My unfounded suspicion is that optimizations might have been turned off to avoid bugs in the toolchain. The developers would have had to deal with very early versions of these tools before the comsole was launched and in development itself.

It was one of the first games and easily outclassed by later releases so I'm sure there are many optimizations that could be made.

I hope we get the same with Waverace one day, nothing since has matched the feel of the wave physics in that one, it would be interesting to see what they did.

One of the “first games”?

What on earth do you mean?

One of the first games released on the N64 system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Nintendo_64_ga...

From context he likely means the first games for the platform.

I vaguely remember it was a launch title.

Some people need everything explained don't they? "What do you mean first game? I distinctly remember playing tag at school and that preceded Wave Race 64 by at least 2 years. Please stop spreading FUD".

Perhaps but it is easy to forget that sometimes they simply either don't understand or that English may not be their primary language.

I try to assume that such things are genuine questions unless facetiousness is obvious.

Makes for a more pleasant place that way.

It's crazy how ambitious it was to have Mario 64 as a launch title, particularly when you compare it with the other launch title, Pilotwings 64.

Apparently some later releases of SM64 turned on optimizations and have less lag than the earlier ones.