Ryan Tracy discusses “Turok” series, Nintendo 64, and the Virtual Console

"Former Acclaim/Iguana Entertainment employee Ryan Tracy is a very talented 3D modeler and texture artist who was involved in modeling and texturing the environments for all four “Turok” games for the Nintendo 64. This includes Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Turok 2: Seeds of Evil, Turok 3: Shadows of Oblivion, and Turok: Rage Wars. He was willing to share his experiences on working on the Turok series, working with Acclaim/Iguana Entertainment, and working with the Nintendo 64′s hardware. NotEnoughShaders.com would like to personally thank Ryan Tracy for agreeing to do this interview with us.

The Turok series (which sold millions of copies) were the first major games you ever worked on. What were some things you learned about game development from working on the Turok series?

When I started on Turok, I was like “This is the strangest idea for a video game. A native american guy hunting dinosaurs.” I was delighted to be working on the N64 so I didn’t care what the game was, only that this is going to be a fun time. They started me out making rocks and no one had much of an idea how we were going to build terrain in the game as well as other level art. We experimented with many types of ideas. The basic problem was the cart was only 8 megs so building out custom level parts just wasn’t going to happen as it would quickly suck up all the resources.", writes NotEnoughShaders.