The Nintendo 64 has carried the same reputation since 1996: great games, terrible fog. That wall of grey obscuring anything beyond 20 feet wasn't a stylistic choice. It was a hardware limitation that every developer working on the platform eventually hit, and most just accepted. For 30 years, nobody figured out how to build around it at scale.
Developer James Lambert just did.
The N64 fog problem, finally explained
Lambert, who previously built Portal 64 (a demake running on actual N64 hardware) and a VR-enabled Super Mario 64 romhack, has now turned his attention to a game jam project called Junkrunner 64. The game runs on real N64 hardware and on highly accurate emulators including Ares, and it features something nobody expected to see on the platform: a draw distance comparable to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Bethesda's 2011 open-world RPG that ran on hardware released 15 years after the N64.
"You can stand on one corner of the map and see all the way to the other side," Lambert says in his breakdown video. When he overlays a size comparison, the Junkrunner 64 map absolutely dwarfs The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's world on the same platform. The nearest equivalent in terms of scale? Skyrim.
The technical culprit behind all that N64 fog is something called Z-fighting. The console's Z-buffer, which tracks the depth of objects so they render in the correct order, simply isn't precise enough to handle distant geometry. As objects get further from the camera, the N64 loses track of which one is closer, and things start drawing in the wrong order. A distant mountain renders on top of a nearer hillside. Fog was the fix every developer reached for because it hid the problem before it became visible.
How Lambert actually solved it
Here's the thing: the solution Lambert landed on is elegant precisely because it mirrors techniques modern engines use, just adapted for hardware from 1996.
"The solution is I just draw the world twice," Lambert explains. "First I draw everything that's far away scaled down by about 100, and then I do a separate pass where I draw everything that's close." The world is divided into tiles at multiple levels of detail (LOD). Distant tiles render in low detail, and as the player moves closer, higher-detail versions replace them. Before any tile renders at all, the engine checks whether it's even in the player's field of view. If it isn't, it gets skipped entirely.
The result is a layered world built from back to front, where low-detail geometry fills the horizon and high-detail tiles take over in the foreground, with no fog wall needed to hide the seams.
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Lambert's Junkrunner 64 ROM is available to download on GitHub for anyone who wants to try it on an N64 emulator.Collaborator Pyroxene handled the actual map construction, building out the multiple LOD variations for each chunk of the open world. Once everything was assembled, Pyroxene confirmed the game hit "a good, and even sometimes great, frame rate" on the hardware. For a 30-year-old console running a world the size of Skyrim, that's not a small thing.
Hover cycle hits 180 mph boosting
Making a big map worth exploring
Building the open world was only half the problem. Lambert recognized that scale alone doesn't make a game worth playing. "This massive map is really cool, but it actually makes the game worse if there's nothing to do in it and traversal is really slow," he says.
The traversal answer was the player's hover cycle, which reaches speeds of around 180 mph when fully upgraded and boosting. The exploration answer was more considered: the map starts completely hidden, and players reveal it piece by piece as they move through the world. It's a design choice that gives exploration actual stakes, something many modern open-world games with icon-cluttered maps have quietly abandoned.
Lambert has been clear that Junkrunner 64 is a game jam project and unlikely to expand into something larger on its own. What matters is where the technology goes next. The techniques developed here feed directly into the larger N64 project Lambert announced previously, a Magicka-style co-op game that will now have a proper open-world engine to build on.
For anyone who grew up squinting through N64 fog wondering what the hardware was actually capable of, this is the answer. Keep an eye on Lambert's next project, and check out the latest gaming news for more stories from the retro dev scene. Make sure to check out more:
