Ultra 1

Ultra 1 is a homebrew demo by Locke released on 21 July 1997, 28 years ago today. It’s a basic 3D scroller like many others on this website.

You can get the ROM here by using the password lockemyultra64.

About Ultra 1

Ultra 1 is as basic as it gets for a scroller demo in 3D. It’s a series of 3D letters that move across the screen spelling out a very simple message. There’s no background, there’s no music, just the text. That said, the letters initially scroll from right to left but then they start spinning and rotating so there is some ingenuity to it, even if it only makes it harder to read the text.

Ultra by … Locke.

Riiight you’re looking at pretty much the first Nintendo sixtyfour demo ever! It’s not much but at least it looks like a next gen demo right? Ok let’s activate this sinewave. Say hi and thanks Uxorious and Matzer and of course everyone else at efnet snes… Ok let’s see if you can read this… Or this… Hard huh? Look at those nice letters going… Ok better turn it off… Let’s see what else can we do here to make it a bit more interesting for you to watch? Getting better? Wwoooooohhoo ooooo… Ok that was fun. Into the screen! not bad huh? But let’s get some of these things going at the same time… This one and this one…. If you can still read this you’re pretty damn good at reading scrollers!!! Especially if we put the speed a bit too!!! Yahoooo!!! Ok thats enough turn all that off… I promise my next demo will have music too ok? It’s a bit dull without sound really… Best art…

This demo claims that it is the first demo released for the Nintendo 64, but that’s not entirely true. There are some like Absolute Crap #1 or Pause that were released (barely) earlier. Not only that, but it looks like it is the basis for other demos that were released after, like Pamela.

Other than that, there isn’t really much you can say about the text. It’s pretty much just a step above a simple Lorem Ipsum.

Review and conclusion

There isn’t really much to say about this. The text isn’t really interesting, there is no music or sound effects. It’s really just not much to look at especially when you consider all the other demos made for the Nintendo 64.

Even though Ultra 1 is a fairly basic homebrew demo, it stands on is own by being one of the first to include 3D graphics.