The new year continues to be a difficult one for the games industry, with Riot Games announcing layoffs affecting about 11% of their global workforce, or around 530 people. The company is also trimming its portfolio, shutting down Riot Forge, pulling back on some other projects, and recentering on its four core live titles: League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, Valorant, and Wild Rift.
Portal 64 dev urges fans not to be mad at Valve for shutting down the fan-made demake
15.01.2024 - 13:05 / gamesradar.com / James Lambert
Portal 64's creator doesn't hold a grudge against Valve for pulling the plug on their project and doesn't want fans to either.
James Lambert, creator of Portal 64, was last week asked by Valve to cease working on the project, effectively putting an end to the promising demake of the beloved puzzle game, which ran on actual N64 hardware.
In a video posted on YouTube, Lambert shed more on why Valve, which is normally fairly supportive of fan-made creations, took this action and said he's not all that surprised that things went the way they did. "Valve asked me to take Portal 64 down, and really, I can't say I didn't expect this at some point because it's their IP on [a] Nintendo console," he says. "I was hopeful I could get it to completion, but this is not unexpected."
He goes on to explain that Portal 64 was built using Libultra, the official SDK used to make N64 games, and once Valve's legal team were made aware of this, they shut the project down. "While I may not be a big enough target for Nintendo to come after, Valve is", he says.
Despite the project being no more, Lambert bears Valve no ill will and asks that fans be equally forgiving. "I don't blame them at all, and I don't think you should either," he says. "Don't be mad at Valve here. The project was probably doomed to be taken down from the beginning." The developer adds that he has considered porting Portal 64 to libdragon - an open-source SDK for N64 development - though, given that this could throw up yet more legal barriers, the chances of that actually happening are pretty slim.
Having poured almost two years of his life into Portal 64, Lambert says he's "learned a lot" and is seemingly content to move on: "I think I hit a pretty big milestone for the project before it got shut down, and I'm pretty happy with how far I got with it." As well as continuing to create content for his YouTube channel, the developer reveals that he also wants to make his own original game developed simultaneously for Nintendo 64 and PC. "I'm really excited to share what I've been working on and what I have planned," he says.
Meanwhile, Portal Revolution, Portal 2's game-sized prequel mod , has gotten the green light from Valve and is now available on Steam.
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