It may not be gone for good

Naturally, there is disappointment in the comments on Lambert’s Patreon post, and some users suggested Lambert might be able to move ahead with the project if he switched from Libultra, the official Nintendo 64 SDK, to libdragon, an open source SDK. Lambert said he’s not sure if doing so would appease Valve, and he’s reluctant to dive into it without first getting a green light from Valve.

“I would consider porting to libdragon if Valve agreed to allowing me to finish before trying to make the jump,” he wrote. “It would be a lot of work and I wouldn’t want to commit to it before knowing if it would actually pay off.” He doesn’t seem to think that’s very likely to happen, though: “They also don’t seem too interested in the project as I can’t meaningfully distribute it on Steam.”