Super Mario 64

• 1. Introduction

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  Super Mario 64 is a 1996 platform game from Nintendo for the Nintendo 64, and a sealed copy of it holds the record for the largest sum ever paid for a video game. That sale happened in July 2021. Heritage Auctions' specialist said: "It seems impossible to overstate the importance of this title, not only to the history of Mario and Nintendo". The remark went on to include video games as a whole. That is a heavy verdict for a cartridge built around one character and one castle. This documentary asks where the idea for a three-dimensional Mario came from. It asks how a small team made a hero feel alive in a world with depth. It asks why Nintendo delayed its console for the sake of one game, and why reviewers argued over a single camera. And it asks why players are still taking the game apart long after its release.

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• 2. A World in Miniature

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  In January 1993, Nintendo's booth at the Consumer Electronics Show gave visitors a talking Mario head built from 3D polygons. The demonstration later inspired the interactive face on the game's title screen, which Giles Goddard programmed. Star Fox made its debut at that same show, and the larger idea began there.

  Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Super Mario series, conceived a 3D Mario while Star Fox was in production for the Super Nintendo. That game relied on the Super FX graphics chip for extra processing power. Miyamoto considered using the chip for a Super NES game called Super Mario FX, imagined as an entire world in miniature, like miniature trains. Engineer Dylan Cuthbert, who worked on Star Fox, later said Super Mario FX was never a game. It was only the codename for the chip. Miyamoto eventually reshaped the idea for the Nintendo 64. The reason was not the console's greater power. It was that the controller offered more buttons for gameplay.

  Production began on the 7th of September 1994 at Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis & Development division, and it ended on the 20th of May 1996. Miyamoto said the team numbered around fifteen to twenty people. They spent about a year on design before twenty months of production, and they started with the virtual camera system. Months went into choosing a view and a layout. Goddard said the first concept resembled the fixed path of an isometric game such as Super Mario RPG. It shifted toward free-roaming 3D, with a few linear stretches meant to steer the player into Bowser's lair.

  This was one of the first games for which Nintendo drew its illustrations in-house instead of hiring outside help. The artists worked in N-World, a toolkit based on Silicon Graphics machines. Before any level existed, the team tested and refined Mario's movement and animation on a simple grid. Shigefumi Hino, Hisashi Nogami, Hideki Fujii, Tomoaki Kuroume, and Yusuke Nakano made the 3D illustrations. Co-director Yoshiaki Koizumi and Satoru Takiwaza handled animation. Yōichi Kotabe, the Mario series illustrator and character designer, drew Mario from many angles and directed the creation of the character models. Koizumi told The Washington Post that his challenge was animating 3D models with no precedent to follow.

  The team put a faux shadow directly beneath every object, whatever the lighting, to help players judge depth. Koizumi called it an "iron-clad necessity" that "might not be realistic, but it's much easier to play".

  Miyamoto's guiding idea was to pack in more detail than earlier games, using the console to show "all the emotions of the characters". He likened the style to a 3D interactive cartoon. He wanted Mario to "create the feeling of controlling something that's really alive". The inspiration came from letting his pet hamster loose in his room. Other details came from the developers' own lives. The Boos came from assistant director Takashi Tezuka's wife. Miyamoto explained that she "is very quiet normally, but one day she exploded". She was maddened, he said, by the time Tezuka spent at work.

  The game first ran on an SGI Onyx emulator, which imitated only the console's programming interface and not its hardware. The first test of controls and physics had Mario interacting with a golden rabbit named "MIPS", after the processors in the Nintendo 64. That rabbit survived into the final game as a holder of a Power Star. The game also contains more puzzles than earlier Mario titles. It was developed alongside The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which came out more than two years later, so some puzzles moved over from that project. The developers also tried a split-screen cooperative mode in which players would control Mario and his brother Luigi. Hardware limits and the team's failure to make it work well led to its removal.

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• 3. Sound and Voice

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  Charles Martinet is one of the first people to voice Mario in a game, and this is one of those games. Leslie Swan voiced Princess Peach. At the time she was senior editor of Nintendo Power and the English localizer for Super Mario 64.

  Veteran composer Koji Kondo wrote the score. He created fresh interpretations of familiar melodies from earlier Mario media and added new material of his own. Yoji Inagaki was responsible for sound design and had to produce hundreds of sound effects. He and Kondo agreed that music and sound effects mattered equally. Inagaki offered a yardstick for the scale of the work. The average Nintendo 64 game had about 500 sound effects, while Ocarina of Time had 1,200 and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask had 2,000.

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• 4. Inside the Castle

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  Princess Peach invites Mario to her castle for a cake she has baked for him. He arrives to find that Bowser has taken over and trapped her and her servants inside, using the power of the castle's 120 Power Stars. Those stars are hidden in paintings that work as portals to other worlds, where Bowser's minions stand guard. The castle is the hub, with a lobby, a main tower and a basement across three floors, plus a moat and a courtyard outside.

  Fifteen courses each hold seven Power Stars: six from named missions and one for collecting 100 coins. Another fifteen are tucked away as secrets and bonuses, which makes 120. Each star Mario recovers opens more of the castle. Some stars appear only after a task that the course name often hints at, such as gathering eight red coins, beating a boss, racing an opponent or solving a puzzle. Friendly creatures lend a hand too. Bob-omb Buddies, for instance, will open cannons for Mario on request.

  Mario's repertoire runs from walking, running and jumping to crouching, crawling, climbing, swimming, kicking, grabbing and punching. Combining a jump with other actions produces the double and triple jumps, the long jump, the backflip and the wall jump. A Lakitu who broadcasts Mario's adventure operates the camera, and the player can switch between first-person and third-person view.

  Health works differently from earlier games. It appears as a pie of eight segments. Yellow coins restore one segment, red coins restore two, and blue coins restore five. A spinning heart or a jump into water also heals Mario. Underwater, the pie becomes a measure of how long he can hold his breath. Finishing a course earns an extra life for every 50 yellow coins collected. Extra life mushrooms hide in places such as trees and poles, and some chase Mario through the air or dodge him on the ground.

  The familiar Super Mushroom and Fire Flower are gone. In their place, red, green and blue translucent blocks appear across many stages. A matching switch in each of three secret areas makes the blocks solid and permanently grants a special cap. The Wing Cap lets Mario fly after a triple jump or a cannon shot. The Metal Cap makes him immune to enemies, fire and noxious gases and lets him resist wind and water currents. The Vanish Cap makes him partly immaterial and invulnerable, and lets him pass through some obstacles. The shell of a stomped Koopa Troopa acts as an unofficial power-up, because Mario can ride it across water, lava and quicksand.

  The final level sits behind endless stairs, in the spirit of the Penrose stairs concept. Mario can climb them once he has collected seventy Power Stars. Until then, the music there resembles a Shepard scale. Three doors to different floors open with keys won by defeating Bowser in hidden worlds. After the last battle, Bowser escapes and swears revenge. Mario earns a special Power Star that gives him the Wing Cap, and he flies back to the courtyard. Peach is freed from the stained-glass window above the entrance, kisses Mario on the nose and finally bakes the cake.

  A reward waits for players who collect all 120 stars. A cannon on the castle grounds takes them to the roof, where Yoshi gives a message from the developers, 100 extra lives and an improved triple jump.

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• 5. Two More Months

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  In November 1995, Nintendo Space World showed Super Mario 64 as a playable prototype. The version was only fifty percent complete, and only about two percent of the texture mapping was done. It had thirty-two courses. Miyamoto had hoped for more, possibly up to forty, but the final game was cut to fifteen.

  Nintendo of America chairman Howard Lincoln said Miyamoto's wish to add more was a major reason the Nintendo 64 slipped from Christmas 1995 to Summer 1996. Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi later said: "Game creators can finish games quickly if they compromise. But users have sharp eyes." He said players "soon know if the games are compromised". Yamauchi recalled that Miyamoto "asked for two more months and I gave them to him unconditionally". The pressure took a toll. Goddard said the stress of the project led some programmers to quit or move to other departments.

  The game appeared at E3 1996, where several Nintendo 64 consoles were set up so people could play it. Peter Main, Nintendo's vice president of marketing at the time, said it was meant to be the killer app for the console. The marketing campaign was large. Videotapes went to more than five hundred thousand Nintendo Power subscribers, and advertisements ran on MTV, Fox and Nickelodeon.

  Super Mario 64 reached Japan in June 1996 and North America in September. Europe and Australia followed in March 1997. It sold around 200,000 copies in its first week. In its first three months in North America it sold more than two million copies and grossed $140 million in the United States, making it the best-selling video game of 1996 by dollar sales. In the first three months of 1997 it was the second-best-selling console game at 523,000 units, behind Mario Kart 64.

  In 1998 the NPD Group ranked it fifth by units, behind GoldenEye 007, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Gran Turismo and Banjo-Kazooie. Sales reached 5.5 million by early 2001 and 5.9 million by September 2002. At the 1999 Milia festival in Cannes it won a Gold ECCSELL prize for its 1998 revenues in the European Union. By March 2008 it had sold 11.8 million copies worldwide, the most of any Nintendo 64 game. By 2015 the total stood at 11.91 million, which made it the 12th most sold Mario game.

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• 6. The Critics Weigh In

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  Larry Marcus, a source analyst at Alex. Brown & Sons, remembers Super Mario 64 as the most anticipated game of E3 1996. He recalls a crowd of teenagers "jostling for a test run". The excitement had started earlier. GamePro enjoyed the 1995 prototype's smoothness and said the action "was a blast", though the game was only half finished. Ed Semrad of Electronic Gaming Monthly liked seeing Mario characters animated in 3D after years in 2D.

  The finished game earned a score of 94 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on thirteen reviews. GameRankings gave it 96% and ranked it the eighteenth best video game of all time from twenty-two reviews. Maximum praised its sense of freedom and its replayability, comparing its switch-based access to new areas with Super Mario World. GameFan's E. Storm was delighted by the water levels and said the game explored an "entirely new realm of gaming". Doug Perry of IGN felt the series had moved into 3D perfectly. Electronic Gaming Monthly praised the size and challenge of the levels and later ranked it the fourth best console game of all time.

  Variety drew some of the warmest comments. Total! said its reviewers were still "hooked" after a month. Corbie Dillard of Nintendo Life called the variety the game's "greatest genius". N64 Magazine compared the game to an enormous playground, though it felt the many hints and tips dulled exploration. Victor Lucas of EP Daily agreed and suggested players "skip all the sign posts".

  The graphics won equal praise. GamePro called it "the most visually impressive game of all time". Paul Davies of Computer and Video Games said the visuals were so amazing that he found himself stopping to admire them. Total! said the lack of pixellation and jagged edges made it look like it came from a "top of the range graphics workstation".

  Awards piled up. Electronic Gaming Monthly named it Game of the Year in both the editors' and readers' picks, and also Nintendo 64 Game of the Year, Adventure Game of the Year and Best Graphics. At the 1997 Computer Game Developers Conference it won Spotlight Awards for Best Use of Innovative Technology, Best Console Game and Best Game of 1996. Maximum ranked it the greatest game it had ever reviewed. Digitiser named it the best game of 1997, with Final Fantasy VII as runner-up.

  The camera divided opinion. Next Generation found the game less accessible than earlier Mario titles because of the camera's erratic moves. Nebojsa Radakovic and Doug Perry said it was sometimes blocked by objects or passed through them. Dan Hsu, Shawn Smith and Crispin Boyer of Electronic Gaming Monthly each removed half a point from their scores. Corbie Dillard saw no problems, and Total! found awkward angles rare. Paul Davies admitted difficulty positioning it but dismissed the flaw as "one hiccup". In a 2007 re-review, Game Informer judged that by present-day standards the camera "would almost be considered broken".

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• 7. Setting the Standard

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  Dan Houser, a prominent figure behind the Grand Theft Auto series, once said: "Anyone who makes 3D games who says they've not borrowed something from Mario or Zelda of the Nintendo 64 is lying". Tom Hall, co-founder of id Software, said the game "defined the 3D platformer as a genre". He added that the industry had not yet figured out 3D platforming, and here was "a masterwork that set the standard".

  The list of admirers is long. Martin Hollis, producer and director of GoldenEye 007, and the team behind Tony Hawk's Pro Skater drew on its mission-based level design. Michael John, designer and producer on Spyro the Dragon, cited its controls and environments. Chris Sutherland, lead designer of Banjo-Kazooie, said it set the benchmark and that every other Nintendo 64 platformer would be compared to it. Gabe Newell of Valve named it an inspiration for Half-Life. Ashraf Ismail, director of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, based the open world on its hub with pockets of maps full of things to do. Square Enix has said that a coincidental meeting with Disney employees led to Kingdom Hearts, inspired by the game's 3D environments and exploration.

  The hub world mattered too. 1Up.com wrote that its central hub, a safe tutorial and a level selector in one, became a staple of the genre.

  The camera that critics argued about became the template. Designers built a virtual video camera that turns and accelerates according to the character's actions, and it can be steered independently. Nintendo Power praised it together with the lock-on camera of Ocarina of Time and called the two games trailblazers for the 3D era. K. Thor Jensen of PC Magazine called the integration of camera control into the core gameplay the medium's true evolutionary leap.

  The analog stick was just as novel. Other consoles used digital D-pads, and 3D games generally tied movement either to a fixed camera angle or to the character's own view. Here, control was fully analog and turned a 360-degree range of motion into movement relative to the camera. The stick also allowed subtle control, such as running speed. In 2005, Electronic Gaming Monthly ranked it the most important game since the magazine began in 1989. It said earlier 3D games existed, but "Nintendo's was the first to get the control scheme right".

  The game was also central to its console's early fortunes. Lee Hutchinson, a former Babbage's employee, notes that its success defied the rule that a wide range of launch games was needed for broad appeal. The Nintendo 64 eventually lost much of its market share to Sony's PlayStation, partly because of cartridge and controller choices that Miyamoto reportedly made for this game. In 2012, the Smithsonian American Art Museum included it among the 80 entries in its exhibit The Art of Video Games.

  Nintendo planned a sequel for the disk drive add-on under the codename Super Mario 128. In July 1996, insiders said Miyamoto was assembling a team made mostly of Super Mario 64 veterans. Miyamoto affirmed that work began only around E3 1997. The project was canceled because of slow progress and the commercial failure of the disk drive. Later games carried the line forward. Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy built on its power-ups and open 3D play. Super Mario Galaxy 2 includes a remake of the Whomp's Fortress level called Throwback Galaxy. Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario 3D World moved away from open design toward platforming that recalls 2D games. Super Mario Odyssey returned to it, with a Mario 64 Suit and Mario 64 Cap, a Mushroom Kingdom that includes Princess Peach's Castle, and Power Moons that resemble Power Stars.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  In 2004, an enhanced remake called Super Mario 64 DS arrived on the Nintendo DS. Yoshi is the starting character, and Mario, Luigi and Wario can be unlocked. It added better graphics, new areas, enemies and power-ups, more stars, touchscreen mini-games and multiplayer. Critics praised the graphics and additions but criticized the controls and multiplayer, and by September 2021 it had sold 11.06 million copies.

  The original has traveled widely. A version served as a tech demo for the Nintendo 64 Disk Drive at the 1996 Space World show. On the 18th of July 1997 Japan received Super Mario 64 Rumble Pak Version, which fixed bugs, supported the Rumble Pak and included the English voice acting. In November 2003 it was ported to China's iQue Player as a limited demo, and in late 2006 it reached the Wii Virtual Console. In September 2020 it appeared in Super Mario 3D All-Stars on Nintendo Switch at 720p, based on the Rumble Pak version. It also joined the Nintendo Classics service in October 2021.

  Rumors spread fast after launch. The most popular claimed that Luigi was an unlockable character. In 1996, IGN offered a prize of $100 to anyone who could find him, and nobody did.

  Players have also found glitches that open unreachable areas, including, in 2014, a coin that ordinary play cannot collect. The speedrunning community has built many techniques. The Lakitu skip is a long jump that avoids Lakitu's camera explanation. In the bloated Bob-omb glitch, Mario grabs a Bob-omb mid-explosion, and its large hitbox pushes him through walls. The backwards long jump, or BLJ, chains long jumps backward on a steep slope to build huge speed. The Rumble Pak release patched the BLJ, as did the Japanese Virtual Console, Nintendo Classics and 3D All-Stars versions. In 2013, YouTuber Vinesauce posted a compilation of corruptions made with a program called naughty. Another YouTuber, Pannenkoek2012, makes technical videos on the game's glitches and mechanics that the video game press has covered many times. In May 2024, a player named Marbler beat the game without pressing the A button, a challenge that demands deep knowledge of its bugs.

  Fans have built remakes and mods. Super Mario 64: Chaos Edition loads codes that cause strange behavior. Super Mario 64 Online added online multiplayer, was removed after a copyright strike from Nintendo, and returned as Net64. Super Mario 64 Maker is a level editor. Super Mario 64 Odyssey adds enemy possession by throwing Mario's hat. Super Mario 64: Ocarina of Time recreates the world of Ocarina of Time. Open World Mario 64 is a battle royale mod set on a map made from all the levels. First Person Mario 64 locks the camera to first-person, which makes the acrobatics much harder. Super Mario 64 HD, a Unity remake of Bob-Omb Battlefield, was taken down after a Nintendo copyright claim. B3313 is a ROM hack built on beta content and urban legends, placing Mario and Luigi in a surreal version of Peach's Castle. Super Mario 64 Coop Deluxe supports online cooperative play for up to 16 players.

  In 2019, fans decompiled the original ROM image into C source code, so the game could be ported natively to any system. The next year, fans released a Windows port with widescreen and 4K support. Mods followed, including Render96, which brought in the original high-resolution source textures. Super Mario 64 Plus added a permanent death option, bug fixes and an improved camera. Ports reached the Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Vita, Dreamcast and Android. Nintendo has enlisted a law firm to have videos and listings of the port removed through copyright claims.

  In 2013, a study tested the brain effects of playing Super Mario 64 for at least thirty minutes a day for two months. The game was chosen for its navigation and its three-dimensional environment. Gray matter increased in the right hippocampal formation and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, areas thought to contribute to spatial navigation, working memory and motor planning.

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