An unofficial Nintendo 64 port of the original Tomb Raider is now running well enough to show Lara Croft moving through menus, Croft Manor and several classic levels, reviving a piece of gaming history that Core Design never finished in the 1990s.
The work-in-progress build was shown in a YouTube video uploaded by Snake on April 13, 2026. The roughly five-minute clip shows the port running on the Analogue 3D with its “Unleashed” overclock setting enabled, moving from the title screen into Croft Manor, Caves and Palace Midas.
This is not an official Square Enix or Crystal Dynamics release, and there is no confirmed public download window. Snake’s footage presents it as a fan project with a surprising amount already working, not as a finished product ready for players.
How the N64 version is being made
Snake says the port is based on Lost Artefacts’ TRX project, an open-source reimplementation of Tomb Raider I, Tomb Raider II and Tomb Raider III. TRX’s public GitHub page describes it as a single engine for the classic games, with TR1 and TR2 playable from beginning to end, TR3 support still in progress and features such as photo mode, expanded options, updated moves and bug fixes.
The N64 work also uses Tiny3D, a 3D library and RSP microcode project for libdragon. Tiny3D’s documentation says it was written from scratch and is designed to provide a fast 3D API for Nintendo 64 homebrew projects, including model rendering, lighting, animation support and texture handling through the N64 rendering pipeline.
According to Snake’s notes relayed with the footage, the port is “pretty much entirely implemented” at this stage, including all music and most FMVs, and it apparently fits on an N64 cartridge. The remaining work sounds substantial, though. The project still has “numerous bugs, rendering, and performance issues,” with performance dropping in larger levels.
That caveat is important because Tomb Raider’s original design was tightly tied to the hardware it shipped on. The game launched first on Sega Saturn in October 1996 before its PlayStation and MS-DOS releases, and its grid-based exploration, blocky spaces and deliberate animation timing were shaped by mid-1990s 3D console limits.
Core Design once considered the same idea
The fan port also lands in the shadow of an N64 version that never happened. In a Core Design Q&A, Tomb Raider co-creator Paul Douglas said the studio had paper specs for the N64 in late 1996 or early 1997 with the intention of making a port, but it never received actual devkits. Douglas also said Sony’s exclusivity deal followed soon after.
That history gives the new footage a neat hook beyond technical curiosity. Tomb Raider became closely linked with PlayStation after the first game, but its earliest life was more multiplatform than many players remember. Seeing Lara on N64-style hardware now is less a lost official build resurfacing than a modern homebrew attempt to answer an old “what if?”
It also makes this a sharper fit beside other retro fan projects, including the recent 2.5D Tomb Raider side-scroller. The common thread is not nostalgia alone, but how much mileage fans are still finding in the original game’s level design, movement and unmistakable low-poly Lara.
Snake has not said whether the N64 port will be released publicly. Until that changes, the footage is best treated as a promising technical showcase, one that shows a playable classic Tomb Raider build on Nintendo 64-compatible hardware while leaving the hardest polish questions unanswered.