Let’s take a moment to appreciate the snow in Monster Truck Madness 64

Monster Truck Madness 64 is a bit of an unassuming game. It’s something of a spin-off of Microsoft’s Monster Truck Madness – a pair of PC titles that were mainly intended to show off the abilities of their DirectX API. Not the best or most exciting games to begin with.

Edge of Reality took the reins of the N64 version from Paradigm (also, Rockstar published it, though Microsoft is also credited). To bring it to consoles, they added the kart genre standard weapons to make things more exciting. It’s still something you’d probably really need to be into arena-style monster trucks to appreciate, but it’s not bad.

I rented it back in my youth. I don’t think I was too enamoured with it even then, but there was one thing that stuck in my mind about it. One very unusual thing that most kids probably would overlook: snow.

And it’s not just that Monster Truck Madness 64 had a snowy track, or that it depicted snow falling. No. What Edge of Reality did with snow in this otherwise unassuming N64 game is one of the most effective approaches to the wintry precipitation that I’ve seen, even to this day.

LET IT SNOW

Here’s what happens when you pick snow:

1. Snow begins falling at the beginning of the race. 
2. Speckles of white start appearing on the ground over every texture.
3. The speckles grow in density until the ground textures are completely covered in white.
4. The snow gradually deepens until your wheels sink into it and environmental props are partially buried. (It stops after a certain depth.)

Truly, this only affects traction and hides the road, but it’s a great look. Trucks with big-ass tires trudging through snow. For a game that is sort of all about off-roading, rugged conditions mean a lot. Any track that you pick in Monster Truck Madness 64 can have a time of day and weather condition applied to it, which is kind of impressive, but, snow aside, wasn’t unheard of at the time. So, this means that snow can be added to any track that you feel like, even if it’s a tropical island or a desert. Why not?

So, here’s this monster truck game from 1999 that does snow better than a lot of snow-centric games today. Like, what snowboarding game has snow accumulation? None that I know of. Some of them have snow that your boarder sinks into, but that’s about it. No accumulation And even then, that’s not as common as it should be.

There is certainly better looking snow these days. There’s definitely more reactive snow. But that’s after it’s already on the ground. The only other game off the top of my head that has snow accumulation is every time The Sims gets its “Seasons” expansion, and even then, that comes in visible stages rather than a smooth progression.

FRIGHTFUL WEATHER

Obviously, the N64 isn’t keeping track of individual particles and building them on top of each other, but it’s a convincing trick. I had some ideas of how the effect was done, but I’m not a programmer. Well, I’m a dilettante programmer if we’re being generous. So, to get a firm idea of what’s going on, I contacted former Edge of Reality Vice President and lead programmer, Mike Panoff. Here’s what he told me when it comes to the snow starting to speckle the ground:

“It’s something I just thought of one day. Basically, I recolored the ground texture in a random pattern and slowed down the speed of progression over time to make it feel like accumulation. The textures are all in RAM uncompressed, so the CPU can just poke the values into pixels.”

Again, I’m not a programmer by trade, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t an easy thing to do.

As for the snow gaining depth, my theory was that the world geometry was just raised while the ground’s collision value and position of the props remained the same. It’s maybe the reverse of that.

“The code that ran the collision checks between the tires and the ground just returned a Z-axis bias as the snow got deeper.”

Sort of lost me there. One thing to note is that all the trees, fences, and power-ups sink into the snow as well as the truck’s tires, so it’s a bit more than just a collision.

BLIZZARD

I love snow. Actually, I love all types of heavy precipitation. Thunderstorms and blizzards are when I feel most calm. Rain has been pretty well depicted in video games. Not always, but occasionally you see a pretty impressive storm. Snow, on the other hand? Sometimes. But typically it’s snow that is already on the ground that maybe, if you’re lucky, reacts to your character trudging through it.

And, to be fair, the method that Panoff used in Monster Truck Madness 64 probably wouldn’t work as well in a game with more detailed terrain and textures. Still, not every game published these days have intricate geological features. A retro-inspired game could probably put the same method to good use.

Regardless, it’s surprising to see in a game of this vintage. The credits for Monster Truck Madness 64 has around nine people in creative roles. At the time of release, it’s what most critics would call “good for a rental.” Yet, buried in there is a feature that lends the whole game an identity – a reason to seek it out. It’s a creative flourish that seems to have been undertaken with humble intentions, but its impact was so significant that I carried a memory of it for over 25 years. That is some pretty cool snow.