Bite-Sized Game History: Liberty City’s Early Days, an N64 Controller Prototype, and Jeopardy’s Tetris Blunder

Diving in to the sometimes subtle (and sometimes major) differences between a prototype and the final product is probably one of the most exciting parts of video game history. In many cases, you’ll be looking at the (literal) building blocks of what came before.

In this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, let’s look at one prototype that served as the foundation of something great and another that was ultimately sent to the scrapyard. And after all that, we’ll have a good laugh at a hoax that recently fooled the Jeopardy! writer’s room.

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

The Grand Theft Auto franchise turned the world on its head in 2001 with the launch of Grand Theft Auto III. The franchise’s first 3D entry set a new standard for the fledgling genre of open-world action games and helped push the popularity of the PlayStation 2 well beyond its rivals at Microsoft and Nintendo.

But did you know that earlier entries in the franchise, which were famously played in a top-down perspective, were also built on top of a 3D world?

Mike Dailly was one of the original co-founders of DMA Design, and after he completed work on Lemmings, he got to work on a prototype that eventually form the basis of the original Grand Theft Auto. Dubbed the “Top Down Perspective Engine” by Dailly, the engine allowed DMA’s designers to build a highly-detailed isometric version of Liberty City that they could then rotate to show players a view of the streets from the sky.

The developer recently shared some images showing how this prototype came together during the early days of the design phase:

Do we need to rehash the divisiveness of the Nintendo 64 controller? Probably not, but it’s helpful to remember where a lot of players are coming from when they talk about it.

As the first mass-market controller with an analog stick, this “three-pronged monstrosity” changed the way we played games. But it was also an incredibly delicate piece of technology, and overuse would cause plastic shavings to coat your hands as the plastic of the stick rubbed up against the plastic found in the controller’s innards. But it almost didn’t work that way.

Retrogamer and preservationist Shane Battye recently acquired one of the prototype controllers Nintendo had designed for the console when it was still known as the Ultra 64. The three prongs are still present and accounted for, as is the six-button layout of the face buttons, but the Z-Trigger is noticeably smaller on the prototype, and a completely different design was used for the analog stick.

The prototype’s stick is considerably larger than the one found on a retail N64 controller, and it allows movement in a full circle (instead of the octagonal set of notches that Nintendo ultimately went with). The stick also features a concave thumb rest, as opposed to sharp grooves available on the retail controller. Most surprisingly, Battye discovered that the stick’s interior mechanism used a much sturdier design after he (carefully) took the prototype apart.

The rest of the thread is a detailed exploration into how a controller can evolve during the development process, and as a unashamed fan of the Nintendo 64 controller, it’s interesting to wonder what could have been:

Prototype #Nintendo64 controller intended for Ultra 64, with some differences over retail. The thumbstick is broad and has a circular range of motion. There is a recess for an adhesive Nintendo ‘jewel’ logo as on the front of the console. The color scheme is two tone black/grey.

— Shane Battye (@shanebattye) September 20, 2019

[Tweet Removed – View at Internet Archive]

Finally, let’s visit the set of Jeopardy!, where host Alex Trebek offered that day’s three contestants an entire category of VIDEO GAME-POURRI earlier this week. A question asking which of the four ghosts from Pac-Man doesn’t rhyme with the others proved to be a triple stumper (it’s Clyde), but the contestants easily handled questions about Insomniac’s Spider-Man and Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. However, the $800 question should have gone through another revision or two.

In his trademark voice, Trebek asked the players to identify a game that features “seven rotatable blocks” with names like “Orange Ricky, Hero, and Smashboy.” You probably want to answer Tetris, just as librarian Jessica Garsed did. But can you spot where the writers went wrong?

Instead of citing the actual instruction manual for Tetris, the writers were taken in by a hoax tweet from Vecchitto that’s been making the rounds for a few months now. The game show’s social media team even tweeted it out a few hours before the episode aired in most cities:

Thanks to Mike Dailly and Shane Battye for providing a window into a pair of prototype designs. And thanks to the writers of Jeopardy! for the best laugh I’ve had during the show in a while.

If you’re looking for more bits of video game trivia while you’re browsing Twitter and don’t know where to look, answer in the form of the question and say, “What is Video Game Canon?”

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.