By Ernie Smith
When I was 11 years old, I had perhaps my first genuinely clever thought. I was in the Cub Scouts at the time, and we were planning for a Pinewood Racing tournament, where we shaved down blocks of wood and turned them into aerodynamic machines, to go down tall ramps.
We were in charge of designing our own wooden racers, and I wasn’t sure what to put on mine until I randomly spotted a picture of Mario, complete with the Mario 3 tail, hanging in a magazine. I was thinking, “How could I get this onto that block of wood?” But then I remembered the existence of carbon paper, and the fact that we had some hiding in our house somewhere. With a little tracing and some careful work using a wood burner, we could get Mario onto the block of wood and then paint it yellow, just like the Super Mario Bros. 3 box. It was brilliant. It was copyright infringement.
(If Nintendo was aware, we would have gotten a cease & desist.)
My derby vehicle wasn’t aerodynamic, but it looked cool, and that’s all I cared about. Plus, I got to big-up my video game hero. I think this does as good a job as any of highlighting just how big of a Mario fanatic I was. Barring the infamous CD-I games, if it had Mario in it, it was my jam. I adored all of his games and played each of them with a sense of excitement.
But as I got older, the excitement faded.
I can actually pinpoint the exact moment it wore off for me, honestly: When I got my hands on Super Mario 64, seen by most as a defining moment in video game history. But the added polygons never sat right with me. And without his spark, I began to lose my passion for gaming in general, especially modern titles. It took me a couple of decades to get it back.
And I want to understand why.
The secret to Mario’s success is in the athletic game
Despite the visual cues being all wrong, there is something fitting about Mario being the visual icon for a contest in which wooden cars go down a ramp at hopefully high speeds. See, at the time when Mario was first conceived, Shigeru Miyamoto considered the platforming style of gameplay at the center of the 2D Mario games to be an “athletic game.” He considered this a style in which the player moved swiftly, jumped, and interacted with obstacles.
This style, taken for granted now, was uncommon during the early video game era, with the relatively staccato movements of Mario’s first game, Donkey Kong, representing some of the earliest steps in that general direction. You ran. You jumped. You swapped between platforms. It was herky-jerky, but it was nonetheless innovative.
And there was a chance that had things played out differently, it would have played closer to a Mario game, Miyamoto noted.
“It was originally an athletic game, and the levels would have featured things like see-saws and other devices which the characters would use to move up and down,” he said in a 2000 interview translated by the website Shmuplations.
The later Mario Bros. allowed for a much more fluid range of motion, while still maintaining a single-screen format. But other developers were gradually finding ways to expand the human range of motion. Jungle Hunt, an arcade game with a well-remembered Atari 2600 port, brought in elements of running and jumping—the former over boulders, the latter from vine to vine. One of my first experiences with a platform-style video game was the Atari 2600 Jungle Hunt. (We’ll ignore the lack of realism in the idea that you could headbutt an alligator to death in the swimming scenes.)
The somewhat similar Pitfall!, which did not rely on side-scrolling, nonetheless introduced this obstacle element to the mix, forcing a mixture of speed and careful movement which ultimately defined this style of game.
And to be clear, it was not limited to just human players. One early gaming experience for me was Moon Patrol, where you drove a moon rover over rocky terrain, full of pits and boulders. You can gradually see the seeds of these ideas—the combination of scrolling across the screen and moving across platforms—come together.
On the Nintendo front, things were clearly leading in this direction. The early NES game Excitebike, while closer to a racing game than a run-and-jump game, shares many of the basic elements of an “athletic”-style platformer. Success in Excitebike was measured by fast, fluid motion across a screen, much like Jungle Hunt.
Years later, Miyamoto credited Excitebike with setting the scene for Super Mario Bros., and it shows in the final result.
While not the first of its kind, Super Mario Bros. brought the various points of the obstacle course together, creating a kind of addictive fluid motion that would force you to keep trying, over and over. It was an effective model, but it was one that was easy to repeat. There’s a reason why the Nintendo Entertainment System has a couple of hundred games whose basic range of motion is strongly indebted to the run-and-jump dynamic set by Mario.
That such a concept came from Japan is not surprising, a country with a background in martial arts and movement-heavy athletic pursuits. Most notable for this context: A significant public holiday is Supōtsu no hi, or “Sports Day,” an annual event that began when Miyamoto was a teenager. Held each October, it began after Japan hosted the Summer Olympics in 1964, and included an obstacle component. Which meant that the obstacle-heavy dynamic Mario introduced likely felt familiar to Japanese families far and wide.
In a comment to the Japanese magazine Micom Basic, Miyamoto emphasized that this combination of action and speed created a fluid motion that made platformer games like the Mario series addictive.
“It’s a type of game that is easily approachable for younger inexperienced players, but can also be played by experienced hardcores without getting tired of it,” he said, according to an English translation. “It’s a fun game, even when you’re just watching other people play from the sidelines. That’s the sort of game that I wanted to create.”
To me, the peak of the form came with Super Mario Bros. 3, which expanded on the basic run-jump dynamic by adding in increasingly complex levels and a wide range of power-ups that enriched the basic run-and-jump gameplay.
At its best, it felt like you were blazing through the air, running and jumping faster than any human might. The side-scrolling movement made it easier to focus on the action—the jump and glide mechanics that made you want to keep trying, over and over.
But, for better or worse, the flat dimension would not last.
What Mario lost as it gained a dimension
As Mario 3 was setting sales records in the U.S. in the 1990s, the French software publisher Infogrames was bringing the first 3D platformer to life in the form of Alpha Waves, a game originally for the Atari ST. (Side note: Infogrames later became the modern-day Atari.) Developed by Christophe de Dinechin, it was highly experimental, very new-agey, and focused on exploratory elements, rather than speed. It was nothing like a Mario game, but it also had the basic elements of a 3D platformer.
But one would be hard-pressed to see the flat colors and slow-motion gameplay as a starting point for what would become Mario’s first third-dimensional adventure, which came a mere six years later.
Mario 64 wasn’t the only 3D platformer on the market upon its release. The Sega Saturn had Bug!, and the Sony PlayStation had Crash Bandicoot. These games had limitations, though: Bug’s 3D movement was on a strict track, while Bandicoot tended to limit the player’s range of motion. Mario 64 let you explore the world with far fewer limits, while still stomping on enemies when the time came for it.
However, is open movement what people wanted from a Mario game? Sure, the sales numbers don’t lie. But putting Mario in a 3D setting ultimately forced new rules of engagement on players and designers alike.
In fact, Mario 64 was not Nintendo’s first attempt to introduce additional dimensions to the gameplay. Early in its development, Super Mario Bros. 3’s director, Takashi Tezuka, wanted to give the game a top-down isometric design. “But we just couldn’t make it work,” he said in a 2016 interview translated by Nintendo Everything. The reason? It screwed with the jump dynamics, making it harder to figure out where you were supposed to jump.
Clearly, it needed some more time in the oven. While we eventually got an isometric Mario game in the form of Super Mario RPG, a Super NES game that came out shortly before Mario 64, its design was not that of a traditional platformer. (A game that did go isometric while maintaining a platformer style was Sonic 3D Blast. It probably made more sense for Sonic.)
Now, to be clear, it was entirely possible to create a highly dynamic game beyond a side-scrolling plane. The rail shooter Space Harrier, which used checkerboard floors to create the illusion of a third dimension, was action-packed, just as an example. The challenge was making it work with a platformer format that lived up to the “athletic game” standards of Super Mario Bros.
I think it’s in this mechanic where Mario 64 lost me. I think that while Mario’s jumping and speed were eventually managed with the help of camera controls and free-ranging of motion, it lost something from the simple dynamic that Miyamoto’s team originally landed upon. Like Alpha Waves, it felt kind of like a proof of concept—a more complete one, one filled with details—that set the stage for better games.
Which is fine—I’m all for genres that are willing to modernize to keep with the times. But to me, it felt like the purity of the Mario idea was better kept in two dimensions. The reason is that it lost that purity of gameplay with the addition of cameras and free motion. Both of these innovations were extremely immature; it would take a few years to nail them down for mass consumption.
I think the unrestricted universe created the same kinds of complexities that led Tezuka and Miyamoto to set aside the isometric Mario idea. The difference is, this game was being built to sell a new kind of system, which meant that the case for figuring out how to make it work in 3D was high. And suitably, it was where much of the development time went into. According to The Cutting Room Floor, a website dedicated to researching unused parts of old video games, much of the game’s early development time went into basic mechanics. That meant that level design, generally a main focus of Mario titles, was more off-the-cuff.
If the game started as a 3D game rather than something that existed for a decade in 2D, maybe it would have made more sense.
Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that 3D platformers can’t work. Rather, I just think that Mario was a bad vessel for them, at least as the guinea pig to prove the concept. Games that were built for the format from the ground up, like Spyro the Dragon or Banjo-Kazooie, fared better. Plus, it’s arguable that 3D is naturally a more exploratory format, which is why the Zelda series had a far easier time making the transition (in my view).
Mario is action first, exploration second—and that meant the addition of camera navigation and free movement complicated what was ultimately a simple model. But “simple” still left a ton of room to grow. I think if Mario had never entered a third dimension, the game series would have continued to gain sophistication—after all, the stylistic leaps between Super Mario Bros. and Super Mario World were significant, while titles like Yoshi’s Island showed that Nintendo could continue to up the creativity quotient in two dimensions.
But I think the biggest problem is that the success of Mario 64 essentially necessitated that every game that might have previously been a 2D platformer had to have an additional dimension. And I think that, as someone who loved playing a bunch of side-scrollers growing up, it almost felt like what I liked about those old games was being ignored in favor of something buzzier.
Sonic the Hedgehog famously didn’t have a true sequel on the Sega Saturn—instead leaning into racing games like Sonic R and secondary series games like Sonic Jam, which turned its 3D element into a museum. (The true sequel, Sonic Adventure, only came out on the Dreamcast, a well-regarded console, beloved for its innovations, that nonetheless became Sega’s last hardware foray.)
While it wasn’t the best business decision to minimize your biggest brand on your primary platform, it probably helped the Sonic series make a more successful transition to 3D in the end. It had more time in the oven. It helped make Sega a great software company, even if it was a likely factor in its eventual exit from the hardware business.
Ultimately, it took developers a long time to realize that, yes, people like side-scrollers. Eventually, this evolved into new kinds of genres, like Metroidvania, which combines action and exploration in a more balanced way.
While Mario eventually made it back to two dimensions with the New Super Mario Bros. series, launched in 2006 on the Nintendo DS, it kind of gave up the creative momentum of its 2D games to head in that direction. Which, fine, but I think a couple of decades of 2D Mario games, with a different 3D franchise mascot in the pole position, might have been a better result.
Maybe Conker could have skipped out on the edgelord comedy and become Nintendo’s next mascot.
Mario’s film-industry analogue, and what it says about how 3D graphics oversaturated the late ’90s
A good way to frame this debate is to consider the cultural impact Mario 64 and Toy Story each had on the development of 3D graphics. Both looked amazing for their time, pushing forward a new style that ultimately became the norm in their respective genres.
But if you compare them to what came afterward, it’s easy to see where the seams are. In the case of Toy Story, it comes in the form of relatively limited details in backgrounds and textures. In the case of Mario 64, it’s a reflection that modern games went a slightly different direction with controls and overall structure.
Looking around at various criticisms I found online, Mario 64 often gets derided for its limited camera controls, creating awkward movements in tight-squeeze situations. On the Nintendo 64, players moved the camera with a set of buttons that, on later consoles, gave way to a second analog pad—meaning that the controls, in retrospect, feel awkward, even foreign, especially if you didn’t grow up with them.
If you got started with the newer Mario games on the Wii or Switch, you might find these weaknesses glaring in retrospect. And if you started with the 2D games, it might feel like an unnecessary complexity.
But the game compares to Toy Story in another way: It created the market for a lot of derivative 3D platformers, just as Toy Story eventually convinced studios that hand-drawn animation was no longer worth it. Plenty of those platformers had their charm—a lot of people are die-hard fans of the Nintendo 64 era—but it was essentially a bet on a new style of game, presuming that people were done with side-scrollers entirely. It pushed a vital genre to the side, which, as a fan of side-scrollers, I hated.
(It should be noted that the 2D action artform still existed during the early 3D era. The original PlayStation had highly regarded and popular side-scrollers like Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and Rayman, proving that the format still had plenty of life. The N64 even had its share, including the first-party Yoshi’s Story, a successor to Yoshi’s Island. But the trend was clear: The Sega Dreamcast had very few original side-scrollers.)
Really, the problem was one of oversaturation of one format. If you experienced games in the B3D (Before 3D) time, you could see the weaknesses from a mile away, well before slop like Superman 64 ruined the vibes entirely.
Yeah, it’s generational. But it’s ultimately what changed my relationship with games
My dislike of Mario 64 is not unlike that parent who favors the oldies station. Likely they heard something one day that realized that maybe top-40 wasn’t really the spot for them anymore, so they adjusted. Likewise, I adjusted—I got into console emulation, which ended up making me fall in love with my NES and Super NES games all over again back in the late ’90s.
When it came out, I was 15. I was getting into other things—music, the internet, and so on. But if I was playing something with an inherent third dimension, it was probably the first-person shooter Quake. That felt like a more natural evolution of improved graphics.
Quake arguably holds up a hell of a lot better than most late-’90s 3D games—which is hard to say about other 3D games I actually came to like during this era, like Sega’s cult classic, Shenmue. (Tried playing that game recently. Does not hold up, sadly.)
Maybe I needed a jumping-off point for my own taste in games to build into something genuine. The one problem was, I shut myself off from modern games for so long that I ended up missing out on some games I probably would have liked. I think I ultimately found my way back to modern stuff thanks to indie stuff like Hollow Knight and Celeste. But it took longer than it needed to. And while I’m currently giving a 3D platformer a shot (Bakeru, a spiritual successor to the personal-favorite Goemon/Mystical Ninja series), I still find the camera management stuff tends to take you out of the action.
But that’s just how I feel.
I want to be clear. Mario 64 isn’t quite the “athletic game” that Super Mario Bros. started out as, but there’s nothing wrong with you if you like it. But in my Pinewood Derby ideal of fluid motion in video games, Mario 64 just didn’t have the same flow, which was made worse by the fact that its flow was so highly replicated by others.
I missed out on a lot of games in the decades before I eventually realized that developers were making other kinds of games again. I feel like, even in my frustration with the 3D platformer, I should have given that generation of gaming more of a chance.
But eventually, like a lost life during a long adventure, you find your way back.
Ernie Smith is the editor of Tedium, a long-running newsletter that sweats the small stuff. His words have been published in Vice’s Motherboard, Fast Company, and IEEE Spectrum. His spicier takes are on Bluesky.