18 years later, No Man’s Sky dev reveals prototype footage of the first Harry Potter open-world game

A No Man’s Sky developer has revealed early development footage of the first open-world Harry Potter game – revealing an unlikely connection between The Boy Who Lived and the Quake series in the process.

Hello Games engine programmer Martin Griffiths recently revealed that before joining the No Man’s Sky and Light No Fire studio, “in a past life […] I worked for eight years on the engine for the Harry Potter games.” He points to 2006’s adaptation of The Order of the Phoenix as “a formative time,” as the game was “the first fully streamed, open world game that we’d made.” He went on to reveal the very first footage of Harry Potter running around a prototype version of that game’s Hogwarts, salvaged from “an old SD card.”

It’s not exactly on the level of Hogwarts Legacy, or even complete – there’s a t-posing Dumbledore at the end of the clip – but fans of the films should definitely recognize the version of Hogwarts that Griffiths is showing off. However, the developer then went one better, revealing that there’s a link between the tech he’s showing off here and an even more iconic piece of gaming history.

“I don’t think outside of the original Harry Potter team that it’s well known that an earlier version of this engine was used to bring Quake 3 to PlayStation 2.” That’s an achievement that Griffths says he “still treasures,” and he goes on to explain more about the porting process in the replies: “My favorite challenge was four-way split screen rendering working for local multiplayer,” he says. The PS2’s “limited GPU memory” meant that mesh was drawn in sequence to each of the four viewports instead of risking memory by reloading the texture each time.

In more recent chapters in his career, Griffiths has been bringing the impressive tech of No Man’s Sky and Light No Fire to life. Earlier this year, he outlined how the former’s galaxy-hopping tech isn’t just “smoke and mirrors” – by zipping across three planets inside a minute to show off just how powerful the No Man’s Sky engine is.

In more modern Harry Potter news, Hogwarts Legacy 2 is “one of the biggest priorities” for Warner Bros “a couple of years down the road.”

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