The mid-’90s move into 3D caught out many developers, and we’ve already seen the different ways that games fell short. Some worked as a proof of concept but didn’t expand on it. Some weren’t bold enough to be anything more than the same old game with 3D window dressing. FIFA 97 managed to be the worst of both worlds. If you could do more, though, the moment was right for incredible opportunity. Core came up with Tomb Raider, which not only proved new ideas but followed through on them, and it became defining for a genre, era, and to an extent British games as a whole. Nintendo’s achievement with Super Mario 64 may have been even greater. Tomb Raider was new and unburdened by direct precedent. Nintendo not only defined a type of 3D platformer, and made a fantastic example of it, but did all of that while also having to make it a continuation of one of the world’s most popular series.
Super Mario 64 was released alongside Nintendo’s powerful new Nintendo 64 console. It is not like any previous Mario game. Its open-ended 3D levels, each with their set of challenges, are quite different from anything before. Nintendo could easily have made individual platformer levels where the goal was to get from A to B along a set route, using all of the iconography of Super Mario Bros., just in 3D. There are a few bits of Super Mario 64 which are close to that. Later on, they would make more. But from Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario World, they had already made a virtue of throwing out what they didn’t need, always evolving. Super Mario 64’s biggest triumph comes in presenting new experiences which keep the strengths of previous games.
The interlaced world of Super Mario World returns, with secret exits to buttons that do things across other levels, and a central castle which brings a world together into one place. The thrilling moments when rules get thrown out, tiny becomes large, the clouds become within reach as Mario takes flight, come back from Super Mario Bros. 3. (As does the feeling from the glitchy PAL NES version of SMB3 we got in the UK of a world so full it’s bursting at the seams, technology pushed to its limits). The sense of reality being a thin veil over a dream state from Super Mario Bros. 2 is back as well, most notably in the way that you enter each level by jumping into a painted portrait of it, an even better kind of mystical travel than magic carpets and bigger-on-the-inside pots. Discovering that Wet-Dry World sets the height of its water based on how high you jump into the painting is an amazing moment of bringing together just how deeply linked the castle and its worlds are.
Above all of that, though, it is joy in movement, the jump as dance, which traces a continuation right through from the first Super Mario Bros. to Super Mario 64. The possibilities of 3D give some new dance steps. There are contextual ones like turning on the spot and somersaulting in the opposite direction, or the powered up triple jump if you have space to jump three times. There is the long jump, which is slightly fiddlier with an extra button press but eats up distance like Mario has gone into fast forward. The combined possibilities are joyous, just in getting around, even before applying them to figuring out how the games routes and secrets make use of them.
Super Mario 64 is built from the beginning to show off new ideas (and a new console) as well, though. It’s not long before you get asked to walk slowly to avoid waking up some piranha plants, and to do so you just push a little less strongly on the analogue joystick on your controller used for Mario’s movement. It’s simple and effective. By April 1997, Sony would release a new version of their PlayStation controller with analogue sticks added. Nintendo also use Super Mario 64 to introduce players to controlling the camera as well as their character in an utterly charming way. They turn the camera, a completely virtual concept, into diegetic reality within the game. The whole thing starts with a lakitu on a cloud with a camera dangling on a fishing line, following Mario and capturing all his moves, before you switch to the camera view. Later on in the game, in time for that to have fallen out of your mind, you reach a room with a mirror and see the lakitu behind Mario, still filming away. In a game full of moments of playful and rewarding discovery, that detail is my favourite of all.
That date for Sony’s dual analogue controller is only a month after where we are in the story. They moved fast, but not that fast. The Nintendo 64 came late to the UK, just as its predecessors had. We were still well down Nintendo’s priority list. The N64’s March 1997 release date was nine months after Japan got it and six months after the US. In the world of 3D platformers, Crash Bandicoot had already been making the running here for a few months. The delay wasn’t as detrimental as in Mario’s previous rivalry with Sonic, and that speaks again to the achievement of Super Mario 64. It could wait nine months and still feel an age ahead of its competitors. Personally, after coming to Nintendo much later, I didn’t play Super Mario 64 until a full decade had passed and it had become part of the Wii’s retro Virtual Console service. I still loved it.
The Nintendo 64 did not, as an interviewee on the BBC’s Business Lunch confidently predicted at its launch, become the clear market leader in the UK, any more than Nintendo’s previous consoles had. Graphical power wasn’t everything, especially when the PlayStation had such a headstart and was on sale for less than half the price. It does mark the point where Nintendo really started becoming a player in this story, though, if not the biggest one. Perhaps Nintendo slipstreaming Sony in an overall move towards console domination in the UK was inevitable. Regardless, an opening statement like Super Mario 64 was a hell of a way to assert their place as a maker of unique and enjoyable games.
