Sometime around fourth or fifth grade I came to my parents with a list of books I wanted to buy from the Scholastic Book Fair. I was an avid reader as a kid, so this wasn’t an unusual occurrence — they always let me order a few books every time the Fair sent a catalog around — but one title on my list did give them pause: Prima’s Nintendo 64 Pocket Power Guide: Unauthorized. Why did this request seem strange to them? Well…I didn’t own a Nintendo 64.
I told them I wanted it so I could learn how to keep up with my friend when we played Mario Kart 64 at his house, and it actually did help give me the edge I needed at that game (to this day that guide is the reason why Yoshi is my go-to Kart character), but the truth was that I wanted a N64 myself desperately. I grew up with video games, but mostly at a distance; this same friend and I would spend hours trying (and failing) to get past the first few levels of the original Super Mario Brothers on NES as very young children, another friend had a mind-boggling subscription to the Sega Channel, another scandalized me a bit by introducing me to Twisted Metal on the Playstation, but I never owned any myself. Part of the problem was the expense, but my family was also afraid I’d become “addicted” or waste too much time with them. Given the 300 hours or so I poured into a borrowed copy of Pokemon Gold over a summer not long after that — or the even greater number of hours I piled into Animal Crossing over quarantine, for that matter — they weren’t necessarily wrong to be worried.
The Nintendo 64 did end up being my very first video game console, thanks to some generous gifts from aunts and uncles, and though I only ever actually owned five games for it, I more than got my money’s worth (probably from Super Smash Brothers alone, if I’m being honest). Doing some cleaning this summer, I found that old Prima N64 guidebook and was slightly surprised to discover, though, that out of the nine games it covered, I only ever ended up playing/owning one of them.
Given that list of titles, I suppose that should actually be far less of a surprise, as saying that most of these aren’t exactly memorable is being extremely generous. The one glaring omission for me, though, is Super Mario 64. I read this guidebook until it was tattered (as you can see), and though I spent time reading about all the games listed (usually on the bus on my way to school), it was Mario 64 that I wanted to play more than anything, and spent by far the most time fantasizing about, imagining what the levels and gameplay must be like based on the brief snippets of information it gave. In retrospect, it’s probably for the best that I never owned Mario 64 during its original run, as my middling little middle school fingers would’ve been terrible at it, but I honestly don’t know why I never picked up a used copy later, or even the remake for the Nintendo DS.
In this disaster year that is 2020, though, one bright light is the fact that I finally got to buy Super Mario 64 in the form of Super Mario 3D All-Stars, a special limited edition anniversary title that comes packaged with Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy all playable on the Nintendo Switch. I’m excited to eventually replay Sunshine and Galaxy, as I absolutely adore both games, but it’s the new-to-me 64 that I’ve been engrossed by over the past month. All-Stars, though, also saved my Prima Guidebook from the Goodwill pile, as I finally, nearly 20 years later, have the chance to actually use it to help me through a game.
Has it helped? It actually has , though not as much as I would have expected. Even as a kid I quickly realized it was a bit odd; for starters, it listed some of the Mario Kart cast by their Japanese names, rather than their English ones.
It’s likely that this guide was put together based off the Japanese versions so that it could release at the same time as the American version of the console, but that doesn’t explain many of the discrepancies it has with Super Mario 64 specifically. All the names of the Worlds are wrong, missions are often out of order, and there’s been a few situations now where the guide has either missed an important aspect of a mission (it didn’t know you’re supposed to blow open the top of the pyramid in Shifting Sand Land by standing on top of each of the four pillars, for example, instead describing a long and far more difficult process of climbing into the secret passage from the inside) or outright gotten it wrong (in Wet-Dry world it describes a star that can be gotten by shooting yourself out of the cannon straight into the sky that just…doesn’t exist, missing the one you need the Vanish Cap for entirely). It has no information on how to find the various Cap Switches, despite mentioning that you need to unlock them to progress. It also fits its entire walk-through into twelve pages, meaning no level gets more than a paragraph, and it has no room for images or to describe the actual locations of red coins (just, “hey, go find all eight red coins! Next mission!”).
In some ways, though, that makes it just the kind of guide I want. Yeah, I’d prefer one that was more trustworthy, and I’ve had to pull up Youtube a few times to find particularly difficult coins or hidden areas, but I like to do as much as I can myself, and sometimes a couple sentences giving me the goal of the mission is the kickstart I need to figure the rest out myself, to point me in the right direction.
The internet is far more handy, but as the kind of bizarre, messed-up little relic that could only have existed in a pre-internet era, as well as a reminder of the weird obsessions and longings of my childhood, I’ll always cherish this bizarre little Prima Pocket Power Guidebook.
Super Mario 64 and the Power of Exploration
This might be a hot take, but here we go: the popular open world model that most Triple-A games these days use would not exist without Super Mario 64. Sure, Grand Theft Auto popularized the giant map with checkpoints and missions that slowly popped up across it model seemingly every game uses now, but long before GTA was on the scene, Super Mario 64 created its own sort of open world, dealing in many of the same kinds of tropes GTA and its imitators would later come to claim for their own.
Sure, 64 had a hub-world and various stages and missions, but you could more or less tackle them in whatever order you choose. Only 70 stars are needed to beat the final boss, leaving a full 50 missions you don’t even have to do if you don’t want to. If you agree with me that Shifting Sand Land is pure, unfiltered evil, you can skip it entirely! You can even do the individual missions within any given world out of order if you want, since most stars are available in any given mission if you know where to look, or just happen to stumble upon them. In fact, I used that to my advantage in Shifting Sand Land, obtaining every single one of its stars from its first mission, thus avoiding the extra sand tornados and the vulture that attacks you in missions 2-6.
This all highlights Super Mario 64’s greatest strength; it encourages you to explore its worlds. Missions plop you down in a world with only minimal hints or instructions about what to do, encouraging you to look around and learn the lay of the land yourself, and perhaps find some secrets hidden within. There’s real joy in a world transforming from a strange, new place to an area you know like the back of your hand, but also just as much joy in finding a new discovery in a world you thought you knew everything about.
It’s especially why these kind of games are so immersive when you’re young, when you have all the time in the world to explore these worlds from top to bottom. I find myself looking at guides a lot more playing 64 as an adult than I did playing previous Mario games in high school, and I feel no guilt about it. I’m still performing all the difficult platforming maneuvers myself — all while 64’s ungodly camera controls actively try to sabotage me — but I’ve really only been playing 64 on weekends, when I can sit down and focus undivided hours on it, and I don’t feel like spending an entire day wall-jumping off every single wall in Hazy Maze Cave looking for that one little alcove with a star in it that can’t even be seen until you reach it. I could picture myself triumphantly reaching it after days of searching in high school, but as an adult, I’m just as excited to look it up, save myself some time that can be spent on less frustrating video game tasks, and cross another star off my list.
Super Mario Sunshine takes this idea of exploration to the next level. 64 has more worlds than Sunshine, but most of them are smaller and sparser. This is a purposeful decision made with the limitations of the Nintendo 64 in mind, no doubt, and even has justification within the game itself — these aren’t real places Mario is exploring, but paintings that have been brought to life by Bowser. There’s a lonely, wistful feeling to many of these worlds that I don’t get from modern games, even when they’re trying for it — it takes bad graphics to truly make you feel isolated and spooked. Sunshine may ultimately have less worlds to explore, but those worlds are all larger, and also all full of people. You aren’t just exploring worlds, you’re exploring civilizations, and that does wonders to making its worlds feel even more immersive and alive, making them even more fun to explore, and even more memorable as time goes on.
Super Mario Galaxy is the outlier here. That’s strange, as it may actually be the best game in the All-Stars collection from a technical and balance standpoint. Not only is it absolutely gorgeous, but it finally fully fixes the camera issues, while also making Mario more responsive than ever. I haven’t played the Switch version yet, and to be honest I’m a bit afraid to, because Galaxy just perfectly used the WiiMote better than any other game on the console. I don’t know if I’ve ever played another game where the controls felt so fluid and natural, like an extension of my hand rather than a controller I was holding. Galaxy also had an excellent balance of difficulty, paring down some of the nightmarishly, hair-rippingly difficult courses of Sunshine and fixing the control and traction issues that made some 64 courses harder than they needed to be while also avoiding some of the super simple missions both those games had as well.
Yet, for all that, Galaxy loses that vital role of exploration entirely. Yes, there’s still a hub-world and you can still tackle missions at your own pace, but the missions themselves are 100% linear. You may go to the same world seven times on seven missions, but you have no room to explore that world; you’re whisked away to different parts of the world each time on different, fixed tracks. It makes Galaxy more about pure platforming — and, again, it may in fact be the best platformer of the three, and is an incredibly fun game that I highly recommend — but the trade-off is that the worlds themselves are far less memorable and immersive. I can remember specific missions I enjoyed in Galaxy, but I can’t describe any of the worlds to you like I can for the previous two games. They don’t feel like places I’ve really spent time in and come to love, and that’s a shame, because that was one of the greatest joys of the previous 3D Mario games.
Perhaps in response to this, Mario’s 3D Switch release, Super Mario Odyssey, fully embraces the open world aesthetic 64 likely helped invent, doing away with missions entirely and just giving you various worlds to explore, its various challenges and rewards tucked away for you to find at your leisure. If anything, Odyssey may have swung too far in the other direction; I haven’t had a chance to buy it yet, but even when playing it in short sessions at friends’ houses I’ve found an odd aimlessness to it that didn’t exist in previous games, and some fans have complained about some of the rewards feeling arbitrary or the platforming segments all being tucked away in the back of the game.
I suppose this all just goes to show why Super Mario 64 is still so well-regarded even all these years later. Even with its non-existent traction and legitimately evil camera and poor graphics, it struck a keen balance between intriguing exploration, fun worlds, and challenging, enjoyable gameplay. It’s not just nostalgia fueling it. Super Mario 64 holds up.
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!