I Finally Beat Super Mario 64
Revisiting the classic game 23 years later
You used to be able to rent consoles from the video store. Remember that? It’s a sentence that makes me feel old, a concept that grew old and outdated before video shops disappeared. In 1997, my family rented a Nintendo 64 for a night from the local Blockbuster for $20, along with two games: Super Mario 64 and Wave Race 64. It’s a nice memory from a childhood I sometimes struggle to remember the nice moments from.
On that night, I took my first tentative steps around the gardens of Princess Peach’s castle. There will never again be a bigger, more significant jump between consoles than the jump I experienced between the SNES and the Nintendo 64, the move from 2D to 3D, watching as Mario drunkenly failed to walk a straight line in my inexperienced hands. I remember walking along the edge of the bridge towards the castle door, falling in the water, struggling to figure out how to swim. I remember struggling to get the first star. I didn’t like it nearly as much as I liked Wave Race.
That Christmas I would get my own Nintendo 64, and a few months later, Super Mario 64 would become the fifth game I got for the system (Lylat Wars, Turok, War Gods, Tetrisphere, Mario). It was a pre-owned copy from Cash Converters, $49, no box. The price sticker stayed on the cart the whole time I owned it. Someone had already beaten the game before me; I deleted their 120-star file to not spoil the game for myself, which strikes me now as a hubristic act considering the game’s four included save files.
I would play it, on and off, for years. By the time my Nintendo 64 was sold off to fill some of the financial void left by my parent’s divorce (the mechanics of how and why it was sold off are foggy to me now), I had maybe 55 stars. I remember the day that I unlocked the 50-star door, long after getting the game, thinking that maybe I’d make the push through to the finale; I never did.
And now, 23 years and many consoles later later, I’ve finally beaten it on Switch.
As Mario met with Peach outside her castle and I put my Pro Controller down, I felt like a weight had been lifted. It has, just quietly, always bothered me that I’d never beaten it. Finally watching the credits roll has me reflecting on why I never did this as a kid, how I’ve changed as a player, and — more significantly — how the man who just finished the game is different from the child who started playing.
Here’s something that didn’t fully click for me as a kid: games really intimidated me. I loved them, but I was also, on some level, a little afraid of them, and and was too wary of them to ever really put the time into getting good at them. Super Mario 64 is not the only Nintendo classic I never finished. I didn’t hit the end of Ocarina of Time or Majora’s Mask, nor GoldenEye 007 (even on Agent), nor Banjo-Kazooie. I finished Lylat Wars on the easiest route repeatedly, and never even attempted the harder final boss fight until the 3DS version. I studied guides religiously, so that I knew exactly what I would need to do to beat these games, and then I never did it. I never beat Rogue Squadron, or 1080 Snowboarding, and I played the Turok games exclusively with all the cheats turned on. Simply put: the list of games I owned is long, and the list of games I beat is small.
I was intimidated by the challenge these games presented and overthought the effort it would take to beat them. I still am, sometimes; I’m a very anxious person. But I’m not overwhelmed in the same way I was back then. I am as scared of challenging myself and losing out…at least, when it comes to games.
Super Mario 64 is still, in a myriad of ways, wonderful. It’s full of smart world designs, interesting gimmicks, and hugely satisfying platforming. I love the proto-Luigi’s Mansion design of Big Boo’s Haunt, the music on the water levels, the way the game is designed so that you’re constantly running in circles just so that Nintendo could show off their analogue stick. I love that the castle is full of little hidden secrets, most of which I still remember. I love the way Mario runs and jumps and how endlessly satisfying the long jump is, with Mario’s little legs waggling as he sails through the air. I love that I still die over and over on the penguin race, and that one level involves visiting Bowser’s hidden submarine fortress, for some reason. The optical illusion in the hallway leading to Tiny-Huge Island makes me smile every time I see it, and the level itself is an early preview of what Nintendo would achieve once they had the juice to realise Super Mario Galaxy and beyond.
It’s also funny to play a game that I’ve watched speedrunners absolutely tear through over the years. I have not played the game since the Nintendo 64, so my idea of how it is played has been shaped by players who know how to infinite-hop up that final staircase, careening Mario through levels with glitches and pixel-perfect movements. I was shocked when Bowser managed to kill me during the final battle, having only ever seen him dispatched flawlessly — and equally shocked, somehow, that the final level up until that battle is an absolute cakewalk, bordering on a formality. I spent a lot of time with Super Mario 64 tentatively tiptoeing along thin beams, trying to perfectly line up my backflip jumps, and I nope-d out of Rainbow Ride quickly, choosing to gather my 70 stars elsewhere.
I enjoy all the weird enemy designs, like the pondskater spiders and coin frogs and bobble-headed snowmen. It’s funny to play a Mario game with so few Koopa Troopas, and yet so many giant disembodied eyes that you kill by running around in a circle. It makes me wonder when, exactly, the Mario aesthetic became fully defined, when Mario became defined enough that you could point at these enemies and say “they don’t quite fit, do they?” Earlier this year, I asked who and what Mario is in 2020; in Super Mario 64, though, he was more amorphous than ever. Mario’s name and face on the cover was a guarantee of quality more than an idea, an aesthetic, a character.
There are some sour notes in 64, too. An interesting localisation note is that each different region lists a different name in the credits for the creation of the game’s camera: in the US it’s Satan, the Prince of Darkness throughout Europe, and King Demon in Japan. That one bit where you need to climb on top of a giant snowman that blows you away with a gust of cold wind unless you line your movements up perfectly with a fickle penguin can absolutely eat a diaper full of diarrhea. For the most part, though, the game has aged well, and has been diminished only by the fact that several better Mario games have come out since (well, that and the awful flying controls…and the bloody quicksand bits). I very much enjoyed finishing it — far more than I expected to, in fact.
The thing that has surprised me the most is how fast it happened. According to my Switch, I have spent less than 10 hours playing Super Mario 3D All-Stars, including a quick revisit of Super Mario Galaxy’s opening star. That’s less time than I’ve spent in Hades, where I’m yet to beat the damn minotaur and his mate at the end of Elysium. Finishing Super Mario 64 did not take long, and it wasn’t a huge challenge. Little James could have done it. Why didn’t he? What held him back? Why didn’t he believe in his own abilities more?
Revisiting the past can be difficult, or traumatic, or challenging. Even revisiting a game can put you back into the time you played it, and what it meant to you then, and finding out what this game means to me now had led to some introspection. I am strangely proud of myself for having completed it now, at 32. I wish I could go back and tell myself that it’s not difficult, or that I can handle it. And above all else, I wish that Nintendo would re-release Ocarina of Time on the Switch so that I can do the same thing there, too.
