Who says wrinkles can’t be beautiful?

In an age where instant gratification is king, returning to Super Mario 64 decades later is jarring. It’s awkward and, unless you’ve trained yourself to exploit the game’s vulnerabilities, you are forced to play it at the pace the game sets - which is a fair bit slower than both previous and subsequent Mario titles.

There are numerous slow-moving platforming challenges, as well as obstacles for which the only way to avoid them is to simply wait until they’ve passed. The difficulty of some of these challenges may be trivial on paper, but they become genuinely confounding if the player is just a little too impatient—an easy state to find yourself in since, again, it is so much slower and insists you *play* a lot slower than most games would ask a player to endure nowadays.

This is a source of no small amount of friction when people revisit the game. I myself am acutely aware of this, even beyond my own experience playing it, because I’ve watched countless hours of people playing this game online!

I actually first discovered this game from people posting “Machinima” videos (remember those?) of the game, depicting Mario in humorous situations while probably swearing, and was fortunate that my dad not only had a Nintendo 64 stashed away that could be brought out but was also generous enough to buy a Super Mario 64 cartridge for me.

The capacity for exploration this game had in itself made me fall in love with it. To feel like I was inhabiting some small part of the Mushroom Kingdom was something I’d wanted from all the Mario games I’d played previously, but they each were too busy making sure players actually had fun to worry about letting me feel like I “lived” in the fictional land of mushrooms.

More than that, though, looking back? I think what was most significant to me was getting to go someplace with little to no expectations set for me. I didn’t need to be “productive,” I didn’t need to be… anything, really, but curious.

Unlike in previous Super Mario titles, there isn’t even a time limit implicitly compelling players to advance quickly in order to continue playing the game. Apart from the temporary effects of the occasional purple switch, you can take as long as you need to achieve whatever goal you set your mind to in Super Mario 64.

Video games fill a void for lots of people, whether it’s granting a feeling of accomplishment or a distraction from the troubles of one’s everyday life. For me, growing up, one of the most valuable things Super Mario 64 gave me was the space to just… be a kid.

The courses in Super Mario 64 may not technically be as large as the average level of a modern video game, but when you’re dialed in? They feel BIG. Big in a way no level from previous Mario titles felt for me, in a way I don’t think any of them *could* have felt in 2D. Mario is small in a big world, which made him the perfect insert character for a small child playing the game.

But that was then, what about now? How does the game hold up today, after we’ve played more-sophisticated video games? It’s a question that’s been given many answers on the internet, over the years, with a number of players concluding that it’s better left as a memory - something that belongs in a museum rather than a game you’d willingly choose to play for fun.

It’s undeniable that the game shows its age from just a glance, and it’s not hard to find various seams (both figurative and literal) in the game that remind you that you’re playing a video game that was made in 1996.

A lot can be said for making a video game “seamless,” for letting the figurative paint strokes of the artists all blend together to create the illusion of something that was not created but simply started existing one day. Maybe the developers who made Super Mario 64 would be embarrassed to learn a player like me noticed the seams in the world they created.

I love creation, however, and I appreciate the wrinkles of Super Mario 64. Like how Mario can approach a door from slightly the wrong angle so it looks like he’s *about* to run into the wall, only for him to suddenly *snap* into position to where he opens the door and walks through as if nothing was amiss.

I don’t consider that a failure state, just because it takes me out of the game for a moment, and why should I? It’s nothing but a reminder that the developers caught a problem and made sure it didn’t stop you from continuing to enjoy the game.

It’s all a matter of perspective. From one point of view, the course in which you must return a baby penguin to their mother is tedious - and you’d find no shortage of people online who would share that view with you! But when I found myself getting knocked over by enemies and needing to scramble to retrieve the baby from the peril it was innocently wandering into, I couldn’t help but be reminded of old cartoons where characters like Tom & Jerry need to rescue an oblivious baby from a construction site.

Super Mario 64 is what every video game should aspire to be - it’s a masterpiece, like the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel, that you can play with. I’ve never stopped being charmed by it, no matter how far video games have come from it, which is why I can’t just love it from a distance or leave it in the past.

I love this beautiful old game, wrinkles and all.