Super Mario 64 used rock-solid 3D to create a world of dreams and delight
by Ben Kuchera
3D Illustration by Gerardo Escalante embracing the weird world of possibility Super Mario opened up to the author. Our nonprofit generates funding in multiple ways, including through affiliate linking. When you purchase something through an affiliate link on this site, the price will be the same for you as always, but we may receive a small percentage of the cost.
Super Mario 64 was the first game that taught me the power of 3D visuals, but that lesson was very different from what I was expecting. I had mostly focused on what the 3D revolution would mean for games that wanted to replicate real life. What I should have been paying attention to is how well 3D engines could mess with my perception of that reality.
I thought it would be a game that reflected the world back at me, and instead it was a game that made me question my own assumptions about what reality even meant. Super Mario 64 instantly made the world of gaming feel so much more surprising, and exciting, than I had ever expected at that age.
This isn’t real life; it’s a dream
Sony launched the original PlayStation in 1994, two years before the release of the Nintendo 64 console and Super Mario 64, so players had already seen what 3D games could do at this point. It wasn’t just about running left and right anymore; players could now move in any direction, including toward or away from the screen.
Game designers were struggling to find the best ways to let players control characters in 3D space, however, and many of the earliest 3D games were both hard to control and visually simple. 3D graphics took a lot of power, after all, and even the basic designs of video game controllers weren’t ready for 3D controls.
Then Nintendo released the Nintendo 64 console, with its bizarre tri-wing controller designed for 3D movement, and a brand-new Mario game with which to show off the capabilities of the new hardware. That’s when everything changed for me, and not just because I had to sell so many of my old games and systems to be able to afford both the system and the game (which was released on a cartridge and sold for around $60 – a higher than expected price for games at the time). That’s roughly $123 or so in 2023 dollars, but that game played on that system changed everything for me. It felt like I was getting a deal, as if I was paying so much more because I was borrowing ideas from the future and playing them today.
Super Mario 64 was one of the first 3D games for home consoles where the 3D felt clean and solid, with controls that did their best to provide the same level of precision we were used to from the previous 2D Mario games. Compared to the other smeary textures and indistinct 3D engines that were common on the first-generation PlayStation and systems like the 3DO, Super Mario 64 instantly felt like it was a generation ahead of everyone else. It was 3D done right, with controls that almost never felt like they were fighting the player.
That was already enough to help the game stand out from the competition, but it’s what the designers at Nintendo were able to communicate with that extra dimension that made the game such a breakthrough for me.
The ability to control characters in 3D was often discussed as a way to make games more real, so each could closely follow the physical logic of reality that we’re already used to. You could recreate the world in a virtual way, and with 3D movement and control it would feel like you were exploring that world. So many folks were talking about photorealistic graphics, better physics, and more realism as a focus, even in a game starring an excitable plumber with a fluffy mustache.
But Nintendo wasn’t interested in Super Mario 64 being realistic or in presenting a world that played by recognizable rules. The more physically consistent this new take on the universe of Mario Bros. looked, the more surprising each perversion of those rules felt. And there were plenty.
You could run up and down stairs, sure, but the paintings on the walls were also elastic portals into even stranger worlds. This new universe operated on dream logic; Mario could swim around lakes and encounter a dinosaur, but he could also find a metal hat that would turn his body into steel so he would sink to the bottom of that water and somehow not have to breathe anymore.
I could jump on turtles and send their shells flying across the level, but you could also ride them like a skateboard, treating the opening areas of the game like a Mario-themed version of a Tony Hawk game, or at least that’s how it would feel after the first Tony Hawk would be released three years later in 1996. Each boss level had huge chunks of moving, spinning, crushing, burning machinery that made no logical sense. Nintendo saw the 3D spaces of Super Mario 64 as an excuse to get weirder instead of keeping the design and physics grounded.
That was the difference between how I expected the game to feel (I wasn’t surprised when flying around a level actually made my stomach dip), and how it felt in reality when I started playing for longer sessions and discovered, by accident, that one of the game’s best flying levels is accessed by staring into a beam of light inside the castle itself. I was like a kid laying on the grass and imagining how it would be to fly through the clouds, only to find that very thought was what allowed the fantasy to become real. It was thrilling in a way I haven’t experienced since.
This is when I realized that you could use the power of video games as reality-creation tools not just to mirror our world or to create games that looked like movies, but to build a world that had more in common with David Lynch than Walt Disney. Games were unlimited in potential not because they could recreate reality, but because they could play with it in new and surprising ways.
Despite that David Lynch reference, Mario 64 was not dark in tone. It was an uncomplicated story with some rather complicated interactions that were taught to the player so expertly that I rarely felt like I was learning anything at all. I was just intuitively exploring the game, and, in doing so, I was discovering haunted houses that defied logic, plenty of surprising secrets, and a sense of adventure and fun that the Mario series has amazingly been able to keep up almost continuously since. Mario’s creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, has always been fascinated by breaking the play space and messing with your head in his games, but that was to be expected in 2D space; we knew we were seeing a stylized version of reality. To see the same boundary-shattering ideas in such well-implemented 3D changed everything.
If a painting could be a door, what else should the player assume they don’t know? Suddenly everything I thought I knew about how things worked didn’t matter anymore. I couldn’t access the game’s final area without collecting a certain amount of stars, for instance, and until that barrier was crossed, the stairway to that final area continued forever. I wasn’t met with a door I couldn’t unlock. Instead, the game kept me in one place using impossible physics.
The difference between being told to stop, and being told you could keep going forever, but you wouldn’t get anywhere? The effect is the same, but the emotions the two approaches inspire in the player are very different.
I became desperate to know how the game was communicating what I should try and what I should avoid, while still making it feel like every decision was my idea. I was curious about how it was cheating 3D space for levels that felt more like magic tricks than something you could sketch out on graph paper. If physical reality was this malleable in virtual space, and it made me feel this strongly to experience it, the power of gaming must be greater than I had originally assumed. If someone could control my attention, how dangerous was that? But also: How could that power be used to help?
As much as I was playing the game, the designers of Super Mario 64 were playing right back. They built in enough on-ramps and hints for each surprise that even the newest player would see and do things that felt fantastical and strange. While so many games today give off the impression that if you miss something it’s your fault, Nintendo has always seemed to believe it was on them if a secret was too well hidden or obscure for most players. They democratized delight.
The first decade of my love of gaming made me believe I wanted to be a warrior or a soldier, that I was there for the power fantasy. After Super Mario 64, I understood that I actually wanted to be Alice going through the looking glass. And from that point on, I was much less sure of what I expected to find once I got there.