Remembering the joy of Super Mario 64
I want to share my thoughts on a game that brought me a lot of joy as a child and that game was Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64 because it was one of my earliest and fondest video game memories.
I have played many video games over the years, I mean MANY. I spent most of my time as a kid and teenager growing up in the 90s and 2000s playing video games. Because before online gaming and the internet all I had was my N64 and single-player adventure games. I grew up in a time where you had less of a choice in how to pass the time which I found made the choices you make more special.ant to share my thoughts on a game that brought me a lot of joy as a child and that game was Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64 because it was one of my earliest and fondest video game memories.
I loved speed-running the game in college and remember going deep into all the systems you needed to learn to be a better runner. There was always a way to refine and shave seconds off every move you make. Every moment is a mathematical physics equation to solve. The ROM hack community is deep if you choose to dive in. It fascinates me that people are still creating compelling levels for this game to this day. Depending on what you find you may find some hacks that you would think are better than the original.
But as a child the game was completely daunting, you had to solve every puzzle the game had by running through the levels for hours until you could understand the controls and figure out ways to acquire stars through your own self ingenuity. I am of course talking about a time before YouTube and Twitch, now everything is a click or screen tap away. I was thinking about that when I played the game again in 2019 on my old N64 and then again in 2020 when the game was included in the Super Mario 3D All-Stars Collection for the Nintendo Switch. Playing this gem made memories flood back to me and inspired me to want to write this. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent as a kid jumping around a level for the sake of learning the game and just for the sake of pure joy. I just don’t have the patience for that anymore but I remembered how much I missed being able to do that.
This brings me to a question I keep asking myself; is replaying this game taking away that magic I used to feel about it? With how things are going it SM64 might be like one of those Nintendo games that will keep getting re-released for the rest of my life. Are all the memes, speedruns, and game-breaking jumps degrading those memories for me?
The magic I am trying to describe is that feeling of excitement as you were going on an adventure. This game was the start of the “Golden Age of 3D Collectathon Platformers” that I spent my formative years playing and loving. I want to hold on to the magic of this game because it was the first real 3D game I played. Another game from this era was Banjo-Kazooie, and there have only really been 5 games in that series but no game could ever recreate the magic that the first game brought. There have been SO MANY Mario games that took mechanics and ideas from SM64. Back then this game was special, you had a world to escape to that felt as real as the world you lived in.
Swimming around outside the castle was a game in itself. There is a current going from the waterfall to that pond so when you swim with it you go super fast and I remember what it was like learning Mario could swim. In many other games, water means death but in this game, you can navigate it with practice. I wanted to mention the current because that is such a small little detail most people would overlook. When you only had one game to play at a time you noticed all those things. Remember a time when you had to wait for a game to release? Remember when owning a game physically meant something?
That courtyard was a wonderful tutorial, for a lot of people that was their very first experience interacting with a 3D world. I miss that childlike wonder and patience to take in the world I was in because it completely blows my mind that as a child I was perfectly content with running, jumping, and swimming around that small space for hours.
I spent hours in every single area in this game and taught myself how to navigate every single platform you could land on and jump off of. That made eventually finishing the game so satisfying because I overcame everything by myself through practice and persistence. During those times I didn’t consider rating the game on a 10 point scale or starting a petition for Nintendo to change anything because what you got was what you got. You either accepted it or you moved on to the other thing.
Even as I write this I am remembering fond details like how I would play a game over and over because it was all I had and all I could do, I remember being more than happy with that than a time where I could play any game I wanted to at any time. This is most likely my nostalgia glasses. In the 2010s you would find me playing a game while occasionally checking my phone while also listening to a podcast or something on YouTube which would completely take away my focus from the game when it could have had all of it and could have completely escaped to that world.
These things had led me to think about how why playing games as a child vs an adult is fundamentally different. To sum it up in a paragraph (because I would love to dive into it more deeply in another post) as a child you played to explore and discover whereas adult things become more goal-oriented, you want to feel like you accomplished something in every play session. This made sense why video games were so much better with the mind of a child because when you get older you learn to expect to spent your time feeling like you made progress.
Going back I noticed little things about the game I haven’t realized in over 15 years like how the first boss foreshadows the first fight with Bowser. Both king Bobomb and Bowser taunt Mario saying he’s too weak to throw them… but then he does! Then you get the wing cap and learn to fly and get a sense like you can do anything you think you can. I listened to the music knowing I have heard these tracks thousands of times before but noticed little sounds and melodies I never picked up on before like how jazzy that first world music was.
I am glad I decided to remind myself of all these memories, it has been so long and I have played so many video games that I can’t remember the first games that got me in love with video games. I wanted to write this to remind myself and anyone who has read this far that video games should bring you joy. This was a very special game that gave me a lot of joy as a child and I was very happy to relive it again. I know this article has no real direction, I just wanted to remember why I fell in love with this game and video games in the first place.