I can still clearly remember the morning I was given the Nintendo 64 and a copy of Super Mario 64 almost 25 years ago. It was a very dark Christmas Eve Eve morning, but not because it was early, but because a storm was rolling in overhead. If you can believe it, getting this present would cause this to be a holiday to be one of the longest in my life. Every year, a couple days before Christmas, we would make the 300 mile drive to my mother’s family home to share in the festivities of gift giving and in-law fighting. Now, if you can imagine, since we weren’t having Christmas at home, that would normally mean our presents would migrate with the child for whom the gifts were for (ahem… me). However, because I was but a child and was prone to mistakes and forgetfulness (a family trait I assure you), one Christmas I forgot a few of my presents at my mother’s family home, an error in which I would continue to be punished for year after year, for I was no longer allowed to bring any presents my parents bought for me. As we all know, your parents get you the best things, the things you actually asked for, the expensive things. This was the first year of the new rule and I got to choose whether I would open my presents before or after the trip. Because I was 10 and waiting is not something kids know how to do, of course I made the terrible mistake of choosing to open them before we left. And wouldn’t you know it, right before my eyes was a brand new Nintendo 64 and a copy of Super Mario 64. All this rich three dimensional goodness would have to be left under the tree in my house, far from my grasp for several days. Like burning your hand on a hot stove, it felt like every second I was away from my new gift was another second with my hand over the fire. The 4 hour drive, which as a kid already felt like 40 hours suddenly felt like 400 hours. No Gameboy, comic book, or cassette tape would soothe my aching soul. Oddly this has become one of my favorite memories, maybe more than actually getting home to play Super Mario 64. However, I haven’t actually been back to play the game since about 1998. Time moves ever forward and I had the good luck to find new games and new friends to play them with every year. While I have replayed many other games across many different, this 64-bit wonder wasn’t one of them. After having waited 4 years since the Nintendo Switch released, hoping to hold out for a “Switch Pro”, I finally broke down and bought the OLED edition, along with Super Mario 3D All Stars and Super Mario Odyssey. When both games game in, I was suddenly struck by how long it had been between the newest Mario adventure and the 64 juggernaut. I wanted to get a feeling for how far Mario has come, how far Nintendo has come, so I decided I would complete Super Mario 64 before moving on to Odyssey. I was shocked by how much I never realized about Super Mario 64. Specifically, it’s very creation is the foundation for all first party, 3D Nintendo games.

The first thing I realized about playing Super Mario 64 after being locked in my mind palace for 25 years was how often I played every other Mario game in its orbit. It could be that the game was locked behind the toyish and annoying N64 controller or that games on either side of it were just better. It was the former, and that was something I realized almost immediately. Controlling Mario and the camera was a real blast to the past. About midway through the N64/PSOne era of games, game developers realized how to merge camera, character, and player; how to allow us to move in a three-dimensional space. But you have to walk before you can run, and Super Mario 64 was basically the Microsoft Solitaire of the Nintendo 64 world. Microsoft Solitaire and Minesweeper were game tools built to teach users how to use the mouse to interact with their new Windows desktop. It was the Super Mario Bros. of the Nintendo Entertainment System, a game that taught us to run to the right. It was a tool to teach us, the player, what it would be like to play in a Nintendo’s 3D space. It was also a learning experience for their development staff, training them how to implement and design challenges. The N64 only had a single joystick with D-Pad and “C”-Pad buttons on either side. This limited the design of 3D camera movement, locking character and camera movement to a single axis with auxiliary control to the C-buttons. Primarily, Super Mario 64 was a demonstration to gamers and third-party developers of everything they expected was capable of their system.

This led me to my second realization: the sheer lack of actual world creativity. For as challenging and interesting as the game was, it lacks any real cohesive world. If you imagined you would be playing the Super Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. evolved into the third-dimension, you would be severely disappointed. Or you should have been, but the sheer spectacle and scope of this new game was unlike anything we had ever seen. It was a truly accessible challenge for any gamer of any age. It was a smokeshow meant to redirect our attention from what Super Mario Bros was and what the new dimension could be. A challenge. They constructed over 15 worlds, 3 Boss worlds, and some Sub-world challenges, a series of increasingly difficult stunts that would require us to learn a whole new set of skills that we would use to play every single new Z-axis addition game. Nintendo basically did a service to the entire gaming sphere, to anyone who would pick up their flagship game on their new console; they taught an entire generation to walk so that we could run. In a way, Super Mario 64’s possible evolution was a sacrificial lamb; the next evolution of Super Mario world building was left behind so that they could learn to build and we could learn to play.

This led me to my final observation, one about the Mario-verse as a whole and how it relates to my taste as a fan. Super Mario 64 makes every other Mario game around it much more significant. It spends no time at all building a world you will truly write to memory. Super Mario Bros. for the NES did the job of world building and teaching us to play. With Super Mario 64, Nintendo chose to focus on the end game, to look to the future, knowing they would be making 3D games far into the future, they taught us to play instead of building a real world. They taught us how grass would feel beneath Mario’s feet, how sand would slow him down, how ice would make us slip, how water would cause us new nightmares in learning to swim, and how hard it is to learn to fly. Nintendo has been known to read the future wrong, to be a bit of ahead of themselves, but teaching people to play in the 3rd dimension wasn’t one of them, even at the sacrifice of world building. Super Mario Bros gave us a fictional landscape. Super Mario Bros 3 gave us a theatrical conceit for our imaginations to grab. Super Mario World a literal connective tissue for the landscape of Peach’s kingdom. Super Mario World Yoshi’s Island gave extended character’s real agency. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars an extended universe. They abandon all of this in favor of teaching us to play in a new world. They put their best story building bones on hold just to teach us to lean a stick and turn a camera. It was that important.

In the end, I stopped just short of all the available stars in Super Mario 64 in favor of moving on to my next Mario led adventure. I completed every star in all 15 stages and then some, but still not 100% complete, just like my original file on my significantly heavier N64 cartridge. In my lack of completion I somehow feel more complete. I admire Nintendo’s resolve to learn and teach their audience. None of the other companies are quite as well known or devoted to this level of pedantism. They create for the future, peering into a crystal ball and sometimes getting it wrong. They knew people would want to wear goggles and play in a more immersive world… they just did it 25+ years too early. They knew old people wanted to just point at the TV, so they created the Wii-mote. They just overestimated the overall novelty outside of… older people. Nintendo may steer wrong, but when it comes to Mario, they always read the current correctly, even in retrospect. Super Mario 64 is a well made game with a shallow world that does more for gaming than it does for Mario, but still comes out the other side an incredible feat. Super Mario 64 is a good game.