Mario had always run from left to right. For the Nintendo 64, Nintendo threw that away. Edge saw the half-finished game in November 1995 and wrote that Nintendo “was forced to abandon its 2D expertise and start from scratch”: Super Mario 64 was “the start of a whole new book, not merely an additional chapter”.
The new book needed new tools. The console’s controller had an analogue thumb stick, so Mario could tiptoe, walk or run depending on how far it was pushed. The game had to show a 3D world from a moving viewpoint, so Nintendo gave the camera a character: Lakitu, a cloud-riding figure from earlier Mario games, filming Mario as he went. When the game went on sale in Japan with the console on 23 June 1996, Edge gave it ten out of ten and said “The world of videogaming has just changed forever.”
Fast facts
- Developer and publisher: Nintendo.
- Director: Shigeru Miyamoto.
- Music: Koji Kondo.
- Released: Japan 23 June 1996, with the console; United States 29 September 1996; Britain 1 March 1997.
- Cartridge: 64 megabits.
- Structure: 15 main courses and 120 Power Stars, reached through the rooms of Princess Peach’s castle.
- Reviews: Edge ten out of ten; N64 Magazine 96%.
Making it
Miyamoto normally produced games, overseeing about ten at once. For this one he took a more direct role. “In the case of Super Mario 64, I am actually doing the job of director rather than supervising everything as producer,” he told Edge at the Shoshinkai show in November 1995, where the game was shown about half complete.
It took time. Edge described it in 1996 as “the fruit of more than two-and-a-half years of development”, made with “unlimited development resources”. The Nintendo 64 itself was delayed more than once, and when it finally reached Britain N64 Magazine laid some of the blame on Miyamoto, who had “asked for more time to work on the console’s launch title”. The magazine thought it had been “a good call”.
Moving in three dimensions
The first thing a player does is play with Mario. The game opens with his face, which can be pulled and stretched with a pointer, and then drops him in a grassy area outside the castle. Edge counted more than 20 actions to try there. Pushing the stick a little makes Mario tiptoe; pushing it all the way makes him run; in between he walks. Nintendo Power listed “more than half a dozen different leaps”: he could belly-flop down chutes, back-flip onto balconies, wall-kick off walls to climb higher, and link jumps into a triple jump. A “butt slam” pounded switches and posts from above.
All of this is relative to the camera. N64 Magazine explained that “What you do with the analogue stick is entirely relative to what you see on screen”, and that the picture was “the Lakitu-Cam, a small cameraman on a cloud who follows Mario throughout the game”. Lakitu does his best, but walls get in his way. In a narrow corridor he cannot get a side-on view, so the player can move him with R and the C buttons. “Mastery of the game lies in being able to simultaneously control both Mario and, intuitively, Lakitu.”
That was the part reviewers found hardest. Edge said the analogue control was not where “any difficulties occur”, but “it’s the way the action is viewed that takes some getting used to”, especially on narrow gangplanks and bridges. N64 Magazine warned that the shifting view “could conceivably deter a novice player”, although “In time you’ll come to regard SM64’s extensive camera freedom as yet another remarkable quality”. In a mirror inside the castle, the player can see Lakitu filming, which Edge called “a magical moment”.
Courses and stars
The castle is a hub. Paintings on its walls lead into the courses, and each course has several stars to find, from beating a boss to racing a Koopa up a mountain, raising a sunken ship or returning a lost baby penguin to its mother. Doors in the castle open only once Mario has enough stars. The three Bowser stages behind them are the most linear parts of the game, N64 Magazine noted, with “a start, and a finish, and a whole bunch of moving 3D obstacles in between”. Winning each one earns a key to more of the castle.
Reception
Edge’s editorial called it “a singularly perfect example of how new technology should enrich game design”. Its review praised Kondo’s music and said the 64-megabit cartridge held an “astonishing” scale and variety of content. In the same issue it wrote that without the game, “N64s would still be sitting on Japanese shelves”. It also warned that the launch might be a problem for Nintendo: some third-party publishers had scrapped half-finished N64 projects after seeing it at E3, and Hiroshi Yamauchi had conceded that Nintendo would be fortunate if three games came close that year.
British players waited until March 1997, by which time N64 Magazine could say that earlier reviews had been of the Japanese version. Its only real complaint was about the English text: signposts that gave away too much. It scored the game 96% and called it “the most successfully realised 3D world ever realised”.
Sales
In Japan Nintendo shipped “enough copies of Super Mario 64 to allow for one per machine”, and Edge reported that most shops would sell the console only with the game, so everyone who bought a Nintendo 64 at launch took Mario home too. In America, where the two were sold separately, Edge expected the pair to cost about $320. Later counts put its lifetime sales at about 11.9 million copies.
The decompilation
Nintendo has never published the source code of Super Mario 64. What exists instead is a reconstruction. A group of fans working as n64decomp took the game’s compiled program apart and rewrote it, function by function, as C source code that compiles back into cartridge images matching the originals byte for byte, for the Japanese, American and European releases among others. They published it on GitHub on 25 August 2019. The repository contains no graphics, sound or other assets: its instructions say “A prior copy of the game is required to extract the assets”. It was later released under the Creative Commons CC0 public-domain licence, which covers only the fans’ own work.
Because the code could now be compiled for other machines, a native PC version appeared in May 2020, running in widescreen at high resolutions. Nintendo acted against that. Video Games Chronicle reported that download links and at least one YouTube video were removed, with Nintendo’s notice describing the file as “an unauthorized derivative work based on Nintendo’s copyrighted work”. The reconstructed source repository itself remains on GitHub. Whether publishing such a reconstruction is lawful has been debated: a 2020 article in the Hastings Science and Technology Law Journal examined whether publishing reverse-engineered code of this kind could be fair use under US copyright law.
Sources
- Edge issue 29, February 1996: Shoshinkai report and Prescreen (p. 38; the half-complete game, “start from scratch”, the analogue stick’s run, walk and tiptoe); interview with Shigeru Miyamoto (p. 57; director rather than producer, about ten games at once).
- Edge issue 35, August 1996: editorial; news report of the Japanese launch (p. 6; one copy per machine, most shops selling console and game together); “Ten reasons why Nintendo 64 will succeed” and “could fail” (development time, third parties, Yamauchi’s remark, the $320 US price of console and game); Testscreen review (over 20 actions, the camera, Lakitu in the mirror, 15 courses, 64-megabit cartridge, Koji Kondo; ten out of ten).
- Edge issue 39, December 1996, news: the US launch on 29 September 1996.
- N64 Magazine issue 1, April 1997, pp. 34–45: review (Miyamoto asking for more time, the Lakitu-Cam and R and C buttons, the triple jump, backflip and butt slam, the Bowser stages, the English text, 120 stars, 96%).
- Nintendo Power issue 87, August 1996: “more than half a dozen different leaps”, belly-flop, back-flip and wall kick.
- n64decomp, sm64 repository on GitHub (web): “A Super Mario 64 decompilation”, the ROMs it builds with their checksums, its asset requirement and CC0-1.0 licence; release tags dated 25 August 2019. https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64
- ResetEra forum thread, “The full decompilation of Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64 is now released on GitHub”, 25 August 2019 (web, secondary). https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-full-decompilation-of-super-mario-64-for-the-nintendo-64-is-now-released-on-github-unlicensed.137057/
- Andy Robinson, “Nintendo takes action against Mario 64 PC port”, Video Games Chronicle, 8 May 2020 (web, secondary). https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/nintendo-takes-action-against-mario-64-pc-port/
- Joseph Godfrey, “Super Mario Decompiled”, Hastings Science and Technology Law Journal, vol. 12, no. 1 (2020) (web). https://repository.uclawsf.edu/hastings_science_technology_law_journal/vol12/iss1/3/
- Wikipedia, “Super Mario 64” (web, secondary): lifetime sales of 11.91 million; the game’s US and European release dates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_64