Simple ZoomRotation

Simple ZoomRotation is a demo for the Nintendo 64 by René and released on 25 Jul 1997, making it one of the earliest homebrew demos on the system. It’s a soundless demo that includes a short animated loop of a texture being rotated and zoomed in & out as the name implies.

You can download the ROM zip file on the download page by using the password renetation.

The Simple Rotation demo by René has to be one of the simpler demos out there that isn’t a technical sample from the devkit or a bitmap/marquee demo that you saw all over the scene back in the day. It’s basically just a simple zoom/rotation just as the name implies.

It’s a simple zoomrotation, done without any hardware tricks.

The actual demo itself has a grid of repeated bitmaps with what appears to be a bright light source and a lens flare. In front of that there is a large bold 3D text that says ‘OVID’. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean but given how things are nowadays, it feels like it says ‘COVID’ but it cut out a letter. Purely coincidence though, given that Simple ZoomRotation was released 22 years before the pandemic.

That’s all there really is to Simple ZoomRotation. It’s a very simple demo but it really shows how even back then people managed to make their own homebrews without using any libraries. It would have been interesting to see how this was done by having a look at the source code, but those are probably list in the winds of time.