To get one of the ‘secret’ castle stars in Super Mario 64, you need to catch a yellow rabbit. It’s there, unexpectedly, when Mario unlocks a door in the basement of Peach’s castle, hopping to and fro. There’s no indication of its purpose, or that you’ll be rewarded for capturing it; no precedent for Mario stumbling upon a rabbit in any of his games, no hint they even existed in his universe. You just try to catch it because, in this warped, consistently inconsistent, logically illogical, so-surreal-it’s-real universe, it seems like the thing to do. And because it’s fun.
It’s a throwaway moment, but it also says a lot about this era-defining game.
Super Mario 64 was a voyage of discovery for everyone: Shigeru Miyamoto, his design team, EAD’s coders, and last but definitely not least, us. It’s often said that its achievement was transposing Mario’s world into 3D but, with the exception of the vertiginous Bowser stages, it did nothing of the sort. It made an entirely new world for him, and around him. If Ocarina Of Time was a translation, Mario 64 was a whole new language.
And it didn’t stop at defining the exploration of 3D space: it broke every conceivable boundary, and this coming from the mind that had previously let the 2D Mario run outside the edge of the screen. Who says a level needs to have a start and an end? Why can’t it be an open space? Who says it needs to be the same every time you go in it? Who says you should do what the game says you’re supposed to be doing? Why should levels be connected together in a string – can’t they grow organically out of a hub? If so, why should the game stop in the hub? Does everything in the levels really need to have a point, anyway? And let’s face it, does a level even need to be a space at all? Couldn’t it be – say – a rabbit?
The game’s endlessly playful nature is made apparent right from the title screen’s tweakable Mario face.
That slippery rabbit – named MIPS, after the Silicon Graphics subsidiary which worked on the N64’s architecture – was, in fact, the first part of Mario 64 to exist, after Mario himself. Before even contemplating what Mario would be doing in his first 3D game, the Nintendo team studied camera, control, physics and animation. Miyamoto insisted that it had to be fun simply to manipulate Mario with no rhyme or reason; it had to be fun before they’d even finished drawing and animating the character, when he was just a faceless block.
That fierce unity of purpose in the early stages of design resulted in a game in which moving around in 3D wasn’t just easy, it was intoxicating, and hilarious. It took a while to get to grips with moving Mario in relation to that disconcertingly free camera, rather than to himself; it would never, could never be as instinctive as it had been in 2D. To compensate, Mario was given a set of moves so complex, so extravagant, so focused on entertainment value above all else, that it even included an entirely pointless breakdance routine. To this day, it’s virtually impossible to fire up the game after an absence without taking a few minutes outside the castle to do handstands on treetops and triple-jump dives into the water. Mario would occasionally attain such giddy, uncontrollable momentum that he seemed to have a mind of his own – which was exactly as it had always been.
It’s logical enough that, as the first test of Mario’s ecstatic motion, the developers gave him something to chase after. But what’s really surprising, or would have been back in 1996, was that MIPS the rabbit made it in as part of the final game design. And he did so because Miyamoto’s visionary team created a structure that could accommodate him – that could, in fact, accommodate pretty much anything. Super Mario 64’s arrangement of entrances to self-contained levels around a hub did become the de facto standard for 3D platform games and action-adventures, at least until GTAIII showed what could be done with a single, contiguous space. But even more radical and long-lasting than the way it structured space was the way it structured goals.
There’s the use of the stars as a system of progression, opening up the castle and the levels at a pace that always outstrips your own, meaning that you always have multiple things to do, and that you’re
free to choose what to tackle and when. It’s so commonplace now that it’s easy to forget how alarmingly freeform this was for a mainstream console game just over ten years ago.
Mario’s winged hat naturally allows you to take to the skies, setting up some hugely memorable sequences.
Then there’s the yawning gulf between the game’s two endings – you can beat Bowser and attain closure barely more than half your way to attaining all the game’s 120 stars, offering satisfying goals for both everyman and Mario fanatic. But mostly there was the fact that reducing progression to this abstract currency of stars meant that you could make anything count – even, yes, catching a rabbit.
All of this is what makes Super Mario 64 such a visionary and profoundly influential game. All of this is also what ultimately killed the pure platforming genre: although Super Mario 64 never lost sight of the running, jumping and falling, it offered a blueprint for a scattershot, activity-centre style of game design that was eagerly seized by those not talented enough to make platforming work in 3D.
But none of this is quite what makes it a work of genius.
That final quality is something you can hardly put into words: it’s the expression of beautiful, funny and wicked ideas that could only ever exist in a three-dimensional game space. It’s the infinite staircase that you’re always at the bottom of. It’s the secret entrance you glimpse in the mirror. It’s the mind-messing reversals of Tiny-Huge Island, the microcosmic Igloo ice maze, the spooky underground town-in-a-box, the ship rising from the sea bed, with you inside it. It’s the unfettered wonder of one of videogames’ finest minds discovering that the world has three dimensions, coming up with something you’d never have thought of, and – with typically gleeful generosity – allowing you to discover it as if you had.
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