A New Mushroom Kingdom: 25 years of Super Mario 64

The year 1996 marked the beginning of a lot of new eras. Earlier this year, we looked at the dawn of Shacknews itself, alongside PC gaming staple Quake, which changed the PC gaming world. That year also marked the twilight of the second console generation. The Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis had served the console gaming public well and will always hold an esteemed place in this great hobby's history. However, it was time for something new. It was time to enter a whole new dimension. For Nintendo, that meant leaping into the great unknown with its third home console, the Nintendo 64. The industry leader was bracing to get experimental with new 3D games, new art styles, new ideas and, as has been the case with their previous two consoles, success all hinged on Mario.

Super Mario 64 released 25 years ago, launching alongside the Nintendo 64. It was a game that confounded those who weren't ready to leave their 2D comfort zone. But, for the rest of the gaming world, this game marked a brand new journey, one that would help define Mario to this day.

Building a castle

Super Mario Bros. took players across the Mushroom Kingdom when it launched on the NES. Super Mario World took players through an entirely new world when it debuted on the Super Nintendo. When Super Mario 64 released alongside the Nintendo 64, the heroic plumber took players into a setting that they didn't expect to see: the Princess' castle. The story started off slightly different, with Mario invited to the castle because the Princess was baking him a cake. A few minutes into the game, the real story became clear. Bowser had kidnapped the Princess again.

Before going any further, let's talk about the Princess. Today, everybody knows her as Princess Peach. She wasn't always called that. When the Mario series first spread outside of Japan, the character was named Princess Toadstool. But, that was never supposed to be her official name. In Japan, she had been known as Peach from the very beginning. Why she was ever called Princess Toadstool everywhere else is unknown, though it can probably be attributed to regional marketing. With Super Mario 64 marking a new beginning for Mario, Nintendo saw the opportunity to set things right. Therefore, Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars would be the final time that the Princess would go under the name Toadstool. When Super Mario 64 released 25 years ago today, the name change to Peach would become permanent.

Speaking of ideas that would become permanent, Super Mario 64 would be the first time that players would venture into Princess Peach's castle and its exterior design remains in place 25 years later. Players most recently explored Peach's humble abode in games like Super Mario Odyssey and Paper Mario: The Origami King. The stained glass image of Peach above the entrance has become iconic in itself and Super Mario 64 marked its first official appearance.

What's interesting about the castle is that it was originally planned to be a part of The Legend of Zelda's jump into 3D. However, things didn't quite pan out. Mario and Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto explained in a 1996 roundtable interview, which was published in the Super Mario 64 strategy guide.

For me, Mario and Zelda exist side by side. Their basic gameplay elements are the same, with the only difference being that one focuses on action, and the other on puzzle solving. They’re always developed at the same time, and lots of good ideas from Mario get used in Zelda, and vice-versa.

Actually, the castle system for Mario 64 was originally something I thought of for Zelda, and now that we’ve used it here, I’m wondering what we’re going to do for Zelda… (laughs) In any event, I’m really looking forward to developing the next N64 game. Uh oh, I better stop before I end up talking about what we’re making now. (laughs)

The inside of Peach's castle set the stage for how Super Mario 64 would work. Mario could explore the castle, but when it came time to start a level, he had to jump through one of the castle's many paintings. Inside these paintings was a glimpse at Mario's future.

The 3D Mario formula

With Mario's move to 3D, gone were the days of running from a starting point to a flagpole. Well, at least they were gone for a little while. Miyamoto wanted this to be a very different kind of Mario game. In his mind a 3D Mario could not be the same as anything that had come before it.

"It's very difficult to compare between the existing Mario games and Super Mario 64," Miyamoto said in a 1996 interview with Next Generation magazine. "We must consider them as two different kinds of games. Personally, I wanted to make a game that looked like a 3D interactive cartoon. I wanted to create a small garden where Mario can meet realtime [sic] 3D characters and the player would be able to move the character with the controller just as if it were a real cartoon."

Instead of moving to a set goal, Mario had to collect stars, which would open up more doors inside Peach's castle. Each of Super Mario 64's painting worlds had six stars, not counting an extra one that was rewarded for collecting 100 yellow coins. Upon entering the painting, Mario would be assigned a specific star. Some stars would appear only when they're assigned, while others could be collected at any time if the player knew their location. This kind of open-ended gameplay sounds primitive by 2021 standards, but for the Mario series in 1996, this was amazingly innovative.

The first time a player stepped into Bob-Omb Battlefield in 1996, it may have felt overwhelming. It was the first time in Mario's history that players could see the entirety of the stage from overhead. The first reaction was likely, "Where do I go first?" There were Goombas, like in every other mainline Mario platformer, but these Goombas were wandering in circles and not just statically moving from right to left. There was a giant cannon where Mario could take flight. And, in the center of the level, was a mountain just begging to be climbed. It was unlike anything in a Mario game to that point and the scale of these stages would only get bigger as the adventure progressed.

Equally innovative was Mario's arsenal of moves. While Mario had power-ups, this time in the form of special caps, success in Super Mario 64 was centered around mastering Mario's own basic array of moves. Mario could punch, he could perform a backwards somersault, he could wall jump, he could triple jump, and he could long jump. Many of these moves remain a fixture in 3D Mario games today and all of them have different uses. Some are used to take on bosses, others are used to reach out to far-away stars, and others are used when racing against time.

For as many new moves as Mario had, Nintendo did have one major concern and that was regarding the fundamental jump. As Miyamoto noted in a 1996 interview, which was also published for the Super Mario 64 strategy guide:

In the Mario games up to now, we’ve carefully crafted every stage and level down to the individual pixel. Take jumping, for example. Implementing jumping in 3D is really difficult.

In earlier Mario games, we were able to measure the number of pixels Mario could jump and know exactly what was possible. But this time, we had to design the levels so that as long as your jump was "close enough," you'd make it; it was too hard for the player to judge. This was a design change we made in the middle of the development, when the game was far already very complete. There was a lot of booing from the staff.

If Mario was going to level up, then so, too, was his arch-nemesis. Like Mario, Bowser had evolved over the previous decade in a lot of ways. He was last seen standing side-by-side with Mario in Super Mario RPG, but for this first foray into 3D platforming, Nintendo wanted to think bigger. For starters, Bowser would no longer be able to see eye-to-eye with Mario… literally. For Super Mario 64, Bowser became a larger-than-life beast and would tower over Mario in nearly every mainline Mario game since.

The 3D Mario formula is fascinating, because while the formula itself has aged well, many elements of Super Mario 64 have not. But, that's a story for later, so let's put a pin in that idea for now.

Giving a hero his voice

There was one other way that Super Mario 64 stood out from all of its predecessors. Mario suddenly had a voice. For the first time in a main Mario game, the heroic plumber would speak. Granted, it would be limited phrases, but hearing Mario with a voice was still exciting, if a little bit jarring, for those who had spent the past ten years seeing him as a silent protagonist.

Charles Martinet stepped into the mascot's shoes, having previously voiced him for PC spin-off Mario's Game Gallery (a.k.a. Mario's FUNdamentals). It wasn't Martinet's first rodeo with Nintendo, having previously done voice work for Super Punch-Out. The Mario games may not have been Shakespeare, but that's how Martinet approached his audition.

"What popped into my brain was a character I'd played in Taming Of The Shrew," Martinet said in a 2015 BBC interview. "I was Petruchio going back to get his wife in Italy, and I was a sort of 'Mamma mia, nice ol' Italian guy'. So I thought I'd do something like that. I went on and on about spaghetti and meatballs. After half an hour the producer said, 'cut, stop, we've run out of tape!' And he called Nintendo and said 'I've found our Mario'. Mine was the only tape he sent back."

The rest was history. Martinet's audition was presented to Miyamoto. According to the strategy guide interview, it turned out that Miyamoto was aware of Martinet's body of work, having remembered him from a video game event five to six years prior. Martinet was called in to work on Super Mario 64 and remains Mario's voice to this day. He's also gone on to voice other members of the Mario family since then, including Luigi and Wario. But, for Nintendo fans, the magic all started with that iconic "It's-a me, Mario!" that opened the N64 classic.

A Super Mario legacy

When Miyamota went into Super Mario 64, his goal was to make it something far different than anything Mario had done before. As iconic as Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World were, this needed to be something just as special, albeit in a different way. What Nintendo pulled off was a 3D platformer that would define the genre for many years and continue to define Mario's 3D titles 25 years later.

With Super Mario 64, players could explore diaroma-like worlds for the first time, interact and experiment with objects that had actual physics, and move Mario around a 360 degree, three-dimensional plane using the Nintendo 64 controller's analog control stick. It was a new way of looking at games, one that turned off old school 2D purists of the previous generation, but ushered in an entirely new crop of players.

While heralded as an instant classic, the game was far from perfect. The camera system, for example, even at the time, was deemed a nightmare, one that's aged like moldy cheese. However, Super Mario 64 was the foundation on which Mario's 3D future would be built. The camera was refined into something far more usable in Super Mario Galaxy, the worlds have been made progressively bigger and more engaging in every 3D Super Mario game that followed, and even the Star system has been refined for maximum engagement with 2017's Super Mario Odyssey. Conversely, some elements of Super Mario 64 became timeless and never went anywhere. The soundtrack immediately stands out, with the "Slide" track, in particular, becoming a fixture in Mario games for the next 25 years.

Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Super Mario 64's place in the speedrunning community. Many classic games have passionate speedrunning communities, but Super Mario 64's stands out with its charismatic runners, their commitment to finding new and exciting glitches, and also finding new ways to run the game. While runners like Allan "cheese05" Alvarez and Lee "Biinny" Whelan continue to search for ways to optimize runs and set records, runners like Bubzia have tackled an entirely new category, taking on the classic platformer while blindfolded. The speedrunning community has never stopped celebrating Super Mario 64 over its 25 years of existence and it doesn't look like they're going anywhere anytime soon.

Nintendo always believed in the power of the Nintendo 64. Across dozens of interviews with a number of different outlets, Nintendo's higher-ups stood by their assertions that the Nintendo 64 was a game-changer when it came to console gaming.

"We’re going to be releasing a lot of games that do things that have never been done before," Miyamoto said, concluding the 1996 roundtable interview that appeared in the Super Mario 64 strategy guide. "We still have those doubt [sic] sometimes: 'is this really going to be fun?'... but it’s precisely because it’s something weird that we want to try it! The N64 is that kind of hardware—it makes the strange possible."

Nintendo certainly did release games that were fun, strange, and everything in-between. But, like the two consoles before it, the ball doesn't get rolling without Mario. Super Mario 64 has its place in gaming history for a reason, becoming an innovator in the 3D gaming space and convincing a new generation of players that it was time to play.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?