Once in a great while, a piece of work will be released that has such an impact that its ripples surpass its genre and can be felt throughout the entire medium. Cinema has had a few such as The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane. The Beatles and Elvis Presley represent a pair of landmark artists for music. For video games, there is one game that stands out as a creation that has defined mechanics across multiple generations, platforms and genres. Fitting in with this week’s genre study, it just so happens to be a platformer. The year was 1996. The game is Super Mario 64.
Before we get started, I’d like to clarify a few things. For our purposes here, this is a focus on consoles. So you PC fans can hush down with talks about Alone in the Dark, Alpha Waves or the mess of 3-D platformers that did indeed come out before SM64. I’m addressing this game in regard to what it meant to the genre and to the industry as a whole. So while it may not have been first at everything, it was the best of everything at that time. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get on with why SM64 is so darn special.
For starters, it was the first completely successful transition of a 2-D series into the 3-D realm. To many younger gamers, that may not seem like that big of a deal, but let’s put it into perspective. Gaming’s other platforming icon, Sonic the Hedgehog, has struck out at this so-called “simple” task nearly every time up to the plate. Think about that. Arguably the industries second most recognizable character has yet to make the transition as smoothly as Mario did on his first time out.
Even within the genre it was the most successful transition overall. Like I mentioned earlier, there were games like Alpha Waves and 3D World Runner that came out years before SM64, but they were hardly great three-dimensional representations of the lush environments that gamers had experienced in previous 2-D platformers. Those other games were indeed in 3-D and did indeed feature jumping over obstacles or on platforms, but they were mainly rough shapes with little-to-no sense of an environment. SM64, on the other hand, gave gamers a chance to truly inhabit a fully-realized, 3-D version of the Mushroom Kingdom. Even a game like Crash Bandicoot, which actually eeked out just before SM64 did, followed a more standard platforming level design whereas Mario would gain his success by completely redefining the genre and spreading his influence throughout the industry.
Super Mario 64 would not just triumph in its transition but in, more or less, creating a new style of platmforming gameplay. No longer was the player meant to just run from point A to point B without dying, there were now multiple objectives within each world that allowed for multiple runs through each level that usually always resulted in finding something new each time. This is a formula that Rare would borrow from with its high profile platformer, Banjo-Kazooie. This rethinking of the genre has led to a demand in replayability in nearly all genres of games.
Another big component of SM64 was the hub world. There had been other games that featured a world-map or hub level, but none quite like this. SM64 plops you down in the middle of an expansive and fully explorable hub world. In this space, players were able to get a sense of Mario’s new abilities and move-set. It gave us an opportunity to see how the camera worked, and it gave us a sense of just how large this game would be. Using stars as currency, players were able to access new levels once they had the required amount. Again, we see Rare, even today, copy this design to the letter with Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Rare’s Conker’s Bad Fur Day also used a similar hub world to introduce players to characters and movement. It was done so well, in fact, that we see the idea of the hub world seeping into other genres. The recently released Wolfenstein featured a hub world before players jumped into the actual missions, and even Halo 3: ODST’s New Mombasa serves as something similar.
And speaking of cameras, let’s not forget that bit of groundbreaking innovation. SM64 is often credited as the first game with an intelligent-interactive camera. This was pretty much a necessity for this type of expansive, free-roaming gameplay, and at the time, it seemed like a pretty solid implementation. Of course, nowadays, SM64’s camera doesn’t seem nearly as smooth as it once did, but that’s mainly because damn near every third-person game since has had time to refine it. Getting to move the camera around like that was a huge deal back then, and the mechanic itself has sparked many debates on how immersive such a mechanic is. Whether you like them or not, player-controlled cameras have become a main stay in the industry. The number of games influenced by this mechanic would be too many to list.
As I said before, Super Mario 64 wasn’t necessarily the first to some of these mechanics, but it was the first time we had seen them all together and executed at such an elite level. It raised the bar for the genre and redefined not only what it meant to be a platformer but a video game as well. The next time you pop any game of any genre into your console of choice, stop and take a moment to look at the level structure, objective design, camera movement or any of the other things we’ve discussed here, and give a silent thank you to Miyamoto and company for a fourteen year old platformer that showed the industry just where these things we call games could go.