Plumber in 3D

Watching Super Mario 64 on a supermarket display screen in 1997, my brain just stopped working. This was something completely outside my experience—a gateway to a new dimension of what games could be. The controller looked like a prop from a science fiction movie, the 3D graphics made no sense, and I stood there unable to comprehend what I was watching.

I’ve got to say though—I’m a SNES guy. Always have been. Pixel art, sprite work, that whole aesthetic—that’s where I live. The SNES was the best thing the entertainment industry ever made, in my opinion. Everything since has been trying to recapture something it already perfected. But Super Mario 64 shattered all of that in about thirty seconds.

Twenty years later, a programmer named Roystan Ross did something kind of beautiful—he rebuilt the entire game from scratch on modern hardware. Not an emulation, but an actual reconstruction. It runs in a browser now, in HD, and you can play through the first level. It’s the kind of technical accomplishment that would’ve seemed impossible when this blog started.

I never got the N64 the way everyone else did, but this rebuild made that 1997 moment finally hit. Like I’d been feeling something real at the time, but couldn’t quite see it until someone showed me what it was.