well-above-average vehicle physics, multiple race modes with competing cars, and an immersive in-cockpit camera. Looking back, the creators considered this release a career defining achievement; as minimme remarks, “It’s a sight to behold, and the devs themselves have described it as one of the most important moments in their lives as developers.”

- *Duke Nukem Advance* and *Doom II* featured dynamic texture destruction, moving level architecture, and consistent framerates that outclassed competitor engines. - *V-Rally 3* established a graphical milestone on the handheld that only Velez & Dubail themselves would manage to surpass in subsequent years.

---

[13:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=806s) Market Saturation and the Evolution of the Handheld Shooter

By 2003, the Game Boy Advance software ecosystem began to cool down. After an unprecedented flood of over 600 titles in under two years—averaging roughly one commercial release every single day following the Japanese debut—the pace dropped by roughly 100 releases compared to 2002. Extremely low software development overhead had created severe market oversaturation, pushing commercial releases increasingly toward licensed children's titles.

This shift heavily impacted first-person shooters. After climbing from three releases in 2001 to six in 2002, the genre collapsed to just a single FPS release per year from 2003 through 2006. The lone FPS representative for 2003 was a handheld demake of *007: Nightfire*, handled by JV Games (the studio behind 2001's *BackTrack*). Although plagued by a sluggish framerate, the underlying engine architecture was far more ambitious than a casual glance suggests. Rather than leaning on an old-school binary space partitioning (BSP) raycaster, *Nightfire* implemented a conventional polygonal 3D rendering pipeline. This allowed for angled architecture, dynamic ramps, physical polygonal furniture, mounted turrets, and real-time muzzle flashes that illuminated surrounding walls in dark environments.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Evolution of FPS Engine Techniques on the GBA accDescr: Diagram contrasting traditional BSP raycaster limits with Nightfire's true polygonal pipeline.

subgraph BSP["Early Raycaster Engines (e.g., BackTrack)"] A["Grid & BSP Partitions"] --> B["Right-Angled Walls"] B --> C["Flat Geometry & Billboards"] end

subgraph Poly["Nightfire 3D Pipeline (JV Games)"] D["True Polygonal Meshes"] --> E["Sloped Ramps & Angled Walls"] E --> F["Dynamic Gun Muzzle Lighting"] E --> G["Polygonal Objects & Turrets"] end ```

- GBA release trends saw overall software output tumble in 2003 as low-budget shovelware squeezed mid-tier projects. - FPS commercial releases shrank drastically: 3 in 2001, 6 in 2002, and down to 1 per year across 2003–2006. - While Torus's titles retained the crown for performance and fluidity, minimme stresses that “while I said Torus’s Doom 2 and Duke Nukem games are probably the most impressive on the system particularly thanks to their framerate, there’s definitely an argument to be made for Nightfire.”

---

[14:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=895s) Racing Takes the 3D Crown: V3D Tricks, Voxels, and Top Gear Rally

As shooting titles dried up, racing simulations quickly became the primary showcase for handheld 3D graphics. *Sega Rally Championship* arrived with decent gameplay, though its visual presentation was hamstrung by an aggressively low rendering resolution that could not compete with *V-Rally 3*. *Drome Racers* took an alternate technical approach, using flat-shaded, pastel-colored polygons reminiscent of the Super Nintendo Super FX chip to bypass texture mapping memory bottlenecks and maintain high framerates.

Velez & Dubail struck again with a portable conversion of *Stuntman*, expanding their V3D engine to support animated track obstacles and complex set-pieces that transformed dynamically as the player raced. The V3D engine achieved its performance via a clever optical compromise: polygons noticeably distorted and warped near the bottom edge of the display due to an affine, non-perspective-correct rendering calculation. To hide this artifact, Velez & Dubail built the car dashboard in *V-Rally 3* directly over the distorted screen area, masking the engine's shortcuts while elevating cockpit immersion.

Meanwhile, Skyworks Technologies took over the voxel torch from Rebellion by releasing *Quad Desert Fury*. The title improved visual fidelity over *Smuggler's Run* with denser, smaller landscape voxels and a significantly greater draw distance, though the demanding renderer compromised the vehicle handling and physics engine.

```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: V3D Engine Screen Warping Workaround accDescr: Flow diagram showing how V3D affine polygon distortion was masked by the dashboard HUD.

A["Software Poly Pipeline"] --> B["Non-Perspective Rendering"] B --> C["Lower Screen Poly Warping"] C --> D["Opaque Cockpit Overlay"] D --> E["Hidden Visual Artifacts & Enhanced Immersion"] ```

The standout racing achievement of 2003 was *Top Gear Rally*, developed by Melbourne-based Tantalus Media. Published by Kemco across PAL territories and Japan, it was picked up directly by Nintendo for its North American release—giving it monumental retail distribution advantages in an overcrowded market. Tantalus had iterated on their internal engine through previous quiet releases, but perfected it here. The game featured exceptionally large, fully 3D-modeled cars running alongside heavy, realistic vehicle physics. While its tracks lacked the sheer environmental complexity of Velez & Dubail's work, its car models were the largest on the system and its handling was unmatched.

- *Stuntman* incorporated moving, dynamic 3D track elements that adapted on the fly. - Non-perspective-correct texturing in the V3D engine caused noticeable warping along the lower viewport, which *V-Rally 3* cleverly concealed behind its 2D dashboard graphic. - *Top Gear Rally* stood out as the only Nintendo-published 3D title on minimme's master tracking list, providing crucial shelf exposure.

---

[17:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1047s) Studio Ambitions: Graphic State, Raylight, and Pocketeers

Several pioneering demo studios attempted to transition into full-scale commercial software in 2003, with varied results. Graphic State revisited the ambition of their earlier open-world technical demos to develop a *Crazy Taxi* clone titled *Crazy Taxi: Catch a Ride*. The title bit off more than the hardware could comfortably chew: while it squeezed expansive city maps, detailed architecture, and dozens of wandering 2D pedestrian sprites onto the screen, the renderer suffered from an uncomfortably low framerate and blurry resolution.

Raylight finally delivered commercial software utilizing their Blue Roses engine, launching two drastically different titles: 1. *Wing Commander: Prophecy*: An ambitious attempt to adapt the sprawling PC space combat simulator to handheld hardware. The engine handled full 3D space cruisers, dogfighting craft, beam weapons, and volumetric sprite explosions. Ship counts were carefully managed to minimize performance dips, making it a masterclass in handheld software scale. 2. *Ozzy & Drix*: A 3D sidescrolling platformer based on the animated series. While the game was mechanically dreadful to play, the visual presentation displayed uncommonly large, smoothly animated character models, clean background geometry, and vehicular action interludes.

Neither Blue Roses game managed to rival the jaw-dropping fidelity of Raylight's earlier private engine demos, causing them to lose ground to specialized European competitors. Meanwhile, AGB Games rebranded as Pocketeers and shipped *Need for Speed: Underground*. Although the visual clarity suffered from grainy rendering and cramped color palettes, the game handled smoothly. It established an EA partnership that yielded four increasingly sophisticated *Need for Speed* handheld follow-ups over the subsequent hardware lifecycle.

- *Crazy Taxi: Catch a Ride* pushed impressive open-world scope with roaming traffic, but suffered from poor framerates and sub-native visual clarity. - Raylight’s commercial debuts proved their tech could run on standard retail cartridges, but failed to match the hyper-detailed fidelity promised in their early trade-show demonstrations. - Pocketeers leveraged their initial *Underground* port into a multi-year franchise engagement, systematically refining their custom engine with every release.

---

[19:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1158s) Novelty Fatigue, Unreleased Tech, and the 2004 Horizon

By late 2003, public and critical fascination with Game Boy Advance 3D was evaporating. While unreleased concept footage like the canned third-person shooter *Radium* teased cinematic dynamic cameras and planar mirror reflection effects, the broader gaming press grew cynical. Review outlets increasingly dismissed 3D handheld engines as unplayable gimmicks designed primarily to trick consumers through still screenshots printed on the back of retail packaging. High-profile flops like *Quad Desert Fury*, *Ozzy & Drix*, *Cruis'n Velocity*, and *Medal of Honor: Underground* cemented the sentiment that polygon rendering often degraded gameplay.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: The Decline of Handheld 3D Novelty accDescr: Cycle showing how visual ambition clashed with publisher economics and market fatigue.

A["Complex 3D Tech Demos"] --> B["Compromised Handheld Gameplay"] B --> C["Press Disdain & 'Gimmick' Backlash"] C --> D["Retail Software Sales Plummet"] D --> E["Publisher Hesitation for High-End Engines"] ```

This commercial hesitation left cutting-edge technology stranded in development labs. An Italian developer called Prograph Research engineered *DR Advance*, a smooth, high-framerate 3D racing pipeline that boasted advanced lighting and track design. Despite positive industry buzz, it never received a commercial release because publishers were unwilling to take financial risks on original IP. A developer from Prograph captured the grim market realities: > “Our idea was to generate interest in the engine and in case propose a formula-like without a license. Unfortunately, though the interest was high, the profit margin offered was too low, as the GBA market became saturated very quickly and third-party products usually sold very few copies.”

The industry was already looking toward the future. By 2004, Nintendo launched the dual-screen Nintendo DS, and Sony introduced the PlayStation Portable in Japan. The sheer technological chasm between these platforms was jarring; playing a software-rendered GBA racer alongside hardware-accelerated launch titles like *Ridge Racer* on the PSP underscored just how rapidly handheld technology was moving.

Even against next-generation hardware, 2004 delivered standouts on the aging 32-bit portable. *Hot Wheels: Stunt Track Challenge* doubled down on the clean, flat-shaded aesthetic to maintain velocity, while Velez & Dubail pivoted from circuit racers to character action with *Asterix & Obelix XXL*. Swapping cars for Roman legions, the duo produced an expansive platformer featuring sprawling geometry and animated 2D character sprites scaling smoothly without pixel breakdown. The sheer density of enemies on-screen pushed the console to visuals that flirted with the look of a home PlayStation console.

- Press sentiment soured toward 3D on the system as developers used rudimentary polygon engines merely to capture striking box-art screenshots. - Prograph Research’s *DR Advance* engine proved that high-performance tech demos could no longer secure profitable publisher backing in a flooded market. - *Asterix & Obelix XXL* demonstrated that the V3D engine could successfully drive complex character platformers, pushing scaling sprites and environmental density to the outer physical limits of the console.

[21:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1302s) Late-Era Technical Ambition: Kill.Switch, GTA, and Payback

By 2004, developers were wringing unprecedented tricks out of the Game Boy Advance hardware. Visual Impact, who had previously developed a pair of reasonably impressive *SSX* snowboarding titles for EA, took a dramatic leap forward by porting Namco's tactical shooter *Kill.Switch*. Delivering a full-blown third-person cover shooter on a handheld system was an outright novelty for the era. The game features a polygonally rendered 3D protagonist who animates with remarkable fluidity, maintaining a smooth frame rate despite numerous active background elements and gunfire. Minimme singles it out as the single most anachronistic-feeling title on the platform up to that point.

```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: Evolution of Urban 3D Approaches on GBA accDescr: Diagram comparing the technical rendering strategies of GTA Advance, Payback, and Driver 3. subgraph GTA["GTA Advance (2004)"] G1["2D Sprites & Systems"] --> G2["Textured 3D Buildings & Lamps"] end subgraph PB["Payback (2004)"] P1["Full 3D Textured World"] --> P2["Dynamic Shadows & Physics"] end subgraph D3["Driver 3 (2005)"] D1["Full 3D Open Cities"] --> D2["On-Foot & High-Speed Driving"] end ```

That same year saw the release of *Grand Theft Auto Advance*, which took a hybrid approach by combining 2D top-down action with fully textured polygonal buildings and street lamps. While not the most aggressive showcase of pure 3D power, it stood out because the polygonal rendering had to share hardware overhead with sprawling, complex open-world gameplay systems. Minimme reflects on how this restrained design philosophy benefited the player experience: “This isn't the most impressive use, but with all it’s gameplay systems running at once it’s cool that it could also run so many fully textured 3D buildings on top of everything else.” In his view, “It’s also a good game, and honestly games that use 3D sparingly typically are more fun.”

Standing in direct contrast to GTA's hybrid restraint was *Payback*, an ambitious project that originally debuted on the Amiga in 2001 before being ported to Mac OS in 2003 and eventually reaching the GBA in late 2004. According to an unreferenced anecdote on Wikipedia, the port was completed well in advance, languishing until Destination Software finally stepped up to publish it. Where *Grand Theft Auto Advance* leaned on 2D sprites for its characters and traffic, *Payback* renders nearly everything in textured 3D polygons—from the city architecture down to individual pedestrians and vehicles. It incorporates detailed visual effects including car crash physics, tire skid marks, dynamic human and vehicle shadows, exhaust smoke, and exaggerated particle decals for bullets and blood. Minimme notes that while it ultimately falls short of GTA's charm and playability, “it’s certainly a lot more flashy and it has a lot more bells and whistles than any other game we’ve looked at or will look at.”

- *Kill.Switch* (2004) by Visual Impact introduced cover-based shooter mechanics and fluid character animation to the handheld. - *Grand Theft Auto Advance* combined dense 2D simulation logic with textured 3D architecture. - *Payback* pushed hardware boundaries with full 3D models for vehicles, humans, and environments, alongside real-time physics and shadow rendering.

---

[23:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1424s) Blue Roses Triumphs and Stumbles: Smashing Drive to Big Mutha Truckers

After earlier commercial releases like *Wing Commander Prophecy* and *Ozzy & Drix* failed to recreate the brilliance of Raylight Studios' initial tech demos, 2004 finally delivered a showcase that harnessed the Blue Roses engine effectively: *Smashing Drive*. An adaptation of the arcade taxi racer, the game sends players hurtling through dense, heavily scripted city courses loaded with destructible 3D obstacles and dynamic shortcuts. Everything reacts to vehicular collisions, creating a chaotic sense of momentum. Much like Reflections' *Stuntman*, the environments feel handcrafted and continuously evolve around the player. Minimme highlights its technical spectacle: “The sheer amount of detailed polygons streaming in and flying past at any given time is what makes this one so special - it’s straightforward but cool to see at this level.”

Heading into 2005, the handheld landscape shifted dramatically with the Western debut of the PlayStation Portable and the rising popularity of the Nintendo DS, prompting GBA development to taper off. Despite this decline, specialized developers continued experimenting with mature engines. Torus Games re-entered the first-person shooter ring after a three-year hiatus to release *Ice-Nine*, showcasing their refined proprietary engine. Meanwhile, David A. Palmer—the developer who coded the GBA port of *Doom* in 2001—returned to deliver a competent, if visually dated, spinoff entry in the *Tokyo Xtreme Racer* series. Raylight also turned out a rather sluggish, laggy port of *Street Racing Syndicate*, which offered little beyond oversized car models.

Raylight's final release for the system was *Big Mutha Truckers*, an entry that doubled as a simultaneous release on the Nintendo DS using the exact same Blue Roses engine. The GBA edition represents a rare 1:1 demake of its dual-screen sibling, retaining the same sprawling open-ended map structures while dialing down level-of-detail settings across the board. Its release struck Minimme as deeply surreal: “The fact that this is a 1:1 demake of a DS game that’s impressive in and of itself is a big part of the novelty here, and it’s just bizarre that this game even exists not only because the PS2 game it’s based on is so bizarre, but also because these DS and GBA ports came out three years after it.”

- *Smashing Drive* (2004) demonstrated the Blue Roses engine streaming dense, interactive 3D assets at high speeds. - Torus Games proved their technical longevity with *Ice-Nine*, while David A. Palmer engineered *Tokyo Xtreme Racer Advance*. - *Big Mutha Truckers* (2005) served as Raylight's swan song on the platform, sharing its underlying tech directly with the Nintendo DS version.

---

[25:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1543s) Peak Engineering: VD-Dev’s Driver 3

The pinnacle of pure 3D hardware manipulation on the Game Boy Advance arrived in 2005 courtesy of Fernando Velez and Guillaume Dubail (VD-Dev) with their port of *Driver 3* (Driv3r). Minimme unhesitatingly crowns the project: “What I believe is hands down the most technically impressive 3D game ever released on the GBA was Velez and Dubail’s port of Driver 3, and I’m not just saying that because I love Driver 3.” Though admitting it ranks as their least fun game to actually play due to cumbersome handling and mission structures, the technical feats operating beneath the hood remain unrivaled.

To pull off the handheld port, the French duo merged two distinct pipelines: the third-person on-foot exploration engine they had established in *Asterix & Obelix XXL* and the high-speed vehicle rendering systems from *V-Rally 3* and *Stuntman*. With these tools, they constructed two expansive open-world cities that mirrored the layout and scale of the home console releases. The GBA renders fully realized city blocks, multi-lane traffic, pedestrians, and dynamic transitions between car theft and on-foot shootouts in real time. The visual parity achieved between an underpowered 16.78 MHz handheld and 128-bit home consoles cemented the title as the undisputed engineering high-water mark of the platform's commercial lifecycle.

---

[26:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1591s) The System's Twilight: 2006 to Cars: Mater-National in 2007

By 2006, the Game Boy Advance had entered its twilight era, leaving behind a barren landscape where only six notable 3D games reached store shelves. Among these late releases, only two offered genuine entertainment value: The Pocketeers closed out their studio history with their final *Need for Speed* project, while Visual Impact bowed out with a conversion of *Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam*. The latter served as a polished farewell to the sharp, untextured, flat-shaded polygon aesthetic that had defined early 3D experimentation on the handheld.

Curiously, 2006 also witnessed a sudden, inexplicable surge in voxel-based releases. Skyworks, the studio responsible for *ATV Quad Power Racing* back in 2003, released three separate voxel titles in a single calendar year—effectively doubling the total number of voxel releases on the platform before the hardware died out completely. These included another quad-bike title, clearly engineered to squeeze the final drops of commercial utility out of an engine they had perfected years earlier.

The official commercial end for 3D graphics arrived in late 2007 with *Cars: Mater-National Championship*. Australian studio Tantalus dusted off the rendering engine they had built for *Top Gear Rally* four years prior, turning in a technically solid racing game with detailed car models. Minimme notes the poetic decline in subject matter over the handheld's six-year lifespan: “I’d say that the fact that we started with big gaming IPs like Doom and Duke Nukem and Resident Evil and ended up with Cars and some random monster truck and quad bike games speaks to where the GBA ended up as a whole. Oversaturated, and aimed at kids.”

- 2006 brought the final releases from The Pocketeers (*Need for Speed*) and Visual Impact (*Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam*). - Skyworks released three voxel-based outdoor racers in 2006, leveraging code originally developed years earlier. - Tantalus closed out the GBA's 3D history in 2007 with *Cars: Mater-National Championship*, resurrecting their *Top Gear Rally* engine.

---

[27:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1674s) Lost Gems and Leaked Tech Demos (2011–2019)

Long after the retail death of the handheld, internet leaks and preservation communities unearthed discarded prototypes that shed new light on the console's technical capabilities. In 2011, a build of Rare's *Banjo-Pilot* leaked online, revealing that the 2004 beta was built around a sophisticated voxel terrain engine. Although the final 2005 release was redesigned into a traditional 2D Mode 7-style flat plane racer because the voxel build suffered from severe frame drops, the leak demonstrated a breathtaking artistic direction that could have been the system's premier voxel title.

In 2012, preservationists discovered a 2001 tech demo developed by German studio Shin'en Multimedia, known for push-the-envelope titles like *Iridion 3D*, *The Touryst*, and *Fast RMX*. The racer prototype featured real-time polygon rendering and dynamic vehicle shading in its selection menus. That same year brought the discovery of a *Virtua Racing* prototype pitched to Sega by Dream On Studios. Evaluating its uncertain timeline, Minimme remarks: “If this was as early as 2001 then it’s really amazing, and even if it came out towards the end it’s still well above average.”

In 2015, two more lost projects surfaced. A YouTuber named Steven Seventyeight showcased *Mario Kart XXL*, an unreleased 2004 pitch prototype that featured two simultaneous scaling and rotating pseudo-Mode 7 background layers—a visual feat unmatched by any licensed retail GBA software. Soon after, footage emerged of *Dune: Ornithopter Assault*, an almost completely finished voxel flight shooter by Cryo Interactive that had been cancelled in 2002. Taking clear cues from NovaLogic's *Comanche*, the game restricted gameplay to a cockpit visor overlay to maximize processing headroom for its smooth, undulating desert landscapes.

The discoveries continued into 2019 when archival channel PtoPOnline uncovered prototypes from NDWare and C4 Digital. These consisted of a fully modeled *Harry Potter* Quidditch engine demo and a 3D tennis prototype. The Quidditch software booted with an intro splash screen for Climax Studios, suggesting the developers behind *Hot Wheels World Race* and *Serious Sam Advance* had circulated an uncredited, high-performance character-rendering framework to outside teams.

- *Banjo-Pilot* prototype (leaked 2011): A cancelled 2004 build that utilized full voxel landscapes instead of the flat Mode 7 tracks seen in the final game. - Shin'en Multimedia Prototype (leaked 2012): A 2001 polygon racing demo featuring real-time vehicle lighting. - *Virtua Racing Advance* (leaked 2012): Dream On Studios' polished tech demo pitched directly to Sega. - *Mario Kart XXL* (uncovered 2015): A 2004 demo running dual scaling and rotating background planes. - *Dune: Ornithopter Assault* (uncovered 2015): A near-complete 2002 voxel flight combat game styled after *Comanche*. - NDWare / C4 Digital demos (uncovered 2019): Quidditch and tennis prototypes running on an engine tied to Climax Studios.

---

[31:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1862s) Developer Legacies and the Reality of 3D on GBA

The independent studios that spent the early 2000s hacking 3D math into the GBA's simple 2D hardware used those lessons to navigate the broader video game industry for decades to come. Velez & Dubail rebranded as VD-Dev, maintaining an unbroken reputation for extracting impossible visuals out of handhelds with titles like *C.O.P. The Recruit* on the Nintendo DS and *IronFall: Invasion* on the Nintendo 3DS. Despite the tragic death of co-founder Fernando Velez in 2016, the studio reorganized and delivered the multi-platform futuristic racer *Rise: Race The Future* in 2018.

Raylight Studios also prospered by updating the Blue Roses engine through successive console generations, transforming it into modern middleware that powers releases across the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Australian teams achieved major modern milestones as well: Torus Games transitioned into high-definition remaster projects like *Praetorians HD Remaster*, while Tantalus Media built an elite reputation for console porting, tackling *ZombiU*, *Cities: Skylines*, and Nintendo's high-profile *The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD* on Wii U.

Reviewing the era as a whole, Minimme observes that despite the dizzying ambition of early technology demos, the GBA never received an undisputed 3D masterpiece. Hardware limitations constantly forced teams to gut mechanics, truncate draw distances, or slash framerates just to get polygon pipelines running. Evaluating the systemic compromise, Minimme notes: “I mentioned this earlier but in some sense there is a direct correlation between how limited the use of 3D is, and how good the game is.” Handheld titles like *Grand Theft Auto Advance*, *Max Payne*, and *Tony Hawk's Pro Skater* succeeded precisely because they treated 3D graphics as an accent rather than the core architecture.

[32:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1939s) Reflecting on 3D on the Game Boy Advance

Looking back across the entire landscape of 3D gaming on the handheld, the titles that truly endure are the ones that manage to deliver genuine gameplay depth rather than relying purely on novelty, setting themselves apart "because they feel like more than just glorified tech demos." While the Game Boy Advance was never engineered to render fully realized polygonal spaces, the sheer ingenuity required to overcome its fixed hardware limitations leaves a lasting mark.

Even with the system's obvious visual trade-offs, low polygon counts, and strained frame rates, the historical effort to make three-dimensional worlds portable remains a captivating chapter in handheld programming. Minimme closes out the retrospective on a warm, appreciative note about the developers' technical wizardry: “Still though, this stuff will always be fascinating and impressive to me at least, and I hope you enjoyed joining me on this exploration of mine.”

## Notable quotes > [25:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1543s) What I believe is hands down the most technically impressive 3D game ever released on the GBA was Velez and Dubail’s port of Driver 3, and I’m not just saying that because I love Driver 3. — minimme

> [31:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs&t=1862s) in some sense there is a direct correlation between how limited the use of 3D is, and how good the game is. — minimme

## Mentioned minimme, Fernando Velez, Guillaume Dubail, David A. Palmer, Steven Seventyeight, Game Boy Advance, Game Boy Advance SP, Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo 64, Nintendo DS, PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Game Boy Color, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, Amiga, Nintendo, IGN, Vicarious Visions, JV Games, David A. Palmer Productions, Activision, Crawfish Interactive, Graphic State, AGB Games, Pocketeers, Raylight Studios, Capcom, Sennari Interactive, Reflections Interactive, Rebellion Developments, NovaLogic, Torus Games, Sega, THQ, VD-Dev, Skyworks Technologies, Tantalus Media, Kemco, Electronic Arts, Prograph Research, Visual Impact, Namco, Destination Software, Rare, Shin'en Multimedia, Dream On Studios, Cryo Interactive, NDWare, C4 Digital, Climax Studios, PtoPOnline, V3D Engine, Blue Roses Engine, C2 Engine, Binary Space Partitioning, Mode 7, Yoshi's Story, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, Max Payne, Backtrack, Doom, Doom II, Ecks vs. Sever, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, Cruis'n Velocity, Dark Arena, Star X, Quake, Metal Gear Solid, Resident Evil, Resident Evil 2, Driver 2, Driver 3, Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf, Smuggler's Run, Medal of Honor: Underground, Duke Nukem Advance, Super Monkey Ball Jr., V-Rally 3, 007: Nightfire, Sega Rally Championship, Drome Racers, Stuntman, Quad Desert Fury, Top Gear Rally, Crazy Taxi: Catch a Ride, Wing Commander: Prophecy, Ozzy & Drix, Need for Speed: Underground, Radium, Hot Wheels: Stunt Track Challenge, Asterix & Obelix XXL, Kill.Switch, Grand Theft Auto Advance, Payback, Smashing Drive, Ice-Nine, Tokyo Xtreme Racer Advance, Street Racing Syndicate, Big Mutha Truckers, Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, Cars: Mater-National Championship, Banjo-Pilot, Iridion 3D, The Touryst, Fast RMX, Virtua Racing Advance, Mario Kart XXL, Dune: Ornithopter Assault, C.O.P. The Recruit, IronFall: Invasion, Rise: Race The Future, Praetorians HD Remaster, Cities: Skylines, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD

## Video description Join me as we relive the weird and wonderful timeline of 3D graphics engines on the GBA - be sure to rest your eyes when necessary!

More GBA videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL643B5filmfFl35g3r2l7_ucQKmv_7K6_

Support the channel on Patreon for some bonus content and early videos! https://www.patreon.com/minimme

Check out my Twitter: https://twitter.com/minimme Check out my 2nd channel: https://www.youtube.com/micromme Check out my cool web 1.0 website + discord server: http://www.minimme.com/

Sebastian Macke's Voxel explanation https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace

Music: The Elevator Bossa Nova - www.bensound.com

Ocean - DeeTunez Free Beat 2014 - DeeTunez https://soundcloud.com/deetunez https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdunOUTr3zpHYZxLz3LeUrg

Watching the Clouds - LAKEY INSPIRED Fly With Me - LAKEY INSPIRED Warm Nights - LAKEY INSPIRED Monroe - LAKEY INSPIRED https://soundcloud.com/lakeyinspired https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOmy8wuTpC95lefU5d1dt2Q

Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Video Credits/Sources: "Monster Truck Madness ... (GBA)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrHcmknsY-k "Mario Kart: Super Circuit ... (GBA)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USFwEmkk1tA "Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf ... (GBA)" https://youtu.be/K6dglTKfRgM "Sega Rally Championship ... (GBA)" https://youtu.be/pKNTc_BJUBw Videos by YouTube channel 10min Gameplay https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzjc5u-yPodS9U9E4tpNRUw

"007: Nightfire - Game Boy Advance" YouTube video by Gaming Exhibit https://youtu.be/va8TNG7eIJc https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnpTNnBBzxLjwM6en8eKy3A

"Game Boy Advance Longplay [099] Star Wars: Flight of the Falcon" YouTube video by World-of-Longplays http://www.longplays.org Played by: Mad-Matt https://youtu.be/q6HMu0k-NVc https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVi6ofFy7QyJJrZ9l0-fwbQ

"Grand Theft Auto on the Amiga!! Payback [Quick Play] | Nostalgia Nerd" YouTube video by Nostalgia Nerd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xmd3HBKRod8 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qPftDWPw9XuExpSgfkmJQ

"The Most Impressive GBA Game Ever!? - Port Patrol" YouTube video by Fraki https://youtu.be/rpctDKMoGIA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ9-nBb_3BB0zik4t3XXoFw

"Prototype - Game Boy ADVANCE - E3 Trailer [16:9]" https://youtu.be/9ATtJZXQVt8

"Gameboy Advance 3D-Trip by Oxygene by Oxygene, 2001" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cuv6_NlrIY

Graphic State's Open World Demo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyGcVQIq2J8

AGB/Pocketeers C2 Engine Demos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XNo1auSJhY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxxX3mXSD8I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7zJejGu88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVdOFjJ99ic

Raylight Blue Roses engine demos https://youtu.be/M4HC3SOb-K4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTRYIOIMqU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuMcCJkS5ZI https://youtu.be/UytJbUCLBqU

"Sniper Elite 4 - Launch Trailer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGBRAEvXZ94

French interview of Velez and Dubail for footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkJssrpWZ9M

GBA SP Unveil B-Roll by Giant Bomb https://youtu.be/TQbUuXaYZnQ

Radium trailer https://youtu.be/I4JcpKJZUxQ

GP Advance/DR Advance engine prototype https://youtu.be/QleV3OIUZmE

E3 2004 DS intro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaA-lYUQom0

E3 2004 PSP intro https://youtu.be/cg-Zanga13Y

The Touryst Trailer https://youtu.be/lSQD5xJeXpk

Shin'En Prototype https://youtu.be/nok9bMha8JU

Virtua Racing Prototype https://youtu.be/KD5iGYMuAbQ

Mario Kart XXL https://youtu.be/zL8FdA3lshY

Quidditch/Tennis C4 demos https://youtu.be/BJhJUxcCUN8 https://youtu.be/PE8w7zdJtYU

Rise trailer https://youtu.be/-Ue9Cozkc7s

Praetorians HD trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_GZOmcqJLc

Cities: Skylines trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_zDorj9nZI

Twilight Princess Wii U trailer https://youtu.be/-CfW2hpHoNI

Other credits: VD-Dev quote from SSFF's video on them https://youtu.be/rfOR3XqrJc4

Sebastian Macke's Voxel explanation https://github.com/s-macke/VoxelSpace

IGN/Gamespot/Journo/News Articles: https://au.ign.com/articles/2000/08/22/game-boy-advance-development-kit-revealed https://au.ign.com/articles/2001/03/20/gba-ignpockets-game-boy-advance-faq https://web.archive.org/web/20001003153249/https://pocket.ign.com/news/23952.html https://www.gamespot.com/articles/nintendo-announces-north-american-gba-launch-details/1100-2693383/ https://au.ign.com/articles/2001/01/31/footage-of-new-3d-gba-engines

AGB Games archived website: http://web.archive.org/web/20020609204859/http://www.agbgames.com/news.htm

DR Advance quote Originally from this now defunct blog: https://massycalamai.blogspot.com/ Seen on: https://www.unseen64.net/2011/06/10/gp-advance-gba-cancelled/

Raylight website: http://www.raylightgames.com/

[Source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fgH08z6xs)

中文简报

硬件瓶颈之下，程序员强行在任天堂2D掌机GBA上实现3D画面 Game Boy Advance的软件表现证明，仅将3D作为点缀克制使用的作品，实际游玩体验始终优于纯多边形炫技之作，后者为了在2D芯片上运行而牺牲了帧率与玩法机制。尽管Game Boy Advance完全是作为一台2D精灵图机器设计的，但随着开发者争相将主机级体验移植到便携掌机上，它却意外成为了纯软件渲染3D技术的竞技场。本次回顾梳理了这一技术演进历程：从首发初期类似《托尼·霍克职业滑板2》的混合类型以及类似《毁灭战士》的BSP光栅走廊射击游戏，到《V-Rally 3》和《车手3》等顶峰时期的技术突破，再到后期的体素实验与未发售原型。Minimme指出，尽管这些技术演示类游戏往往饱受低帧率和玩法缩水之苦，但那些克制使用3D技术或成功达成高性能表现的作品，依然留下了令人惊叹的底层代码编程传奇。尽管任天堂正式将Game Boy Advance设计为不含3D硬件的专用2D平台，开发者仍纯粹依靠32位ARM7TDMI的软件渲染，打造出了光线投射引擎、真正的多边形引擎以及体素高度图。 (0:02) GBA第一人称射击游戏市场早期迅速崛起，涌现出Torus Games的《毁灭战士II》和《毁灭公爵Advance》等高水准作品，但该类型的产量从2002年的6款骤降至2003年至2006年间的每年仅1款。 (13:26) Velez & Dubail自主研发的V3D引擎树立了该掌机的画质巅峰标杆，并在2005年移植的《车手3》中达到顶峰，该作渲染出了具有步行与驾驶机制的完整开放世界3D城市。 (25:43) 在整个GBA游戏库中，视觉野心与玩法机制质量之间呈现出负相关：节制使用3D或将其作为混合点缀的游戏，整体游玩体验往往远胜于那些全力进行纯软件渲染的炫技作品。 (31:02)

Source quotes

[25:43] minimme: What I believe is hands down the most technically impressive 3D game ever released on the GBA was Velez and Dubail’s port of Driver 3, and I’m not just saying that because I love Driver 3. [31:02] minimme: in some sense there is a direct correlation between how limited the use of 3D is, and how good the game is.

Original transcript

[0:02] The Gameboy Advance had a strangely unique existence in that it was a console that was [0:06] fundamentally designed for sprite based 2D graphics while polygonal 3D graphics were [0:10] all the rage in the rest of the video game world. Through some programming magic the [0:15] GBA proved to be only just powerful enough to handle 3D or at least pseudo-3D graphics, [0:20] and because of the gaming landscape at the time, of course developers took it upon themselves [0:24] to make 3D games. It was never a question of whether they should, it was a question [0:28] of whether they could. [0:30] In this video we’re going to timeline out and explore what was something of a fascinating [0:34] rise of 3D graphics on the GBA by looking at the big milestone games, the ambitious [0:38] tech demos, and the developers behind it all, but first I want to give a foreword on how [0:43] I put this all together. A lot of you might remember that some years ago I made list videos [0:48] where I looked at graphically impressive handheld games starting with the GBA, and through these [0:52] videos I built up a knowledge of what games used 3D and how they achieved it. [0:57] There’s no real wiki for this specific subset of games, and no comprehensive list of them [1:02] anywhere, so I made my own spreadsheet of them for this video where I entered related [1:07] data like release dates and metascores and developers and publishers, and through this [1:10] I do graph out some trends and do some data storytelling here. If you’d like to see [1:15] the spreadsheet it’s linked in the description, and I do recognise that there are some potential [1:20] pitfalls with my methods which I’ve noted there too and tried my best to avoid. So with [1:25] that in mind, let’s begin. [1:30] Before anyone in the public even knew what the Gameboy Advance looked like, IGN leaked [1:34] a very barebones dev kit in August of 2000, emphasis on barebones. Supplied with the dev [1:40] kits was a single level demo of Yoshi’s Story which showcased the GBA’s impressive [1:45] sprites and colours, some Mode 7, parallax and zooming capabilities, and a particularly [1:50] memorable pre-render of the rotating island. Now while Yoshi’s Story was a 2D game, it [1:56] was also a Nintendo 64 game which served to bolster the pre-release hype for what the [2:00] GBA was capable of. We all think of the GBA to be something of a handheld Super Nintendo, [2:05] and this was the general sentiment back then too where there were rumours of a port of [2:09] the Super Nintendo’s Yoshi’s Island which ultimately came to fruition. To unintentionally [2:14] and unofficially introduce the console with a much more ambitious N64 port was a big deal. [2:20] Only a couple of days after this, Nintendo would formally unveil the system in Japan [2:25] with prices, dates, and more importantly, specs. Now it’s important to note again [2:29] here that the GBA was not designed for 3D graphics - with Nintendo’s Executive Vice [2:34] President at the time specifically pointing out on announcement that the GBA is a dedicated [2:38] two-dimensional platform in what seems like an attempt to shut down the talk and rumours [2:42] of it supporting 3D, of which there were many with stuff like this Purple Yoshi screenshot [2:47] floating around online at the time which just looked far too good to be true - because it [2:52] was probably fake. [2:53] Early 2001 saw Nintendo announce more details about the system and it’s western launch, [2:58] where they revealed 15 launch titles. Among these, F-Zero: Maximum Velocity showcased [3:03] some impressive Mode-7-esque capability akin to the original SNES game. A lot more racers [3:08] would go on to do the same, and while it is impressive in its own right, I’ll generally [3:12] avoid talking about this graphics technique simply because there are much more ambitious [3:16] graphics engines to talk about. [3:18] Like, for example, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 from that same launch line-up which actually [3:23] featured fully animated polygonal 3D models for the skaters that seamlessly blended into [3:27] the pre-rendered environments in what ended up being a great port of the game. More subtle [3:32] uses of 3D like this can be seen throughout the GBA’s library, like with the character [3:37] models in Max Payne, or bits and pieces of the environment [4:23] in sports games. [4:44] It wasn’t long before third parties would start making 3D tech demos as a way to attract [4:49] publishers. Something to understand is that even though a console might not have dedicated [4:53] 3D hardware, you can still in some sense brute-force polygons if you want to, though you’d often [4:58] preferably want to use some tricks to get around needing to. [5:01] Like with the first major 3D-ish release, a port of the 1998 Windows shooter Backtrack [5:06] by JV Games. A lot of you have probably already picked up on this so I’ll be quick, but [5:11] this uses a graphics technique made famous by a lot of 90s PC shooters that’s known [5:15] as Binary Space Partitioning, or BSP. Essentially, walls are drawn based only on what’s in [5:22] the players cone of vision. The algorithm for it is deceptively simple so it’s very [5:26] efficient for low end hardware, but Backtrack isn’t particularly impressive with its low [5:31] framerate and low draw distance. [5:33] The most famous game that uses BSP is Doom, so naturally less than a month later David [5:38] A Palmer Productions and Activision teamed up for a Doom GBA release, and the results [5:43] are far, far better as it smoothly flows through much more geometrically complex levels with [5:48] a seemingly unlimited draw distance. It’s not a perfect version of Doom, especially [5:52] with it’s lower resolution which basically doubles the size of each pixel on the GBA [5:56] screen, and because it’s based on the Jaguar port of Doom rather than the original DOS [6:00] game, but critics and fans loved it and apparently I ranked it as the best GBA First Person Shooter [6:05] around when I reviewed them all years ago, so it must be pretty good. I need a better [6:10] memory. [6:11] A third FPS came out less than a month later with the impressive Ecks vs Sever, and a company [6:15] named Graphic State would try their hand at a BSP engine racing game in the Cruis’n [6:20] series with Cruis’n Velocity - which wowed no one with it’s weird visuals and dodgy [6:25] physics. [6:26] Despite this, Graphic State would emerge as the first big player in the overambitious [6:29] 3D GBA games world not only with the smooth, charming Doom-like Dark Arena in January of [6:35] 2002, but also with their tech demos, one of which in particular showed a GTA-like world [6:40] where you could walk around in first person, get in and out of vehicles, see pedestrians [6:44] and scrolling backgrounds, and even fly a helicopter. It’s really a sight to behold, [6:50] even if it only lives on as an old blurry IGN video. They also released an impressive [6:55] StarFox clone in March with the creatively titled Star X, which marked the beginning [7:00] of a handful of textureless polygonal games that would be released on the system. Star [7:05] X in particular was exceptionally smooth considering how crowded it would get. [7:09] 2002 really feels like the year of the GBA tech demonstration, with random demos appearing [7:15] left, right and centre, so another dev to emerge from this was the England based AGB [7:20] Games with their C2 Engine. Among some really impressive racing demos, a soccer demo, and [7:25] of course another GTA style demo because it’s the early 2000s, was a very impressive Quake [7:30] proof of concept which really made a splash. Considering the most complex game we’d seen [7:34] so far was Doom, to skip all the way to Quake was huge, even if it only was an empty 3D [7:40] level. It was just unusual to see complex angled geometry and high quality animated [7:46] textures like this. [7:48] The biggest splash in the incredibly niche GBA 3D tech demo world at the time was from [7:53] an Italian developer named Raylight Studios, who debuted their Blue Roses engine with a [7:57] large handful of demos that were all, at the time, jaw dropping. Most famously out of these [8:02] was a Metal Gear Solid test scene which showed a well modelled version of the PS1 game’s [8:07] opening area with full texturing including animated water, and some Resident Evil test [8:12] scenes which showcased very impressive 3D character animation that was apparently mocapped. [8:19] Raylight later even created a famous demo version of Resident Evil 2 in the hopes that [8:23] Capcom would hire them for the port, but they were unfortunately denied. Oh, what could [8:29] have been. [8:30] As far as games that actually came out goes, we went from 4 notable releases on my spreadsheet [8:35] in 2001, to 15 in 2002. A very unknown company called Sennari Interactive ported Driver 2 [8:46] down using a BSP engine, which might not look like much but it was a technical achievement [8:51] with it’s massive open world cities where you could both drive and walk around on foot, [8:54] it’s good physics system and police AI. Like it is surprising how well this captures [9:00] the essence of Driver 2. [9:03] Rebellion, yes, that Rebellion, had a particularly weird year on the GBA. Their first release [9:12] was in May with a Tiger Woods game that rendered still frames with voxel graphics - which I [9:16] believe is the first appearance of Voxel based graphics on the GBA. This was a technique [9:21] popularised by a company named NovaLogic on 90s PCs, you might remember games like Comanche [9:27] or Delta Force which used it, and it basically renders a heightmap using vertical lines in [9:32] your cone of vision. It’s hard to explain quickly, but this fantastic visualisation [9:36] by a guy named Sebastian Macke helps a lot. I’ll include a link to his amazing article [9:41] explaining the tech in the description. Again, like BSP, using Voxels in this way serves [9:46] as an unconventional but inexpensive method of creating 3D graphics - which is exactly [9:51] why it’s used here on the GBA. [9:54] Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf doesn’t move around in the voxel world. Like I said it just renders [9:58] single frames, but Rebellion would follow it up in September with a port of Rockstar’s [10:03] Smuggler’s Run which animates this voxel world effortlessly. Granted the voxels themselves, [10:09] being the cubes this world is made up of, are pretty large, meaning they’re easier [10:12] to work with from a technical perspective, and the draw distance is quite low, particularly [10:17] when compared to later Voxel based games, but considering how early this came out it [10:22] is a real achievement. [10:23] Rebellion closed the year with an absolute disaster of a game. Medal of Honor: Underground [10:28] is considered to maybe be the worst GBA game ever made, it’s certainly the worst one [10:33] I’ve personally played, and I think this footage of it just speaks for itself. It’s [10:39] a slideshow of endless muddy pixels, making it near unplayable. Again, Rebellion had a [10:44] weird year on the GBA, so weird in fact that I guess they just gave up on the console for [10:49] good releasing no more games on it from this point forward. [10:53] Thankfully to make up for that awful FPS, Ecks vs Sever got something of a sequel remake [10:58] thing to tie-in with the film that was pretty competently put together visually, though [11:02] it bit off more than it could chew with weapon scopes and ladders and innocent bystanders [11:07] and alarms and multiple campaigns. I guess it’s interesting to see such an over complex [11:12] shooter on the system. [11:13] For something more straightforward Aussie dev Torus Games released two of the best FPS’s [11:17] to come out on the system with Duke Nukem Advance and Doom 2, both of which raised the [11:22] technical bar for FPS GBA games to a point that could be argued was never met again by [11:26] any other dev but Torus themselves. Featuring complex levels with sliding doors and multiple [11:31] different floor elevations with detailed textures on all surfaces that could change with damage [11:36] - all while supporting many sprites and running at a smooth framerate, these games biggest [11:40] achievements are simply being filled with character and just being fun. It’s not hard [11:46] to get sucked into them and see them as more than just impressive tech, and in hindsight [11:50] these two games and the first Doom are by far the gold standard first person shooters [11:55] on the system because they’re just that good. [11:58] SEGA got THQ to publish a GBA Monkey Ball game which fared very well thanks to its minimalist [12:04] look, and it’s simple gameplay justifies the use of 3D graphics better than most games [12:09] - though playing Monkey Ball with a d-pad should be a crime. [12:13] Really though, there’s one release from 2002 that stands head and shoulders above [12:17] even the tech demos and that comes from french duo Velez & Dubail. They were all about pushing [12:25] hardware to its limits, especially on the Gameboy Colour prior to this with a good line [12:29] of impressive racers that are among the best on the system from a technical standpoint. [12:34] Only midway through 2002 Velez & Dubail debuted their V3D engine with V-Rally 3. V. This game [12:41] is just incredible; geometrically dense and very complex environments with banks and hills [12:46] and buildings and angles with effortlessly blended sprites for trees and objects all [12:51] while still maximising its use of the GBA’s screen resolution and being smoother than [12:56] virtually any game we’ve looked at so far. It sports well above average car physics, [13:01] it has a cockpit view for that extra rally feel, and it has race modes with other cars [13:06] on the track. It’s a sight to behold, and the devs themselves have described it as one [13:12] of the most important moments in their lives as developers. It really does feel like a [13:16] watershed moment for them as they’d set a new bar for both themselves and the GBA [13:21] and only they would exceed that bar in years to come. [13:26] 2003 saw the GBA start slowing down and changing direction a bit. After over 600 game releases [13:33] total in well under two years, averaging about a game per day since the Japanese release, [13:38] 2003 had about 100 fewer games come out compared to 2002 and the trend continued downwards. [13:44] The market was just so oversaturated because development costs were so low, and there’s [13:49] an easily observable trend towards children's games even within the first year of the GBA’s [13:54] lifespan. [13:55] By my data, FPS games on the GBA went from 3 releases in 2001, to 6 releases in 2002 [14:01] followed by merely 1 release per year up until and including 2006. 2003s FPS game was something [14:08] of a demake of 007 Nightfire by JV games, the same dev who kicked off these FPSs with [14:14] Backtrack. Though this might not look like much on first sight with it’s lower framerate, [14:17] it’s a lot more interesting than you might expect. With it’s complex 3D geometry showcasing [14:22] things like ramps and furniture and mounted turrets in full polygonal 3D, this seems to [14:27] use a more traditional engine rather than a BSP based engine like we’ve seen in the [14:32] past. What this means is there’s a lot less right angles, a more liberal use of texturing, [14:37] and more 3D objects everywhere. On top of this the muzzle flash from your gun seems [14:41] to light up the environment close to you which is really something else on the GBA, so while [14:46] I said Torus’s Doom 2 and Duke Nukem games are probably the most impressive on the system [14:50] particularly thanks to their framerate, there’s definitely an argument to be made for Nightfire. [14:55] In place of all the first person shooters, driving games took over the 3D GBA mantle [15:02] from this point forwards. Sega Rally Championship had a decently fun GBA port, though it wouldn’t [15:08] hold a candle to V-Rally 3 mostly because of it’s much lower resolution. Lego Drome [15:12] Racers would really impress with it’s smooth framerate, having a gorgeous, Super-FX style [15:16] look that took advantage of pastel colours saving the need for expensive textures. [15:21] Velez and Dubail knocked it out of the park again with a port of Stuntman, improving the [15:25] engine to include moving 3D objects and much more complex levels which evolved visually [15:30] as you drove through them - all while being a lot of fun to play. Just an interesting [15:35] note about the V3D engine, something distinguishing about it is that at the bottom of the screen [15:39] the polygons typically appear to bend, which indicates that the 3D graphics aren’t rendered [15:45] in a very perspective correct way assumedly in order to run smoother. I find it sneakily [15:51] clever how V-Rally’s cockpit view covered it up though which feels like two birds with [15:55] one stone. [15:57] A company called Skyworks Technologies took the reigns from Rebellion for Voxel engine [16:01] games, releasing Quad Desert Fury which looks far better than it plays, having a much higher [16:06] fidelity engine than Rebellion’s Smuggler’s Run did with smaller voxels and a longer draw [16:10] distance - though it’s physics and driving model suffer because of this. Still, these [16:15] voxel games never fail to amaze me. [16:18] One of the most notable releases from 2003 is actually a Nintendo published game, the [16:23] only Nintendo published game on my spreadsheet, which was a huge deal on the GBA. It was actually [16:29] published by Kemco in PAL regions and in Japan, but with a library as oversaturated as the [16:34] Gameboy Advance’s was, having Nintendo behind your project, even if it was just in the US, [16:39] was a godsend in exposure alone. [16:42] The game was called Top Gear Rally, developed by the Australian Tantalus Media, who actually [16:47] quietly released a couple of racers on this engine in the past. This was where they really [16:51] nailed it though and got the appropriate recognition, because it’s a very, very strong rally racer [16:56] with truly weighty, realistic controlling cars that are modelled in full 3D. As a whole, [17:01] this isn’t as impressive as V-Rally or Stuntman, but it boasted the largest 3D models around [17:06] at the time with the cars and the gameplay itself was unmatched when it came to realistic [17:11] driving. It was also one of the first GBA games I personally ever owned, so I’m pretty [17:17] sentimental about it, but trust me, it is genuinely exceptional. [17:27] Graphic State made a reappearance after bursting onto the scene early on with those decent [17:30] published games and those particularly impressive tech demos like that open world one, and in [17:35] the same vein as that demo they made an open world Crazy Taxi spinoff which bit off more [17:40] than it could chew with it’s low res and framerate, but this does feature surprisingly [17:45] large, detailed and complex open levels especially when compared to its contemporaries like Driver [17:50] 2. It also features a lot of sprites on the screen at once - I just wish it handled it [17:55] all better. [17:56] Raylight finally debuted their Blue Roses engine in not one, but two commercial releases. [18:01] Wing Commander Prophecy is one of the most ambitious and complete games on the system, [18:06] being an attempt at porting the full version of the PC game down to the GBA and mostly [18:10] succeeding. There’s heaps of 3D models in the game for ships that are smartly used sparingly [18:15] to avoid slowdown, and there’s some good simple weapon and explosion effects to help [18:19] sell it all. It’s not the most impressive game visually, but it is impressive in it’s [18:25] scale. [18:26] Raylight’s other game was Ozzy & Drix, a 3D side scroller based on the cartoon of the [18:30] same name, and it’s an awful game with some decent visuals. Large models that animate [18:35] this much is unusual, it’s generally nicely uncluttered, and there’s even some driving [18:40] sections and cutscenes. Both Raylight’s offerings in 2003 were above average visually, [18:45] but they weren’t getting close to the tech demos we’d seen from them in years prior [18:49] and they were getting beat out by the competition. [18:54] Speaking of big tech demo companies finally releasing games, AGB games, the guys behind [18:59] the Quake demo, renamed to Pocketeers and released a port of Need for Speed Underground [19:04] - which didn’t look great with it’s lowered res and busy visuals, but it did at least [19:08] play well and Pocketeers went on to release another four impressive Need for Speed games [19:14] over the next few years with vastly improved visuals. [19:18] Now while there were still tech demos and new engines popping up here and there throughout [19:22] 2003, like, for example, this trailer for a cancelled third person shooter called Radium [19:27] which shows some impressive camera movement and even what looks to be an attempt at a [19:30] reflection in a mirror, the excitement for 3D on the GBA was quickly dying down among [19:36] the small amount of those who cared. You can see critic reviews turn from excitement to [19:41] disdain when it comes to 3D graphics as they often call it just a gimmick, and while there [19:45] were still good games coming out that were 3D, the novelty was wearing off and there [19:49] were more and more poorer games coming out. Quad Desert Fury, Ozzy and Drix, Cruis’n [19:54] Velocity, Medal of Honor: Underground and a whole bunch of other games on my spreadsheet [19:58] that just haven’t been worth mentioning completely bombed where the 3D just felt like [20:03] a hindrance that only served to help sell the game through screenshots on the back of [20:06] the box. [20:07] One of the more impressive engines from 2003 that we wouldn’t see until years later was [20:12] this one named DR Advance by a company called Prograph Research, which had a multitude of [20:17] impressive features and ran at a high framerate but never saw a commercial release in any [20:22] way because they couldn’t land a publishing deal that was worth going through with. Stories [20:27] like this aren’t unusual, and a dev at Prograph said this about it: [20:31] “Our idea was to generate interest in the engine and in case propose a formula-like [20:36] without a license. Unfortunately, though the interest was high, the profit margin offered [20:40] was too low, as the GBA market became saturated very quickly and third-party products usually [20:46] sold very few copies.” [20:49] This quote succinctly speaks to the state of affairs going into 2004, which was the [20:53] year the Nintendo DS came out, as well as the PSP in Japan. Like to think that something [20:58] like Ridge Racer on the PSP came out alongside these 3D GBA games is a funny thought. It [21:05] just goes to show how quickly hardware was advancing at the time. [21:08] That’s not to say that there weren't some really impressive releases in 2004 though. [21:13] Hot Wheels Stunt Track Challenge continued the gorgeous textureless look on, and I often [21:18] see Velez and Dubail’s Asterix and Obelix XXL being used as the go to game for showing [21:22] off GBA 3D, where they made a platformer rather than a driving game and of course, knocked [21:27] it out of the park again with some almost PS1 grade visuals. I know that’s hyperbole [21:32] but the way their 2D sprites flawlessly scale while animating is just amazing and there’s [21:37] usually so many of them on the screen at once and it all just looks exceptional. I can’t [21:42] praise these guys enough. [21:44] A developer named Visual Impact made a couple of reasonably impressive SSX games for EA [21:49] in years prior, but in 2004 they stepped up their game with a port of Kill.Switch which [21:53] is a full blown cover shooter on the GBA, a novelty in and of itself. It has a polygonally [21:58] 3D player character that animates very well and it all runs smoothly with a lot going [22:03] on at once, standing as the most anachronistic title so far. [22:07] One of the more well known uses of 3D comes from the GBA’s Grand Theft Auto spinoff, [22:11] which used polygons for some environmental stuff like the buildings and street lamps. [22:16] This isn't the most impressive use, but with all it’s gameplay systems running at once [22:20] it’s cool that it could also run so many fully textured 3D buildings on top of everything [22:24] else. It’s also a good game, and honestly games that use 3D sparingly typically are [22:29] more fun. [22:30] In the same vein as GTA, there was a fanmade GTA clone called Payback originally made for [22:35] the Amiga in 2001, which is an unusual time for an Amiga game to come out - and I don’t [22:41] like using the term GTA clone but this was with all respects initially made as basically [22:46] GTA on the Amiga. In 2003 it was ported to mac, and in late 2004 it found itself on the [22:54] Gameboy Advance - where it was apparently finished quite a bit earlier but the dev couldn’t [22:58] get a publisher until Destination Software picked it up. My only source for this is an [23:03] unreferenced paragraph on Wikipedia though so take it with a grain of salt. [23:07] Regardless, it’s one of the most technically complex games on the system, where unlike [23:11] GTA almost everything here is polygonally 3D from the pedestrians to the cars to the [23:16] buildings, and it’s almost all textured. On top of that, it’s filled with impressive [23:21] visual effects like car shadows, human shadows, skid marks from tires, smoke from damaged [23:25] cars and particle effects which are shown off with the silly bullet and blood decals. [23:30] It even sports fairly realistic car crash physics to top it all off. It’s not as enjoyable [23:35] of a game as GTA partly because it lacks character, but it’s certainly a lot more flashy and [23:39] it has a lot more bells and whistles than any other game we’ve looked at or will look [23:43] at. [23:44] We also finally got to see Raylight’s Blue Roses engine put to really good use in a commercial [23:48] product in 2004 after Wing Commander and Ozzy and Drix didn’t quite live up to the tech [23:53] demos. Smashing Drive is an arcade taxi driving game with heavily scripted linear stages filled [23:58] with shortcuts and 3D models everywhere, many of which can be bumped into and they will [24:03] react appropriately. It’s very very dense and busy, and like Stuntman the stages are [24:08] multifaceted where the environment around you feels handcrafted and is continuously [24:13] changing. The sheer amount of detailed polygons streaming in and flying past at any given [24:17] time is what makes this one so special - it’s straightforward but cool to see at this level. [24:26] It’s 2005, the PSP releases in the west, and the GBA continues to slow down. But again, [24:33] that didn’t stop there from being some particularly interesting games. Torus returned after 3 [24:38] years of non-FPS games to remind the world just how good their engine is with Ice-Nine, [24:43] David A. Palmer, the mysterious and talented programmer behind the awesome 2001 Doom port [24:47] returns to the scene with a competent but somewhat visually dated Tokyo Xtreme Racer [24:52] spinoff of all things, and Raylight release a laggy port of Street Racing Syndicate which [24:57] is only notable for its huge car models. [25:00] Raylight’s other 2005 release, Big Mutha Truckers, yes that is what it’s called, [25:04] stands out because it’s also on the DS running on the same engine. The GBA version is essentially [25:10] the exact same game, just with every level of detail aspect to it scaled down or turned [25:14] off. It’s impressive in the way the Blue Roses engine is usually impressive, and the [25:18] sheer scale of it with the bigger open levels probably makes it Raylights most ambitious [25:23] GBA game, which is fitting since it’s their last. The fact that this is a 1:1 demake of [25:28] a DS game that’s impressive in and of itself is a big part of the novelty here, and it’s [25:32] just bizarre that this game even exists not only because the PS2 game it’s based on [25:37] is so bizarre, but also because these DS and GBA ports came out three years after it. Weird. [25:43] What I believe is hands down the most technically impressive 3D game ever released on the GBA [25:49] was Velez and Dubail’s port of Driver 3, and I’m not just saying that because I love [25:57] Driver 3. In fact in terms of playability, this is their least fun GBA game, but, man, [26:03] they combined the on foot stuff from Asterix and Obelix, with the driving of their earlier [26:08] games, and built two massive open world cities that mirror their console counterparts in [26:12] scale to create another game that’s comfortably above all others, even Velez and Dubails prior [26:17] work. It’s truly incredible, and the fact that it’s directly comparable to the main [26:23] Driver 3 game speaks wonders to its achievements. [26:31] We’re really in the dregs now. Just 6 notable 3D games came out in 2006, and I’d say only [26:42] two of them are passably enjoyable with Pocketeers final Need for Speed game and final game ever [26:48] as a developer, and Visual Impact’s Tony Hawk’s Downhill Jam port, which is the peak [26:53] and finale of that sexy flat shaded polygons look we all know and love. [26:57] What’s real peculiar about 2006 is 3 voxel based games came out, doubling the amount [27:02] of Voxel games total on my spreadsheet. They were all by Skyworks, who did that quad bike [27:07] game in 2003 and these are very similar to that, with one of them straight up being another [27:12] quad bike game. I guess they wanted to maximise the use of this engine while they still had [27:17] the chance. [27:18] Of course, the final 3D GBA game and only entry on my list from 2007 is Cars: Mater-National. [27:24] There is no escape. Tantalus dug up their engine for the first time in 4 years since [27:29] Top Gear Rally for this, so it’s actually a decent little game with good models again, [27:34] but yeah. I’d say that the fact that we started with big gaming IPs like Doom and [27:39] Duke Nukem and Resident Evil and ended up with Cars and some random monster truck and [27:43] quad bike games speaks to where the GBA ended up as a whole. Oversaturated, and aimed at [27:49] kids. [27:54] But this isn’t where our story ends. In the years since much more has been discovered [27:58] with tech demos and unreleased games coming to light. In 2011, a rom of a voxel based [28:03] version of Banjo Pilot was leaked online. Now Banjo Pilot did actually commercially [28:09] release in 2005, but the final version was more of a mode 7 style racer whereas this [28:14] 2004 build featured an impressive voxel based world. It was changed simply because it was [28:20] too laggy, but it’s fascinating to see and I suspect it would’ve been the most fun [28:24] voxel based game had it come out. [28:26] Developer Shin’en, who you might know as the German developer behind The Tourist and [28:30] Fast RMX recently, had an unreleased 3D GBA racer prototype surface online in 2012 that [28:36] was originally made all the way back in 2001. Early on this dev actually did make a couple [28:42] of really impressive scrolling shooters on the GBA with Iridion and Iridion 2 which featured [28:47] amazing pre-rendered backgrounds, so I wanted to acknowledge them as one of the bigger hardware [28:51] pushers on the platform, and this impressive demo only helps back that up. The vehicle [28:56] select menu is particularly impressive, assuming it isn’t pre-rendered, as it shows the shading [29:01] change on the models as they rotate. [29:03] 2012 also revealed that Virtua Racing was almost ported to the GBA, as third party publisher [29:08] Dream On Studios pitched this demo to SEGA back in the day. It appears to be a strong [29:13] port of the game - but we don’t actually know when it was developed. If this was as [29:17] early as 2001 then it’s really amazing, and even if it came out towards the end it’s [29:22] still well above average. Regardless, it’s cool to see what’s always been a hardware [29:26] pushing game pushing more hardware. [29:29] In 2015 a Mario Kart prototype called Mario Kart XXL was revealed by a channel named Steven [29:35] Seventyeight as a top down racer that featured two scaling and rotating background mode 7 [29:40] style layers, something that hasn’t otherwise been done on the GBA. Originally made in 2004 [29:45] for Nintendo, it doesn’t appear to have anything more traditionally 3D going on unless [29:50] Mario and his titular Kart are 3D, but I’d guess that they’re pre-rendered. Still, [29:54] it is an unusual sight especially because it’s Mario Kart. [29:58] As is this voxel based shooter also found in 2015 based on Frank Herbert’s Dune called [30:03] Dune Ornithopter Assault, a game that was basically finished but cancelled in 2002 - which [30:08] would’ve made it the most impressive voxel based release at the time since it was only [30:12] against Tiger Woods and Smuggler’s Run. The big heads up display does limit the screen [30:17] area a lot to squeeze the most out of the engine, but this is otherwise a remarkably [30:21] smooth and ambitious helicopter game in the vein of Comanche. Or Ornithopter game, rather, [30:27] sorry. [30:28] New information and prototypes and demos are still being revealed even as recently as last [30:32] year, like these two demos by NDWare and C4 Digital which were uploaded on YouTube by [30:37] PtoPOnline. One is a Quidditch demo with a fully modelled character, and the other is [30:42] a Tennis demo with two fully modelled characters, and they’re both very smooth though also [30:46] very barebones. Interestingly on the Quidditch demo a splash screen for Climax appears, who [30:52] were the developers behind that Hot Wheels GBA game as well as the not great Serious [30:56] Sam GBA game, so it’s speculation but maybe that implies that these demos are running [31:01] on Climax’s engine. [31:02] As for how the developers went after this, Velez and Dubail continued to release insanely [31:07] impressive handheld games on the DS and 3DS and are still operating to this day, releasing [31:12] Rise: Race The Future in 2018 - though tragically Fernando Velez passed away in 2016 so they [31:17] had to do some restructuring. Raylight Studios appear to be doing well, and apparently they’re [31:22] still building upon their Blue Roses engine as it now supports the Switch, Xbox One and [31:26] PS4 which is amazing considering it started here with those tech demos. Torus continued [31:31] strong as a budget developer, just recently releasing the Praetorians HD remaster, as [31:36] did Tantalus who have even had some high profile projects recently like the Cities Skylines [31:41] and ZombiU ports, and most famously, the Twilight Princess Wii U port. Go Australia. [31:47] And that’s the timeline of 3D graphics on the GBA. Despite all those amazing early tech [31:53] demos, there was never a big, big 3D release on the system which speaks to not only it’s [31:58] saturated library, but also how gameplay was often sacrificed or simplified just so these [32:03] games would run. I mentioned this earlier but in some sense there is a direct correlation [32:09] between how limited the use of 3D is, and how good the game is. Games that only use [32:13] a hint of it like GTA or Max Payne or Tony Hawk fair far better than comparable 3D games [32:19] because they feel like more than just glorified tech demos. Still though, this stuff will [32:24] always be fascinating and impressive to me at least, and I hope you enjoyed joining me [34:15] on this exploration of mine.