Northport

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Northport was Nvidia's project to release GameCube and Wii games in China for the Nvidia Shield, with Super Mario Galaxy 1 being one of these games. It was unprecedented as the first time in Nintendo's history that they allowed their games to be sold for another company's platform, likely due to Nvidia supplying the Tegra X1 SoC in the Nintendo Switch.

History

Northport started in May 2016. It was then that Nvidia gave Nintendo the games' source code and that lingcod development started. The public first became aware of Northport in any capacity in January 2017, when the Chinese government announced that "New Super Mario Bros" (actually referring to New Super Mario Bros. Wii, not the Nintendo DS game of that name) had been approved for sale in the country. It was officially announced in December 2017 alongside the release of New Super Mario Bros. Wii for the Shield.

Games

At any point during its development, Northport planned to release at least the following titles for the Shield.

• Cooking Mama
• Donkey Kong Country Returns
• Mario Kart Wii (canceled later; public demo presented before cancellation)
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii
• Punch-Out!!
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Super Mario Sunshine (canceled early on)
• The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Super Mario Galaxy release

Super Mario Galaxy was released for the Shield in March 2018. The Super Mario Galaxy build released for the Shield was compiled from the same updated source tree as the Korean Wii version. This tree was updated to use the latest RVL SDK at the time of the Korean version's 2008 release. This is why the copyright date is 2007 - 2008. It is also believed that the Chinese localization was not created by Nvidia, but rather by Nintendo for an intended release on the Chinese iQue Wii. The iQue Wii was ultimately canceled, so this of course never happened.

Supporting this theory:

• Nvidia did not credit any localizers or translators in their credits list.
• The Chinese government requires video games to display ISBN numbers on launch. The code for this, IsbnManager.cpp, is in the Korean Wii release as well as the Shield release.
• The Korean Wii release's code references a directory named CnSimpChinese in LocalizeData.

New files

The Shield release contains several new files, such as nintendoLogo.arc, the Nintendo logo image that is displayed on launch. Notably, these files break the capitalization convention used by the games' other files, and are not Yaz0 compressed as are other files in the same directory.

The existence of these new files indicates that in addition to the source code of Super Mario Galaxy itself, Nintendo also supplied Nvidia with several development tools, at least including Resarc and the BRLYT and TPL creators.

Credits

Engineering Team

• Aayush Prakash
• Anthony Pesch
• Chris Dannemiller
• Chris Spyropoulos
• Denis Barkar
• Eric Cameracci
• Eric van Beurden
• Ian Bullard
• Jihui Shentu
• Jim McArthur
• John Ratcliff
• Jonathan Lim
• Ryan Houdek
• Stefanos Piiditis
• Terry Caton

Additional Engineering

• Jeffrey Qiu
• Johnny Costello
• Lindsay Moore
• Nima Nikfetrat
• Roggie Zhang
• Ryan Prescott
• Sujit Tupe
• Willy Lau

Engineering Support

• Jim McCaffrey
• Paul Hodgson
• Seth Williams
• Robert Stepinski

Quality Assurance

• Adam Chamberlain
• Benjamin Feuerstein
• Felipe Alves
• Jason Lee
• Joel Sansait
• Joseph Astillero
• Shaad Boochoon
• Trevor Holm
• Whitney Kitchur

Project Management

• Blair Yakimovich
• Dane Johnston
• Gavriel State
• John Han
• Nan Li
• Ryan Elam

Nvidia Management

• Ali Kani
• Bill Bean
• David Sullins
• Fredrik Liljegren
• Kashi Anoosheh
• Mike Pepe
• Rev Lebaredian
• Stephanie Johnson
• Sunny Thakkar
• Teresa Jones
• Tim Bender
• Tony Tamasi