The Importance of Playful Controls in Super Mario 64 and its Legacy

Super Mario 64’s enduring popularity can be attributed to its focus on making the controls feel like a toy. Nintendo’s approach revolutionized 3D platformers and set the standard for future games in the genre.

This blog post is part of an ongoing series where I analyze the top 100 best video games of all time as part of the David Perry Challenge. Super Mario 64 is ranked #7 out of 100.

It’s a testament to Nintendo’s design team that they were able to get so much right in their first transition from 2D to 3D games. Super Mario 64 defined nearly everything about how a 3D platformer should control and feel. The game’s success can be attributed to its focus on creating a fun and intuitive control scheme, which serves as the foundation for the game’s levels and progression systems.

The core mechanics of Mario 64, specifically movement, are a total joy to control. The tight and intuitive controls allow players to barrel around and take tight turns with ease. The subtle joystick movement allows for sneaking across platforms, adding an extra layer of depth to the gameplay. Additionally, the ability to duck and crawl opens up new possibilities for exploration and problem-solving.

The jumping mechanics, including the standard jump, triple jump, side flip, back flip, long jump, and dive, further enhance the game’s sense of freedom and control. The melee mechanics, including the kick/punch, dive, butt stomp, and grab/throw, while not as intuitive as the core running and jumping, fill in some of the gaps that are not possible otherwise and offer players a variety of options for interacting with enemies and the environment. These kinds of melee movements would be phased out or altered in future iterations of 3D Mario games.

The level design in Super Mario 64 is also noteworthy. The game’s levels are designed so that players are tasked with getting a particular star each time they enter a level. This provides a clear goal for players to work towards and adds a sense of progression to the game. Additionally, the constant stars in each level can be obtained even if players don’t go into the level with the goal of getting that particular one, providing a nice forgiveness if players don’t know exactly what they’re looking for.

The levels in Super Mario 64 are also built so that players will often need to leave the level they’re currently playing to go play in other ones. For example, players can’t get all 8 stars in Bob-omb Battlefield until they’ve gotten the red hat switch. The red hat can’t be obtained until after players have collected a certain number of stars. But the game also prompts players to open all the doors they can once they’ve collected 1, 3, 8 stars, etc. This gating of some of the onboarding ensures that players “choose” to go to the early tutorial-style levels before diving into the more complex ones.

The game’s progression is based on both player skill and the collection of stars and keys. I found it interesting that the entire game feels like a set of Steam/Xbox achievements, with each star being an achievement. Players have a world they can navigate however they’d like in the form of the joyful controls, and they are given a simple prompt that is a hint toward the next achievement. Not much else is needed.

Overall, Super Mario 64 is a fun and popular game because it is primarily a toy with challenges built on top of it. Nintendo, by focusing first on making the controls feel great, was able to then focus on building the levels and progressions systems to support and highlight the controls. Super Mario 64 defined nearly everything about how a 3D platformer should control and feel.