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If you were a child of the ‘90s console war, you likely dreamt of playing the exclusives you couldn’t because your family owned a PlayStation and not a Nintendo 64. That’s why it’s such a huge deal that Halo is finally coming to PlayStation, or that Sonic coming to Nintendo platforms in the early 2000s seemed like something your friend made up on the playground until it actually happened. But if developers and publishers won’t put these games on other platforms themselves, there’s always homebrew. That’s how fans have gotten games like Spyro the Dragon running on a Nintendo 64 and Super Mario 64 on the original PlayStation.
Frogbull, a YouTuber who has made games like Grand Theft Auto Vice City run on a Dreamcast and Metal Gear Solid playable on a Sega Saturn, has uploaded a new video of a prototype of Insomniac’s original PlayStation platformer running on a Nintendo 64 (thanks, Time Extension). It’s not a perfect recreation, as Frogbull describes it as “raw, full of missing textures, [including] animations that are implemented but not yet tied to actions,” and has a lot of bugs that need squashing, but it’s a neat look into an alternate timeline where Spyro started as the multiplatform franchise it would eventually become.
Mario, meanwhile, is still pretty much locked down on Nintendo’s platforms 40 years after its debut, but fans can imagine a world where Super Mario 64 was on a PlayStation when it launched in 1996. Video Game Esoterica has posted a video of a work-in-progress build of a Super Mario 64 PS1 port from modder Malucard. Like the Spyro port, it’s got its own set of issues. It crashes a fair bit, but it’s still in development and isn’t quite player-ready yet. Still, it’s pretty neat to see the early days of a Mario game running on a PlayStation.
While this sounds like fanfiction to anyone who grew up playing these games in the ‘90s, console exclusivity is slowly becoming rarer in the modern day. Microsoft has been putting several of its biggest franchises on other platforms, such as Halo and Gears of War. Sony has started porting most of its PlayStation 5 games, like Horizon and God of War to PC, as well, though it has been slower to put its games on competing consoles. Helldivers 2 recently came over to Xbox, though, so Sony is also open to crossing console lines.
