Super Mario 64 (1996)
Super Mario 64 is a rite of passage. Not only for myself, but for video games as a whole. From 1996 onward, any game made with polygons, and many others besides, has the genetics of Super Mario 64 somewhere in its design. It’s influence and legacy is immense. For good reason.
For many developers, the early years of widespread 3D polygon-based games were challenging. How did one design a game within a three-dimensional world? Talented programmers and designers had been simulating 3D graphics with the clever manipulation of sprites for many years, with increasingly impressive results, but ‘true’ 3D spaces were unexplored territory.
Nintendo themselves had experimented with polygons in the early 1990s, using a special Super FX processing chip in game cartridges to boost the power of the sprite-based Super Nintendo Entertainment System. 1993’s StarFox, the shining example of this practice, portrays an impressive cosmos of triangles and oddly-shaped rhombuses on aging hardware. It was barebones, however, compared to a fleet of ‘next generation’ consoles on the horizon.
Sony’s PlayStation, released the year after StarFox, established polygonal games as the decade’s dominant force, with early titles like Ridge Racer and Air Combat ushering in a new breed. The PlayStation introduced the world at large to a new kind of video game, and laid the bedrock for what would follow.
Super Mario 64 was a launch title for Nintendo’s newest home console, the Nintendo 64, released in Japan on June 23 1996. Like most launch titles, Super Mario 64 was a vehicle for demonstrating the power of the new console’s technical prowess, particularly it’s widely touted 64-bit processing power. (By comparison, the PlayStation was a 32-bit system.) Colourful worlds, wide open spaces, and the precise movements of Mario were all central aspects of the game’s success, and directly highlighted just what developers could do on Nintendo’s latest hardware.
Much more than being merely an N64 tech demo, however, Super Mario 64 became a foundation stone of modern video game design and development. Led by Mario’s creator Shigeru Miyamoto, the development team spearheaded a new form of game design. Earlier 2D platformers had largely been linear obstacle courses with a simple goal of reaching the end, with many early 3D platformers such as Crash Bandicoot carrying on this philosophy. Miyamoto and his team, perhaps in an effort to save previous memory space on the N64’s limited game cartridges, plonked Mario into a series of open, free to explore levels with a variety of goals, many of which were far from the obstacle course design of Super Mario 64’s predecessors.
Miyamoto’s team took the opportunity to experiment and ran with it. Mario would have to swim, race, puzzle solve, explore, and much more to collect the 120 Power Stars littered throughout magical paintings inside Peach’s Castle. Though some solutions were needlessly obscure, a great many could be discovered intuitively by pushing the boundaries of what Mario can do. It is a design philosophy that rewarded playfulness and exploration, allowing plenty of opportunity for players grappling with the shift to 3D to get to grips with whole new dimensions of virtual movement.
Super Mario 64 may feel clunky to control for our modern sensibilities, but it was developed in part to demonstrate the N64’s revolutionary analogue stick controller, allowing a freedom of movement and precision of control rarely before seen in the gaming world. Thanks in no small part to Super Mario 64’s success, the analogue stick would become an industry standard, adopted by Nintendo’s competitors Sony and Sega, and virtually all modern video game controllers released thereafter. Mario hardly turns on a dime, but his goofy hops, grounds pounds, and much more defined how video games would play forevermore.
