50 Years of Video Games: Super Mario 64 (N64)

With the Nintendo 64 being pushed back to 1996, it ended up being a little late to the party of home console games fully exploring 3D spaces. However, games released for the Sega Saturn and PlayStation were left to figure out how to move characters in a 3D world on their own, and the solution many came to wasn’t the best. To imitate real human movement, if a character wanted to run to the left you first had to press left to turn them in that direction and then you can press forward to move them that way. This style of movement is now commonly referred to as “tank controls” which already hints at its cumbersome nature, but it was functional enough for slower titles. Platformers thrived on frequent fluid movement though, and the platformers that did use tank controls often suffered for it. When the Nintendo 64 finally came out though, Super Mario 64 lead the way not only for the new system but showed the world the best way to move in 3D space as a character: if you press left, you move left. Mario would handle the small adjustments quickly enough that it didn’t slow things down, similar to how in real life you don’t need to come to a complete stop to turn and move in a new direction. This seemingly simple control method seems obvious in retrospect, but so does the midair movement control Mario had introduced to 2D platformers back in Super Mario Bros. as well, the heroic plumber’s movement paving the way for responsive movement in both styles of gameplay.

Even beyond the basics of running the direction you press on the joystick, Mario controls remarkably well for the most part. He’s speedy but not slippery and he packs a few little attacks that can be slipped into his jumping and running easily. A midair kick not only lets him knock away pesky flying foes but can help you with getting more out of a leap, the kick letting you hang in the air a little longer or you can even kick off an object or wall to get a bit of momentum in the other direction. Mario can do actual wall jumps too, although if you’ve played later Mario games it is a little bit pickier here about when you need to execute it while still being fairly easy to figure out the rhythm once you’ve pushed against your expectations a little. Very few other moves require such adjusting though, Mario able to perform a running triple jump for extra height, a backflip that can help him reach higher places in a small area, long jumps for clearing more horizontal space, and even a side flip that is perhaps the most difficult trick to pull off reliably but only really required once for an objective you technically don’t need to complete. Most of his abilities can be fluidly called upon in a situation to get you moving where you want to go and you can even find some unexpected uses for the less versatile ones. Crawling seems like an odd skill in such a fast-paced jump-focused game but then you find a section where you need to ever-so-carefully cross a thin bridge and find crawling slows Mario down enough that you won’t risk falling off. The aerial ground pound that can be used to activate switches or smash enemies below can also be used to save you after you fell from a high place, a quick activation just before you hit the ground negating the damage.

Almost none of Mario’s moves really let him down and ones that do require a bit more finesse or timing are either given the room needed to figure out the action safely when required or you can use your mastery of that skill to do small skips on the way to objectives. However, there is one area that does show some of its age and inexperience a little, the camera a bit hard to wrangle at times. Contextualized as an actual cameraman floating on a cloud recording the experience, the camera angles you view the action with are handled well enough most of the time by the game, but if you want to get a different perspective than what it is offering you can sometimes be left pressing the C buttons multiple times to turn it around. Sometimes it just won’t want to turn in a direction further for no clear reason, other times it might get a little obstinate as it doesn’t want to even slightly risk the camera moving into level geometry while other times is brazenly does so. The camera is thankfully not consistently a bother, but when you do reach the demanding late game levels or are in a tight space you are briefly reminded of its little issues.

Super Mario 64 starts right after the heroic plumber Mario is called to Princess Peach’s castle to share in a cake, but when he enters it he finds the building eerily quiet and empty. When he hears the laughter of an old familiar nemesis though, he learns that the evil turtle king Bowser has taken over the place. Stealing the Power Stars used to protect the castle and trapping the princess and her servants in the walls, Bowser distributes those stars amongst his minions and throws them into worlds found within paintings, Mario needing to hop into these pictures to gather the stars, fight Bowser, and save the Princess and the other victims of Bowser’s latest scheme.

Interestingly, Super Mario 64 features a fair bit of text-based conversation for a series that rarely used it before and would dial it back later. Boss characters like the living bomb King Bob-Omb greet you when you arrive and essentially tell you their weakness, new levels often come with a small primer on what to expect when first entering, and when you reach a certain amount of collected Stars the game checks in with you and makes little suggestions on what you should do next. Signs are posted all around the castle and worlds with reminders of controllers or little hints, some of them outright telling you how to do what could have been a puzzle otherwise. They are often small and off to the side, likely present first and foremost as a safeguard just in case people had trouble adapting to a game world where people could run around with a full 360 degrees of freedom. As you get deeper into things the game does pull back on placing signs and little tips all about and there are some goals and area gimmicks that can take a bit to figure out in a good way, so while it maybe waits a bit to take the training wheels off, you often need to read those signs yourself to get such help and it doesn’t rob the full experience of its depth or difficulty.

While exploring Princess Peach’s Castle already has a few goodies, hidden stars, and a nice little background song to accompany the task, when you enter one of the paintings that contains a world you get to the real meat of Mario’s adventure. There are 15 main courses in Super Mario 64 that each have 7 stars to grab, certain amounts allowing you to access new worlds or the boss levels where you can face off with Bowser. Most of the game’s worlds manage a good balance between size and ease of travel, Mario often quickly able to at least get in the right area to start trying to perform whatever objectives are required to make a Star appear. These objectives come in many different forms from things like beating a simple boss character, reaching a difficult area, winning a race, collecting the red coins hidden around a level, or figuring out some specific gimmick unique to the stage. One level can have you safely transporting a baby penguin to its mother at the bottom of a slippery snowy mountain, another has you crawling through a toxic cave’s maze looking for the right exit, and another has you needing to carefully approach a massive and fearsome eel from behind to snag the Star from its tail.

Super Mario 64 does reuse Star concepts fairly regularly, partially because each world and even the boss stages have the red coin challenges, but with only 70 required of the 120 available you can choose which stars you want to tackle fairly well and, more importantly, there is usually fairly good variation between these similar objectives. One red coin challenge might need you to fly through the air, another you swim underwater, and they’re often arranged as a way to move you towards a little platforming trial like the moving poles you jump between in Dire, Dire Docks. Some levels feature a goal where you need to find 5 “secrets”, these not being immediately apparent and usually following a theme so, for example, when you realize how they’re spaced out inside Shifting Sand Land’s interior pyramid area, you’ll need to really carefully climb up to similar spots to snag those invisible secrets for the Star. Some levels can even change based on which Star objective you select to tackle when entering a stage, this necessitating booting you out of the world after nearly every Star you grab, but it does mean the world designs aren’t static and you find new experiences even within familiar paces. Perhaps one of the most difficult Stars in each world though are the 100 coin Stars where you need to collect the abundant yellow coins used for healing and level specific high scores in a great number. This often scrapes up against how many are even in the level total and require a full tour of the stage to achieve most of the time, this often a challenging but fitting victory lap after you’ve earned the other Stars and learned how to get around these levels well.

While some world themes are repeated with there being two ice levels and two worlds focused on large swimming spaces, Super Mario 64 differentiates its level spaces not only with theming but with how you explore the layout. Cool, Cool Mountain is a descent down a mountain and as such many of the goals focus on things like descending it quickly or safely while Tall, Tall Mountain later in the game instead makes upwards travel its focus, dispensing with the snow and instead asking the player to make sure they don’t lose their footing on the way up to the Star objectives. Lethal Lava Land is a wide open area with lava between the platforms, but with the right risk taking you can leap across much of it fairly quickly to get to your goals. However, Lethal Lava Land also contains an interior volcano area that focuses on much tighter and precise platforming, other worlds similarly laying out objectives that can be in a wide open area of opportunity or a confined space where you need to be more careful. As you start nearing the end of the adventure the game starts throwing in more creative world concepts that also come with an increase in difficulty. Tick Tock Clock is an enormous climb through the moving interior pieces of a clock that requires overcoming a variety of different platforming challenges, Tiny-Huge Island has you swapping between versions of the stage where you’re incredibly tiny or incredibly huge and in turn swap between struggling against huge dangers or trying to make sure you don’t run off with your new size advantage, and Wet-Dry World requires you to manage to the water level as it can deny or allow access to different tiers of explorable terrain.

While things start off simple and accessible, going for enough stars to beat the game or even trying to grab the full 120 does start to have you face more demanding trials that your excellent set of movement skills is up to the task for. Each confrontation with Bowser that happens over the course of the game has its own obstacle course that gets steadily harder too, and although the boss fight is similar each time it also grows and requires better timing and attack avoidance. Bosses in general in Super Mario 64 never really get flashy or complex, but there are a few other elements that can add more depth to exploring stages. Mario can unlock certain special caps that give him brief powers when found and worn, the Wing Cap allowing for aerial trials, the Metal Cap letting him walk underwater, and the Vanishing Cap letting him slip through certain barriers. Cannons can be opened up to launch Mario around levels as well, these and the caps often having some clear use in a specific Star but potentially helpful in exploring a stage or getting around the intended solution if you’re clever enough in their use. It can seem a little odd when Super Mario 64 does only give you a single way forward in certain stages since otherwise it often emphasizes the ability to freely explore, make your own path, and sometimes even get Stars out of order in a stage just by pursuing something beyond the prescribed objective.

Musically the game also does a great job of setting the tone for different stages. The underwater exploration of Jolly Roger Bay is scored by a serene tune while the ghostly mansion Big Boo’s Haunt is a droning ominous sound, the first two stages share a bombastic energetic tune that urges to to take off and get going on your big adventure while the Bowser levels have a great building sound with gravitas to emphasize that you’re heading forward to face off with your main foe. Perhaps its little surprise a mainline Mario game would have catchy music, but the range also gives it a lasting appeal while usually serving as a fitting soundtrack for the stages the tracks are applied to.

THE VERDICT: Some slight roughness in areas like the camera control doesn’t prevent Super Mario 64 from being a phenomenal 3D platformer. Fluid and responsive movement makes navigating levels a breeze when it needs to be while level design makes sure to challenge the player in different ways, the different Star goals encouraging you experience the breadth of a stage’s offerings even if they might technically be a reused concept before you see the new implementation. An excellent soundtrack accompanies the tour of many great worlds that get more creative as you get deeper into the experience but the game ensures there are both simple stars to ease you in and more difficult ones to really push a player going for full 100% completion. This may have been Mario’s first real step into 3D gameplay, but Nintendo made sure to make it feel incredibly natural and a strong fit for the kind of worlds he could now explore.

And so, I give Super Mario 64 for Nintendo 64…

A FANTASTIC rating. Almost since I started The Game Hoard I always expected the day may come where I’d cover Super Mario 64 and I was preparing myself to have to explain how it had aged or lost some of its charm. I had imagined the sentences I would write or how to phrase things, perhaps attempting a similar approach to how I had to temper my praise of Super Metroid by saying it’s still great but not the everlasting classic it is sometimes made out to be. However, revisiting Super Mario 64 all these years later and I am surprised how well it has held up. I have found some games I played earlier in life to not be as good on a second visit and it’s been far too long since I played Super Mario 64 for muscle memory to sustain me, so I was surprised how the deeper and deeper I got into it the more I found it didn’t dull with age. The camera is definitely a contentious area that feels almost like that necessary blemish that all wonderful things must have to avoid overblown praise, and it’s not like every area of Super Mario 64 is an exhilarating test of player skill either. You won’t go wild for that fairly tame King Bob-Omb fight, but it eases you into the world and those early moments serve as a wonderful playground for learning your movement options and coming to understand the way the game structures its missions. Little secrets hide within the castle, challenges like the 100 coin Star test level knowledge and platforming competency for really committed players, and the music feels like such a wonderful companion along the way as it makes sometimes simple level concepts feel more vibrant and rich. Big Boo’s Haunt is actually a fairly small level when you consider it’s floor plan, but it’s many rooms, surprise monstrous piano, library of flying books, and plentiful ghosts make it feel like a level with much more going on as Super Mario 64 works to pack in a lot to do within these spaces.

You could certainly point at specific moments that aren’t as compelling as others, Tall, Tall Mountain is similar to Tick Tock Clock but less creative for example, but not only are you free to go between different levels to find the Stars you want to tackle, but the overall experience is certainly a ride that provides plenty of entertaining tasks to complete and a skill set that makes doing so enjoyable even at its most basic level. Mario is just excellent to control in Super Mario 64 and the world is built to foster your development in using it, and for the first game that really got 3D movement in a platformer down so fluidly it’s shocking how most of it still holds up today. I would not say it is the best 3D platformer, Mario topped himself in future titles like Super Mario Galaxy that learn and grow from what we saw here and in other games, but even as someone who was ready to find the flaw, who held the magnifying glass up and was prepared to rate it lower if need be, I found Super Mario 64 to still provide superb action and a wonderful little game world to explore.