Renowned Valve title, Portal, got a fan-made "demake", called Portal 64, to run on Nintendo 64 hardware. As opposed to a remake, a "demake" is taking a modern game and rebuilding it in a more early gaming engine, such as the Nintendo 64 or the first PlayStation. With titles such as Resident Evil and God of War getting the same treatment, the goal of demakes is to take modern-day gaming concepts and see how much of the game can still be recreated using primitive methods.
With Valve's Portal: Companion Collection on its way to releasing Portal and Portal 2 onto the Nintendo Switch, this will be the first time Portal has been available on any Nintendo console. The first Portal game out in 2007, was initially released as part of The Orange Box bundle for Windows, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3. Portal shocked the world by being the favorite among the bundle, which was especially impressive considering the rest of the bundle contained Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2. Thus, Portal was later ported to more systems such as Mac OS X, Linux, and Android, and got a sequel called Portal 2 in 2011.
Game developer James Lambert, has been creating a Nintendo 64 version of Portal, which runs on "real N64 hardware." As reported by Nintendo Life, James is working on a project to show how Portal might have looked and run if it were initially made for the Nintendo 64. With a portal gun and the actual portals rendered into his latest build, the game is taking and truly looking like a recognizable version of Portal. Portal 64 is still in development, with hopes of adding familiar Portal sounds, character models, plus animation and particle effects on the portals themselves hopefully coming in the future.
Looking into the portals themselves is the perfect way to see the difference between more modern gaming systems compared to the Nintendo 64. As players of the original Portal are well familiar with, lining the portals up in a straight line and looking through them shows a line of portals seemingly going on towards infinity. However, while Lambert has impressively been able to render this effect from six to as far as fourteen "portals deep", meaning the viewer sees fourteen portals before the effect stops, it effectively shows the difference in power and how far gaming hardware has come since the N64. However, at the same time, seeing this effect shows that perhaps the N64 was more powerful than it's usually remembered for.
With hope, Lambert will be adding in the features and updates he mentioned for all to see. Portal was well-known for its intricate puzzles, requiring the player to use the Portal Gun in various unique ways. Through his demake, Lambert has shown what a "Portal 64" game could have been like. It is, in a sense, a portal to an alternate version of this iconic game.
Source: Nintendo Life, James Lambert/YouTube