I think the article itself probably explains it well: you didn't get it for free.
>However, there was a reason this effect didn't take off until years later. The DirectX9 and newer forms of bump mapping are painless - developers can use them with very little setup and they are very, very cheap to run. Devs don't even need to think about it. But with this older type of bump mapping, developers had to build the effect themselves. And it was not cheap. For something that just adds a bit of visual flare, most GameCube and Wii developers decided it was not worth it and passed it by.
So again, Nintendo themselves probably coded it into the tech demo because they wanted to show off what was possible with the hardware, even if it wasn't practical (I believe there was a Dreamcast tech demo that bragged about how many polygons they had put into rendering a bowl of fruit).[0] And it is known that Nintendo worked with Factor 5 directly to provide them with prototype Gamecube hardware before the console was ready so that F5 could release a "killer app" launch title. It wouldn't surprise me, then, that F5 similarly threw in all the bells and whistles they could think of.
>However, there was a reason this effect didn't take off until years later. The DirectX9 and newer forms of bump mapping are painless - developers can use them with very little setup and they are very, very cheap to run. Devs don't even need to think about it. But with this older type of bump mapping, developers had to build the effect themselves. And it was not cheap. For something that just adds a bit of visual flare, most GameCube and Wii developers decided it was not worth it and passed it by.
So again, Nintendo themselves probably coded it into the tech demo because they wanted to show off what was possible with the hardware, even if it wasn't practical (I believe there was a Dreamcast tech demo that bragged about how many polygons they had put into rendering a bowl of fruit).[0] And it is known that Nintendo worked with Factor 5 directly to provide them with prototype Gamecube hardware before the console was ready so that F5 could release a "killer app" launch title. It wouldn't surprise me, then, that F5 similarly threw in all the bells and whistles they could think of.
[0]https://imgur.com/HvQqYjT