Super Mario 64

Super Mario 64 is a 1996 three-dimensional platform game developed by Nintendo EAD and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64, the first game in the Super Mario series to feature 3D gameplay.¹³³ Directed by series creator Shigeru Miyamoto, it took the moustachioed plumber out of the second dimension and placed him in a vibrant, open, colorful 3D world.⁴⁸ Widely acclaimed since its release as one of the greatest and most important games ever made, it codified many of the controls and design conventions of the 3D platforming genre.¹³ It is the eighth entry in the Super Mario series.¹³

The game was released in Japan on June 23, 1996 as a launch title for the Nintendo 64, alongside Pilotwings 64, and the pairing helped drive initial sales of the console.⁸¹³ It came to North America in September 1996 and to Europe and Australia on March 1, 1997.¹²¹³ Contemporary accounts differ on the North American date: Mario? Wiki gives September 29, 1996, while other sources note that some stores broke the street date and began selling the console and game as early as September 26.¹³² The Nintendo 64, originally dubbed Project Reality and then the Ultra 64, was Nintendo’s first proper foray into polygonal graphics and one of the first systems to include an analog controller as standard, developed in collaboration with Silicon Graphics Inc. on its hardware.¹²⁸ In Europe the console launched on March 1, 1997 priced at £250 with just three games available, Super Mario 64 among them.⁵

In the game, Bowser? invades Princess Peach’s? castle, imprisons her, and hides the castle’s Power Stars inside worlds accessed through magical paintings.¹⁷¹⁶ Mario receives an invitation from Peach to come to her castle and enjoy a cake she has baked, only to hear a familiar bellowing voice and learn from Toad that Bowser has taken over the castle and imprisoned the princess along with the stars.¹⁶¹⁷ To rescue her, the player travels through the paintings to different worlds and collects Power Stars to unlock areas of the castle, ultimately reaching Bowser.¹⁷ The object is to gather enough of the castle’s 120 stars — 70 are needed to face Bowser — and defeat him, with each level offering multiple star missions rather than a single linear path.² Within each level, one star is awarded for collecting all its red coins and, in the full levels, another for gathering 100 coins.²

Design and development

In entering the third dimension, Super Mario 64 largely eschewed the obstacle-course design of the series’ 2D platformers in favor of a mission structure and gameplay focused on exploring a larger area.¹³ Assistant director Takashi Tezuka said the team worked “with no precedent and no model,” free to create sandbox levels that “enabled a freer style of play that wasn’t limited to a single path”.⁸ Fellow assistant director Yoshiaki Koizumi? recalled that “there was no jumping actions in 3-D we could reference at the time,” and that the team shared the enjoyment of trial and error with Miyamoto.⁸ The game introduced a suite of moves — triple-jumping, ground-pounding, long-jumping, diving, and side-somersaulting — that would recur in most later Super Mario installments; punching and kicking were also introduced but would not appear in any later title other than the game’s DS remake.¹³

The Nintendo 64 controller’s analog stick gave players nuanced, camera-relative control that was unparalleled at the time.⁴ The game established a control template later treated as standard: the analog stick to move, A to jump, B to attack, and the C buttons to move a free-roaming camera around Mario, with the Z button used to crouch, crawl, backflip, and perform a coffee-grinder sweep.¹⁶ The camera itself was diegetically operated by a Lakitu carrying a camera, an in-game explanation Miyamoto felt was needed so its presence would not seem strange.¹⁷ Contemporary and retrospective reviewers frequently criticized the camera as the game’s chief flaw, calling it one of the few things that could be nitpicked in an otherwise polished game.⁴¹

The soundtrack was composed by series veteran Koji Kondo?, whose score reviewers and players have repeatedly described as iconic.⁴¹⁸ Mario’s voice was performed by Charles Martinet?, whose high-pitched, cheerful portrayal debuted here and became a series standard; the game also popularized “Peach” as the Western name for Princess Toadstool?.¹³¹⁹ Princess Peach’s voice was recorded by Leslie Swan, who is also credited as a writer on the game.¹⁸¹⁹ The title screen, on which Mario’s face can be twisted and stretched like Play-Doh, grew out of experiments by Giles Goddard, one of Nintendo’s first Western employees, who was tracking his own face on an “Indy” workstation with a webcam when Miyamoto walked past and suggested putting the effect in Mario 64.⁴⁸ Goddard had begun his career at 16 with the British studio Argonaut Games, which had produced early 3D titles such as Starglider and helped design the Super FX chip for the SNES before he moved to Japan to work at Nintendo EAD.⁸ Some of the game’s details drew on the developers’ personal lives; the Boo ghosts were based on the wife of assistant director Takashi Tezuka.²²

The game underwent numerous levels ranging from small to medium in size, each holding six stars, with mission names hinting at the location of each star.¹⁷ Levels moved through varied environments — snowy mountains, a lava-filled world, a shrinking-and-enlarging island, and the innards of a working clock — with reused themes such as two snow levels distinguished by different layouts.¹⁶ A 64DD version of the game was shown at Shoshinkai 1996, though it went unreleased.¹³

Reception and legacy

Super Mario 64 has been described as revolutionary and a watershed for the medium.⁴ Reviewers routinely rank it among the greatest games ever made, and Nintendo Life awarded its rereleases a 10 out of 10, calling it “the first really convincing realisation of a 3D world in a platform game” and crediting it with introducing analog control to a generation of console players.³¹¹ On IMDb the game holds a user rating of 9.1 out of 10.¹⁹ Later assessments noted that while the game laid the foundation for the genre, elements such as its wonky, slippery controls, limited camera, and vague mission descriptions have aged less gracefully, with a new player likely to feel these flaws more than someone who grew up with it.¹⁷

Super Mario 64 - Nintendo 64 / Switch Review - Ultra HDMI - HDN64 Glenn Plant

The game is widely credited with writing the rulebook for 3D platforming and inspiring countless imitators, ushering in what is commonly called the golden age of 3D platformers.¹²³ Tom Hall, co-founder of id Software?, said it “defined the 3D platformer as a genre” and “set the standard,” kicking “the butt of everything on the N64 after it”.⁴ Tim Schafer of Double Fine Productions called playing it “an epiphany”.⁴ It was instrumental for the generation of “collectathon” games that followed, influencing Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, and Spyro the Dragon.⁴ At Rare?, the studio was developing an RPG called “Project Dream” for the SNES; after seeing an early version of Mario 64, the team recognized their technology looked old and redirected the project into what became Banjo-Kazooie.⁸ Designer Gregg Mayles recalled thinking “overnight” that the game “was gonna be the future of what 3D games are gonna look like”.⁸ Playtonic Games staff who had worked on Banjo-Kazooie at Rare later drew on the same tradition for the crowdfunded Yooka-Laylee, released in 2017.⁸

The game has been repeatedly rereleased. It appeared on the Wii?’s Virtual Console in November 2006, on the Wii U’s Virtual Console in April 2015, and, in China, on the iQue Player as a launch title on November 17, 2003, where the plug-and-play device could only play a handful of Nintendo games alongside The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.¹³⁹ In 2020 it was rereleased as part of Super Mario 3D All-Stars, a compilation of three 3D Mario games, and it later became available on the Nintendo Switch through Nintendo Switch Online.¹²³ A sequel, Super Mario 64 2, was in development for the 64DD but was canceled following that peripheral’s commercial failure.¹³ The game retains an active following through speedrunning and preservation efforts; a 70-player relay of the game closed Awesome Games Done Quick in 2026, and dedicated players have completed it without pressing the A button.⁵