Nearly three decades after plans for an official Nintendo 64 port of Tomb Raider were scrapped, a homebrew developer took it upon themselves to bring the original 1996 Tomb Raider game to Nintendo’s 64-bit home console.
On April 13, YouTuber Snake posted a five-minute Tomb Raider demo showing a work-in-progress port of Tomb Raider running on the Analogue 3D with “Unleashed” overclock settings enabled. In the video, they showcased Lara Croft exploring Croft Manor, navigating the opening level, and Palace Midas.
While it’s a work-in-progress port, the fact that the entire 3D Tomb Raider title will soon make an unofficial debut on the Nintendo 64 feels like a long-unfulfilled dream for many fans of the original series.
From what we know so far, developer Snake is building the port from scratch using open-source tools. They are using Lost Artefact’s TRX decompilation method, an open-source reimplementation of Tomb Raider I and II that already includes numerous bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements.
As for the technical aspect of the port, Snake is using the Tiny3D graphics library for the N64 on top of libdragon. In the video description, Snake explained the current progress of the Nintendo 64 Tomb Raider port and stated:
“The entire game is pretty much implemented, though there are still numerous bugs and rendering, and performance issues. Performance especially tanks in levels with large areas. Almost the entire game currently fits on the cartridge, including all of the music and most of the FMVs.”
It’s pretty impressive that Snake managed to fit a 600–700 MB game originally intended for the Sega Saturn, MS-DOS, and later for the PlayStation 1 on a small 64 MB N64 cart.
However, the project is far from complete, and Snake notes that there’s a ton of polishing work left. For now, it only performs well with overclocked settings on the Analogue 3D. Furthermore, Snake hasn’t mentioned a release date or whether a downloadable ROM will even be shared. Still, Snake is making history. history.
Earlier in the ’90s, an official N64 port of Tomb Raider was in development at Core Design. In prior interviews, former developers acknowledged that the team was ready to bring Lara Croft to the Nintendo 64, but they never received the development kits in time. Later, Sony secured an exclusivity deal for the sequel, which led to the N64 port being dropped.
