Rock n Roll Racing
Rock n' Roll Racing, shipped in 1993, is an isometric-perspective racing game with weapons and an announcer who narrates the carnage.
Audio tracks including Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," Deep Purple's "Highway Star," and George Thorogood's "Bad to the Bone" play throughout. Two players can race simultaneously in split-screen.
The lead developer was Bob Fitch, who did an amazing job making the game fun, squeezing the code to fit in the Super Nintendo's ("SNES") limited cartridge space, and optimizing the game to run fast on a 2.58 Mhz processor.
My role for this project was to write the "track compiler", which took a top-down 2d map of the racetrack (similar to a drawing on graph-paper) and convert it into a 3d, isometric view. This was challenging because the SNES uses renders terrain using 8x8 cells stored in planar format. I'm sure the hardware designers were able to make the SNES less costly to manufacture, but it sure made it challenging to program.
On the plus side, I was able to crib off code created for RPM Racing (prequel to Rock & Roll Racing), written by the incomparable Bill (later Rebecca) Heineman, AKA Burger, one of the founders of Interplay Productions, and a brilliant hacker -- that is, once I learned 6502/65816 assembly language, which I didn't know at the start of the project.