Always impressed by the lengths people will go to preserve game history and more than a little concerned about them getting cease-and-desisted by Nintendo. At least it looks like it's already on the Internet Archive, so that's good.
It's just as much game killing than any live service today. Satellaview relied on server connection, there's no official lasting copies that anyone can own.
It was a service, but my point is less how much was paid, but that much of it is dead and gone. A completely free game that shuts down its servers and becomes unplayable is still a loss to our culture.
I disagree, it absolutely was necessary. The AI tool it was based on (Graphite) creates a frame-perfect emulation of control inputs. While it would technically be possible to manually do it, doing so wouldn't be practicable. Even with the tool, it would take much more effort to actually build the level around the player view, and if they automated that then fair play to them.
People manually recreate shit all the time for a hobby.
And an F-Zero course is far less complicated than say a 1:1 recreation of a city in Minecraft. Shit having those round sprites on the border of the map already give you a perfect staging point for scale.
levels could have been recreated manually from watching the footage alone.
The point was to explicitly not just eyeball it but to be as close to pixel perfect as possible. A manual recreation may have been very accurate but certainly not 99.9%.
Your method would be a remake, this is restoration of the original.
