Noclip.Website Lets You Explore Classic Video Game Worlds From Your Browser
More and more video games are shipping with dedicated photography modes, letting players move from basic screenshots with gameplay-imposed perspective towards freer compositions — and, in some cases, virtual selfies. If you want to snap some pics in the game worlds of your old favorites without getting in the weeds of emulation and modification, Jasper St. Pierre's noclip.website is your best bet. No downloads required, it's built for your browser.
Before the popularization of dedicated photo modes, sophisticated game photography was largely the domain of PC gamers who could access developer tools with special commands, the most popular/useful of these commands being "noclip," which lets the player camera roam freely and pass through solid objects. The movement on noclip.website is similar, but the game worlds St. Pierre has imported are mostly older console titles.
"The original inspiration was simply to see if I could," says St. Pierre. "I originally built an older tool about six years ago now just because I thought Mario's Faceship [from "Super Mario Galaxy 2"] was cool and wanted to explore the nooks and crannies far closer than the game's camera would let me."
Most of the game worlds you can examine at noclip.website are from the Nintendo GameCube, Wii and DS handhelds, with a few re-releases of older 3D games (like "Super Mario 64" and "Ocarina of Time") from those systems also in the mix. "First, I just like Nintendo games, and they have some excellent art and design," St. Pierre explains when I ask about the focus on Nintendo titles. "Second, their technology is old. Their development department made 'Skyward Sword' on a GPU from 1999. I want to stress that. This means that a lot of modern shading techniques that are now part of the 'engine' are just part of the model in these older games. So, in a lot of ways, it's just easier for me to work with, and tends to show up better out of the box."
Long story short, these simpler games are a lot easier for a browser-based renderer to handle (the site definitely gets my MacBook Air's fan spinning) and more straightforward to import in the first place. "There's a lot of technical hurdles," St. Pierre adds. "Probably the biggest is all of the reverse engineering/datamining failures you haven't seen. I have a lot of games I'd love to poke at but just haven't been able to crack the format."
Being able to fly around the geometry of a handheld "Mario" title or through the cel-shaded environments of "The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker" can give you a new appreciation for the ingenuity required to pack so much detail in with little graphical horsepower to spare. Journeying to the edge of the Yoshi Circuit track from "Mario Kart: Double Dash!!," you'll arrive at the point where the cloudy blue sky dome encasing the world meets the water, not unlike Truman Burbank on his escape from Seahaven. St. Pierre's favorite locale in noclip.website is the sunken Hyrule Field from "Wind Waker": "The skybox effect is one of the best that Nintendo's art team has ever made, and the forced perspective in the distance is just a really good example of that sort of practical trickiness."
The website definitely has use as a tool not just for exploring and taking pictures of game spaces, but for studying them as well. I could absolutely see someone using noclip.website in a course on level design for zoomed-out overheads of areas and close-ups of individual details. Game companies, Nintendo especially, can be aggressive when it comes to defending copyrighted material, but hopefully noclip.website is allowed to coexist alongside other invaluable resources for the study and appreciation of games like more conventional fan sites and longplay videos.
"I hope Nintendo sees that I'm well-meaning here," says St. Pierre. "Projects like this, I don't think, replace their revenue stream for games or cause people to pirate. I'm not releasing a fan remake of a Nintendo game that might take away from something they're doing in-house. My take is that projects like this only increase the level of appreciation for the raw talent that went into building these worlds."
In that same spirit, the code for noclip.website is all available in a GitHub repository and St. Pierre (@JasperRLZ on Twitter) doesn't intend to profit off of the site: "It's definitely [the game developers'] work on display, and if they don't want it up, that's their call. But I will never, *ever* put up ads on the site, or take donations. It's not my money to collect. Go buy a copy of 'Wind Waker HD' if this [makes you want to] replay it :)"
By no means an emulator for the games it draws on, and in a sense only an approximation of what fully-integrated game photography tools can accomplish, noclip.website both makes me want to revisit these older games and makes me wish that the releases of yesteryear catered to the player-as-photographer more. Switching between playing the games and appreciating them like this would be so, so nice. "I have nothing but incredible respect for some of the most demanding and technical work in games," St. Pierre says, "and some of the solutions that they come up with to bizarre problems are really cool[…] projects like these cannot exist without the gorgeous worlds made by talented artists. I am simply putting their work in a different perspective. So please, do not pirate games."
