Super Mario 64
is a 1996 platform game developed and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo 64. It is the first Super Mario game to feature 3D gameplay, combining traditional Super Mario gameplay, visual style, and characters in a large open world. In the game, Bowser invades Princess Peach's castle, kidnaps her, and hides the castle's sources of protection, the Power Stars, in many different worlds inside magical paintings. As Mario, the player traverses levels and collects Power Stars to unlock areas of Princess Peach's castle, to reach Bowser and rescue Princess Peach.
Director Shigeru Miyamoto conceived a 3D Super Mario game during the production of Star Fox. Development lasted nearly three years: about one year on design and twenty months on production, starting with designing the virtual camera system. The team continued with illustrating the 3D character models—at the time, a relatively unattempted task—and refining sprite movements. Yoji Inagaki recorded the sound effects, and the score was composed by Koji Kondo.
Super Mario 64 was highly anticipated by video game journalists and audiences, boosted by advertising campaigns and showings at the 1996E3 trade show. It was eventually released in Japan and North America in 1996 and PAL regions in 1997. The game received critical acclaim, with reviewers praising its ambition, visuals, level design, and gameplay; however, some critics criticized its virtual camera system. It is the best-selling Nintendo 64 game, with nearly twelvemillion copies sold by 2015.
Super Mario 64 has been considered one of the greatest and most influential video games of all time. Numerous developers have cited it as an influence on 3D platform games, with its dynamic camera system and 360-degree analog control establishing a new archetype for the genre, much as Super Mario Bros. did for side-scrolling platform games. Its influence can be seen in later 3D platformers such as Spyro the Dragon, and Banjo-Kazooie. It was remade as Super Mario 64 DS for the Nintendo DS in 2004, and has been ported to other Nintendo consoles since. The game has attracted a cult following, spawning many fangames and mods, a large speedrunning presence, and enduring rumors surrounding game features.
Gameplay
Controls
Super Mario 64 has been described as a 3D platformer and action-adventure game in which the player controls the titular character Mario through various courses. Mario's abilities are far more diverse than in previous games. He can walk, run, jump, crouch, crawl, climb, swim, kick, grab objects, and punch using the game controller's analog stick and buttons. He can execute special jumps by combining a regular jump with other actions, including the double and triple jumps, long jump, backflip, and wall jump. The player can adjust the camera—operated by a Lakitu broadcasting Mario—and toggle between first-person and third-person view.Health, lives, and power-ups
Unlike many of its predecessors, Super Mario 64 uses a health point system, represented by a pie shape consisting of eight segments. If Mario has taken damage, he can replenish his health either by collecting three types of coins—yellow, which replenishes one segment; red, equal to two yellow coins and which replenishes two segments; and blue, equal to five yellow coins and which replenishes five segments, by walking through a spinning heart or by jumping into water. Underwater, Mario's health instead represents how long he can hold his breath, slowly diminishing while underwater and replenishing when he surfaces. Finishing a course grants Mario an extra life for every 50 yellow coins the player collected, and extra life mushrooms are hidden in various places such as trees and poles—they may either chase Mario through the air or fall to the ground, avoiding Mario and disappear shortly if not collected.In absence of the power-ups normally found in previous games, such as the Super Mushroom and Fire Flower, three colors of translucent blocks—red, green, and blue—appear throughout many stages. Three switches of the same colors, found in three secret areas located in either stages or the castle itself, turn their corresponding blocks solid and permanently allow Mario to obtain three types of special cap power-ups throughout all of the stages. The Wing Cap allows Mario to fly after doing a triple jump or being shot from a cannon; the Metal Cap makes him immune to enemies, fire, noxious gases, allows him to withstand wind and water currents, perform on-land moves underwater, and have unlimited air capacity underwater; and the Vanish Cap renders him partially immaterial and invulnerable, and allows him to walk through some obstacles. Another implicit powerup is the shell remains after stomping a Koopa Troopa, which Mario can use to run over enemies, and surf on water, lava, and quicksand.
Setting and objective
The hub world takes place in Princess Peach's Castle, which consists of three floors consisting of the castle's lobby, the main tower, and a basement, plus a moat and a courtyard outside the castle. The player's main objective is to look for paintings that, when jumped into, bring them into courses containing Power Stars, which upon their collection unlock more of the castle hub world. Each of the fifteen courses has seven Power Stars, and an additional fifteen are hidden as secrets and as bonuses, for a total of 120 Power Stars in the game.The courses are filled with enemies as well as friendly creatures that provide assistance or ask favors, such as Bob-omb Buddies, who will allow Mario to access cannons on request. Some Power Stars only appear after completing certain tasks, often hinted at by the name of the course. These challenges include collecting one hundred yellow coins or eight red coins on a stage, defeating a boss, racing an opponent, and solving puzzles. The final level of the game is blocked by "endless stairs" similar to the Penrose stairs concept, but Mario can bypass them by collecting seventy Power Stars. The music in the endless stairs before collecting seventy Power Stars resembles a Shepard scale. There are many hidden mini-courses and other secrets within the castle, which may contain extra Power Stars required for the full completion of the game. If the player returns to the game after collecting all 120 Power Stars, Yoshi can be found on the roof of Princess Peach's Castle, who will give the player a message from the developers, accompanied by one hundred extra lives and an improved triple jump.
Plot
uses a letter to invite Mario to come to her castle for a cake she has baked for him. When he arrives, Mario discovers that Bowser has invaded the castle and imprisoned the princess and her servants within its walls using the power of the castle's 120 Power Stars. The Power Stars are hidden in the castle's paintings, which serve as portals to other worlds where Bowser's minions keep watch over the Stars. Mario explores the castle and enters these worlds, gaining access to more rooms as he recovers more Stars. Mario unlocks three doors to different floors of the castle with keys obtained by defeating Bowser in hidden worlds. After getting at least 70 of the 120 Stars, Mario breaks the curse of the endless stairs that block the entrance to Bowser's final hiding place. After Mario defeats Bowser in the final battle, and Bowser escapes, swearing revenge, he obtains a special Power Star which gives him the Wing Cap, and he flies back to the castle's courtyard. Peach is released from the stained-glass window above the castle's entrance, and she rewards Mario by kissing him on the nose and baking the cake that she had promised him.Once Mario earns all 120 stars, he is able to access the roof of the castle via a cannon on the castle grounds, where Yoshi awaits him. Yoshi congratulates Mario on securing all 120 stars and grants him 99 extra lives in order to continue playing the game.
Development
In the early 1990s, Super Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto conceived a 3D Mario design while developing the game Star Fox for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Star Fox used the Super FX graphics chip, which added more processing power; Miyamoto considered using the chip to develop a Super NES game, Super Mario FX, with gameplay based on "an entire world in miniature, like miniature trains". According to engineer Dylan Cuthbert, who worked on Star Fox, Super Mario FX was not a game but the codename of the Super FX chip. Miyamoto reformulated the idea for the Nintendo 64, not for its greater power but because its controller has more buttons for gameplay. At the January1993 Consumer Electronics Show, where Star Fox made its debut, Nintendo's booth demonstrated a talking 3D polygon animation of Mario's head; this later inspired the creation of the interactive Mario face in the game's title screen, which was programmed by Giles Goddard.Production of Super Mario 64 began on September 7, 1994, at Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis & Development division, and concluded on May 20, 1996. According to Miyamoto, the development team consisted of around fifteen to twenty people. Development began with the characters and the camera system; months were spent selecting a view and layout. The original concept involved the fixed path of an isometric game such as Super Mario RPG, which moved to a free-roaming 3D design, with some linear paths, particularly to coerce the player into Bowser's lair, according to Giles Goddard.
Super Mario 64 is one of the first games for which Nintendo produced its illustrations internally instead of by outsourcing. The graphics were made using N-World, a Silicon Graphics -based toolkit. The development team prioritized Mario's movement and, before levels were created, tested and refined Mario's animations on a simple grid. The 3D illustrations were created by Shigefumi Hino, Hisashi Nogami, Hideki Fujii, Tomoaki Kuroume, and Yusuke Nakano, and the game was animated by co-director Yoshiaki Koizumi and Satoru Takiwaza. Yōichi Kotabe, illustrator and character designer for the Mario series, made a 3D drawing of Mario from various angles and directed the creation of the character models. In an interview with The Washington Post, Yoshiaki Koizumi recalled that his challenge was animating the 3D models without any precedents. To assist players with depth perception, the team positioned a faux shadow directly beneath each object regardless of the area's lighting. Yoshiaki Koizumi described the feature as an "iron-clad necessity" which "might not be realistic, but it's much easier to play".
Miyamoto's guiding design philosophy was to include more details than earlier games by using the Nintendo 64's power to feature "all the emotions of the characters". He likened the game's style to a 3D interactive cartoon. Mario was made highly expressive to "create the feeling of controlling something that's really alive", which Miyamoto was inspired to do after letting his pet hamster loose in his room. Some details were inspired by the developers' personal lives; for example, the Boos are based on assistant director Takashi Tezuka's wife, who, as Miyamoto explained, "is very quiet normally, but one day she exploded, maddened by all the time Tezuka spent at work".
Super Mario 64 was first run on an SGI Onyx emulator, which only emulated the console's application programming interface and not its hardware. The first test scenario for controls and physics involved Mario interacting with a golden rabbit, named "MIPS" after the Nintendo 64's MIPS architecture processors; the rabbit was included in the final game as a Power Star holder. Super Mario 64 features more puzzles than earlier Mario games. It was developed simultaneously with The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time but, as Ocarina of Time was released more than two years later, some puzzles were taken for Super Mario 64. The developers tried to include a multiplayer cooperative mode, whereby players would control Mario and his brother Luigi in split-screen. Nevertheless, hardware constraints and the developers' inability to implement the mode satisfactorily led to its removal.
The music was composed by veteran composer Koji Kondo, who created new interpretations of the familiar melodies from earlier media as well as new material. Yoji Inagaki was responsible for the sound design, tasked with producing hundreds of sound effects. He and Kondo felt that music and sound effects were equally important. According to Inagaki, the average Nintendo 64 game had about 500 sound effects, and made comparisons to Ocarina of Time, with 1,200, and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, with 2,000.
Super Mario 64 is one of the first games to feature Charles Martinet as the voice of Mario, and Leslie Swan—then senior editor of Nintendo Power and English localizer for Super Mario 64—as the voice of Princess Peach.