GamingAlexandria published an interesting article chronicling the story behind the unreleased Nintendo 64 game, Viewpoint 2064, complemented by an excellent video by Hard4Games. Viewpoint 2064 was completed and scheduled for a Nov 2000 release, but was ultimately cancelled. A fully-working ROM dump of the prototype was posted to The Internet Archive. The cart’s dumping and release was handled by Forest of Illusion, of gamingalexandria.com.

I spoke to Owlnonymous, a shoot ’em up enthusiast who streams to Twitch and YouTube, as he played Viewpoint 2064 for the first time on real hardware. His verdict is that the game is excellent, much better than other sources may be giving it credit for.

This is a really exciting release, and it was extremely generous of the owner to get the ROM dumped and preserved for posterity, and to release it for free. The dedication of the classic gaming community will never cease to amaze.

Update: To boot the ROM via EverDrive 64, you must add the following line to save_db.txt in /ED64/:

0x5D40ED2C=1 (Viewpoint2064)

or just save this save_db.txt to /ED64/, which is the same one I’ve been maintaining for years but now has Viewpoint 2064 added. Save_db specifies save types and other settings for ROMs that lack the proper flags in their header.

Screenshots used with permission of Owlnonymous

Source: https://twitter.com/shmups/status/1243885269243138048

Hard4Games video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9d24mZNW9I

ROM & Cart Photos: https://archive.org/details/viewpoint2064prototype