How Super Mario 64 Was Made

Super Mario 64 was Nintendo’s first foray into 3D platformer games, but its history goes back well before Nintendo even started development on the Nintendo 64. In 1990, Shigeru Miyamoto, one of Nintendo’s most celebrated game designers, first came up with a 3D mario design when he was working on Star Fox for the SNES. He said he always wanted to create a sort of miniature world, like miniature trains, but the 2D graphics capabilities at the time were holding his ideas back. However, when he saw the 3D models in Star Fox for the first time, Miyamoto was instantly convinced there was great potential in 3D game design and would be able to execute his vision for a miniature mario world.

For years Miyamoto tried creating a fully functional 3D mario game on the SNES, but despite the advanced Super FX chip that made 3D models possible, the technology was still holding him back. This was mostly because of the SNES controller, which made it difficult to navigate a three-dimensional world with the lack of a thumbstick and limited amount of buttons. Therefore, when Nintendo started development on the Nintendo 64, Miyamoto made sure to incorporate these functions in the new controller so he would be able to design Super Mario 64 just the way he envisioned.

While Miyamoto had the idea for a 3D mario game years before development on Mario 64 began, there are claims that the game was inspired by a 3D Yoshi prototype. Back when Nintendo was developing Star Fox, they received outside help from a UK-based development studio called Argonaut Software. Their talented team helped Nintendo with producing 3D graphics and even co-invented the Super FX chip for the Super Nintendo.    According to Argonaut founder Jeremy Elliott, he and his team pitched a whole new title that would star Yoshi in his very own video game, something that could have been the world’s first 3D platformer.

Nintendo however is very protective of its characters so Argonaut’s 3D Yoshi game never went past the prototype stage. Argonaut Software eventually turned that prototype into Croc: Legend of the Gobbos for the PlayStation, Saturn and PC. Elliott believes that the team that worked on Super Mario 64 was influenced by their ideas for the Yoshi game. “Miyamoto-san went on to make Mario 64, which had the look and feel of our Yoshi game – but with the Mario character, of course – and beat Croc to market by around a year. Miyamoto-san came up to me at a show afterwards and apologized for not doing the Yoshi game with us and thanked us for the idea to do a 3D platform game.”

Super Mario 64’s development officially began in 1993 alongside the development of the Nintendo 64 itself. Shigeru Miyamoto took on the role as the game’s director and also worked closely with the hardware team that was developing the Nintendo 64. The first year was fully dedicated to working out the design concept and the remaining two years were spent on the actual development of the software. According to Miyamoto, there were about 15 people working on the game at any given time during development. 

The team started with pinning down how Mario would move around in a 3D world. Developer and co-director of Super Mario 64, Yoshiaki Koizumi, was responsible for creating a Mario motion model with added textures. He also gave the model some basic actions so that they were able to play around with the Italian plumber. Once they had a working Mario model, a simple grid was added for Mario to walk around on. 

Besides Mario and the basic grid, the developers also added a yellow bunny for Mario to interact with and test out the controls and physics, making the bunny the second character created for the game. The bunny is called MIPS, which stands for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages and is named after the microprocessor used in the Nintendo 64. The development team was such a big fan of the bunny that they decided to include it in the final version of the game.

It was very important to Miyamoto to get Mario to feel right to control before moving on to developing other parts of the game. Therefore, the model that was being used on the basic grid was pretty much the same model that ended up in the final game. Most of Mario’s animations were also added from the start and Koizumi remembered a moment during development, when it was late at night and most of the staff had already left the office, that Miyamoto approached him to demonstrate new motions for Mario by acting them out himself. “We may look like we’re acting out sketch comedy, but it really does work well to get the point across.”

Almost 250 different animations were created for Mario, but once development was completed about 200 animations were actually implemented in the game. There were plans to use mocap technology to capture all the animations for Mario, but the team eventually decided to animate everything by hand instead.

One of the big challenges that Miyamoto and his team faced was the drastic change from 2D to 3D. For example, Koizumi said that stomping on goombas became a lot harder in 3D. “On the TV screen, objects don’t have the same kind of physicality, that’s what makes it difficult to make people grasp the physicality and depth.” Therefore the developers decided to add shadows everywhere in the game, regardless of the light source. This way every floating object would have a reference point on the ground, making it easier for players to predict where they would land on the ground after executing a jump. “It might not be realistic, but it’s much easier to play with the shadow directly below.”

Besides making Mario feel right to control in 3D, a lot of time and effort also went into the camera system. Takumi Kawagoe, a talented developer, was responsible for implementing the camera and since this was such an important element of the game, Kawagoe would only work on the camera during the entire development, perfecting it as the game moved along. Miyamoto and his team considered many different types of camera angles, even one where the game looked like a normal 2D side scroller, but with 3D graphics. At one point during development, the team also experimented with a fixed path design for the levels, which gave the game an isometric type look, kind of like Super Mario RPG. 

Ultimately, those ideas were scrapped since it didn’t represent that much of a jump compared to previous Mario games. Instead the developers opted for a camera that simply follows just behind the player. Furthermore, the team wanted to give players more freedom to explore courses so they implemented a free roaming design. However, the fixed path design did make its way into the final game in the form of the three Bowser levels. All other courses allow the player to choose how they get to their objective, but since the only goal in the Bowser levels is to reach Bowser, the developers implemented a fixed route that leads straight to the boss’ lair.

Before you even start playing the game, Super Mario 64 allows you to mess around with Mario’s face. According to programmer Giles Goddard, the mario face came to be after he started to think of ways to show off the power of the Nintendo 64. One of the things that made the Nintendo 64 so impressive at the time was real-time vertex calculations, which made it possible to move around individual points on a 3D model and morph it so to speak. When Miyamoto saw that Goddard was playing around with Mario’s face on a GL program, he asked if it would be possible to implement it on the Nintendo 64. However, Miyamoto himself has said that the Mario head was originally created for a Mario Paint 3D prototype, a game that was never further developed.

At the beginning of development, the devs were controlling Mario with a keyboard and only after six months were they able to use controllers. This is because the game was being developed as the Nintendo 64 was being created alongside it. Giles Goddard has said that they used modified Sega controllers for a while and went through at least a 100 prototypes before they settled on an official design for the Nintendo 64 controller. A lot of the prototypes focussed on getting the central stick to feel right and pleasant to use.

Goddard further said that the very first time Miyamoto tested out the Nintendo 64 controller was while playing Super Mario 64, since that game was perfect to see how the central stick feels. A lot of thought went into how the camera would move while operating the yellow buttons, but Goddard commented that he thinks Miyamoto didn’t like them very much. “I remember talking to him a couple of years ago, he said it’d have been better to have two D-pads, it would’ve been a better balance to have the same on the left and the right.”

Since so much time was spent on Mario’s movement and the camera, the courses were implemented much later in the game’s development. The first course that made it into Super Mario 64 was Bob-Omb’s Battlefield and it took about 6 months to develop. Although half a year was spent on Bob-Omb’s Battlefield, many other levels were reportedly almost “thrown together”. The level designers only made a few concept sketches and notes for the courses before they would directly design them on the computer hardware. “There would only be some concept art sketches, and brief notes/memos. For example, I’d talk with course director Yoichi Yamada about an idea for a level, then he’d make some quick sketches of it. Then we’d look over those and talk more and those key elements of the level would be written down. Yamada and the other level designers then would refer back to those notes while designing the levels with our software development tools.”

The same principle applied to the many characters in the game, such as enemies and bosses. Once the character models were designed, they went straight into the game and were hardly adjusted afterwards. The reason why everything was being added to the game so quickly was mostly because of the tight deadline the developers were facing. Super Mario 64 was Nintendo’s most important launch title for the Nintendo 64 so it was absolutely crucial for the game to be ready on day one of the console’s release.

Although the Nintendo 64 was lacking in speed compared to the first Playstation for example, the console made up for it in the quality of the pixels according to Goddard. “Not a lot of people got that – for every pixel it drew, it put a lot of time and effort into it. They were nice pixels. Nicely-textured, nicely-coloured, nicely-lit, nicely anti-aliased. The PlayStation, speed-wise it was much faster, but the pixels were dreadful, there was no texturing, anti-aliasing. Blindingly fast, but the pixels just looked crap.”

Miyamoto made sure to put those quality pixels to good use and his design philosophy for Mario 64 was to include as much detail as possible to display “all the emotions of the characters”. One of Miyamoto’s goals was to portray the game’s style as a 3D interactive cartoon. Additionally, the developers also took inspiration from their personal lives and an interesting example of this is based on a story from assistant director Takashi Tezuka. The Boos are apparently inspired by his wife. In an interview from 1995 Miyamoto explained that Tezuka’s wife is normally very quiet and friendly, but got frustrated one day because Tezuka was spending too much time working on Mario 64. This sparked an idea in Tezuka for creating the Boos. His idea was to shrink the Boos when Mario is looking at them, but once Mario turns his back the Boos grow larger and start to follow Mario, to attack him. When asked in the interview if his wife knows about this, Tezuka laughed and said that she does.

While Yoshi can be found in the game, he was originally going to have a bigger role and there were ideas for Mario being able to ride on Yoshi’s back as was possible in previous games. Unfortunately, the developers weren’t able to find a satisfying way to incorporate Yoshi in time for the game’s release. Since they didn’t want to waste the model they created, Yoshi was put on top of the castle as an easter egg.

Mario’s brother Luigi was also set to make an appearance in a split-screen co-op mode that never made it into the game. The co-op mode, along with Luigi, were cut from the game because the developers couldn’t find a way to make the mode fun to play, as well as for the fact that the Nintendo 64 was only bundled with one controller.

The game’s music was composed by Koji Kondo who not only made new interpretations of melodies from previous games, but also made completely new soundtracks. Kondo was very meticulous about the music and spent a lot of time on trying to make a soundtrack that would change depending on where the player was and what the player was doing. Mario’s first outing on the Nintendo 64 was also one of the first times that voice actor Charles Martinet lent his voice to the plumber. Princess Peach was voiced by Leslie Swan, then Senior Editor of Nintendo Power, who was also responsible for writing all the English text in the game.

Between November 22nd and November 24th, in 1995, Nintendo held its then annual trade show called Nintendo Space World, where the Nintendo 64 made its first public appearance and back then the console’s name was revealed as the Ultra 64. To further highlight its reveal, Nintendo also provided a playable build of Super Mario 64 on the showfloor where anybody was able to test out the game. On day one of the public event, Nintendo also filed a patent for the Ultra 64 and it included six black and white images of the castle and its surrounding area.

During the time of the event, the game was reportedly 50% finished and featured basic controls for Mario. Furthermore, no less than 32 courses were implemented, which is more than double the courses that made it into the final game if you exclude secret stages. However only 2% of mapping for the stages was completed at that time and Miyamoto had to regrettably cut a lot of the courses later on in development since all of them couldn’t fit on the Nintendo 64 cartridge. 

Between Mario 64’s first public showcase and the final release, a lot more time was spent on tweaking the controls since the developers heard that a lot of people that tried out the playable build had some complaints, describing mario’s movements as “wobbly, “slippery” or “less responsive to the button inputs”.

Super Mario 64, along with the Nintendo 64 console, was originally scheduled to release during the holiday season of 1995. However, In May of 1995 the release of the console was delayed until April 1996. Some time later, the Nintendo 64 was delayed yet again and one of the major reasons this time was because Miyamoto wasn’t satisfied with Mario 64’s progress and wanted more time to perfect the game. Former President of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi was happy to give the developers more time to finish Mario 64 and agreed to delay the game and the release of the console to June 1996. “Game creators can finish games quickly if they  compromise. But users have sharp eyes. They soon know if the games are compromised. Shigeru Miyamoto asked for two more months and I gave them to him unconditionally.”

On June 23rd, 1996, Super Mario 64 was finally released in Japan and a couple of months later the game was released in North America on September 29th, 1996. European countries had to wait until March 1st, 1997 before they could enjoy Mario’s first outing in 3D, almost a whole year after it was released in Japan. Super Mario 64 received universal acclaim from critics and gamers around the world and quickly became the new standard for 3D platformers. The game’s success also drove many sales of the Nintendo 64 and was a huge contributor to the console’s initial popularity.

Although Super Mario 64 wasn’t the first 3D platformer, that credit goes to the PlayStation one launch game Jumping Flash, it was the first 3D platformer ever with a camera system that can be controlled independently from the player character.  

On May 5th, 2011, Super Mario 64’s impact on the game industry was further solidified when it was chosen to be one of the 80 games to be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of “The Art of Video Games” exhibit that opened its doors on March 16th, 2012.

To this day, Mario 64 is still considered one of the best 3D platformers around. In 2013 for example, a couple of developers from Rare, a development studio that worked closely with Nintendo in the nineties, stated that during the development of their game Conker’s Bad Fur Day in 2001, they drew a lot of inspiration from the gameplay and camera mechanics found in Mario 64. “We were just copying Mario, weren’t we? Which, to this day, is still the best 3D camera.”