Reborn in Real-Time?
Is the Mix-Core made Gamecube demo actually running in real-time? Plus 40 new super-sized screens!
by IGN Staff
September 11, 2000 - During Nintendo's Space World show in Tokyo, Japan, the company debuted a full motion video called Rebirth on one plasma screen television. The short, artistic demo showcased a tree that had been reborn to life and, in the footage, was exploring its forest environment. The video featured beautiful lighting and realistic fogging effects, but some of the texture work and character animation was suspect, and IGNcube wondered at the time if a portion of the presentation could be running in real-time. We even asked Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto about Rebirth, who referred to it vaguely only as an FMV demonstration of what is possible on Gamecube.
Now, though, Rebirth's Japanese creator Mix-Core has come out of hiding to offer new details on the demo, and a whole slew of great new screenshots of it running in motion. According to the production house, which is affiliated with HAL Laboratories, the full Rebirth presentation was in fact more than six minutes long, but Nintendo opted only to show a brief snippet of it at Space World. More interesting, though, Mix-Core comments that the Rebirth demo is a "reflection of what can be achieved in real-time on Gamecube." Need more? The company also offers that "a part of the [FMV] scene operates in real-time on a real [Gamecube?] machine." However, it should be noted that unless Mix-Core is sharing full resources with HAL Laboratories (which isn't likely), there is simply no way the company could be in possession of a Gamecube development kit and therefore the Rebirth demo couldn't be running on actual hardware in that sense.
If you look at this movie, which IGNcube recorded of Rebirth during Space World, you can see what we believe could be the real-time portion of the demo that creator Mix-Core references. We presented the video to several development houses making games for next-generation consoles and all of them agreed that it's possible to achieve the visuals demonstrated in the Rebirth footage in real-time and on the Gamecube hardware in a fixed, non-gameplay environment.
Still, we don't know what to ultimately make of the Rebirth video or Mix-Core's latest comments on it. Is it all FMV or not? We're not positive one way or the other. Is it a game in development or just, as Nintendo says, a technical demo? We're not sure. We only know that as more information about Rebirth surfaces, the software only grows more mysterious.
Take a closer look at Rebirth below in action via 40 new super-sized screenshots courtesy of designer Mix-Core and Nintendo.