Spice Rotation

Spice Rotation is a homebrew demo for the Nintendo 64 by RedboX, released on 25 July 1997. It is a simple bitmap image of the Spice Girls that is zoomed in on and rotated around.

You can get the ROM from its download page by using the password wannabemyn64.

About Spice Rotation

This is a very simple demo. It just consists of a single image of the Spice Girls rotating in and out of the screen. Dextrose said it best:

A photo of the Spice Girls that slowly rotates in and outta the screen.

That’s all there really is to it. The movement is jerky and erratic, so it’s not very clear where the image will be rotating next.

The image itself is a very low-res version of this promotional image of the girls from 1997.

It’s probably the first image that RedboX could find online at the time on some old Web 1.0 website from back in the day.

Review and conclusion

There’s not much to say about this demo. It really is that simple.

Even though the ROM itself is 2MB, most if it is just padding, so it can be compressed into a cheeky 67kb, which is little more than the image itself.

Also interestingly, Spice Rotation was released on 25 July 1997, the exact same day as another ROM, Simple Zoomrotation. They both have the same concept too: a repeating bitmap that zooms in and out and rotates.

Though they are different (other than the different bitmaps) in the sense that they have a different rotating pattern. Spice is jerkier, and Simple is smoother. They’re also made by different people, and Simple has a static bit of text on the bottom.

Maybe there was a competition on who could get it out first? Who knows. Those IRC and forum conversations are lost to the void of web rot.

Spice Rotation is a demo that only really stands out for its place in history, nothing more, nothing less.