Fire

Also known as Plasmafire or Firedemo, Fire is a tech demo for the Nintendo 64 made by Lac and released on 16 December 1997. It’s a fairly straightforward animation of an everlasting flame going up and burning for ever and ever.

You can download the ROM on its download page here by using the password plasmademo. The original file comes in a .bin format, but it runs fine in a N64 console. If you still have problems, try renaming the file extension to .v64.

The demo starts with a black screen. Then suddenly some white flames appear from the bottom and spread upward. The flames will continue to burn up in perpetuity. That’s all there really is to it.

One interesting thing that I believe that the Fire demo does is how the flame animation is generated. In this day and age with video streaming services, it’s easy to assume that video like this is pre-recorded and streamed in a loop, but I think that this does it a bit differently.

I believe that Fire is is generated procedurally, meaning that the demo starts with a few white embers at the bottom which then change shape and colour as they move to the top until they disappear. This allows for many more patterns of fire to be made, making it ever-so-less repetitive. I’m not sure if the script uses a different seed each time it boots though. The file is really just 28KB that have been padded out to 2MB so it’s unlikely that any serious amount of textures have been included in the ROM.

Though the novelty wears thin after only a few seconds, it does work as a nice little bit of yule log ambience fire for Christmas time. The only thing needed to make it complete would be some music or sound effects. That would make it better than any of the Youtube videos since those technically have a time limit set to them (and they’re not run on a Nintendo 64, which makes it 64% cooler).