Super Mario 64 is an iconic game in Nintendo’s catalogue. The game introduced Nintendo fans to a 3D world that Mario could explore almost every inch of. In 1996, it was paving new ground. In 2021, Super Mario 64 is starting to show its age. Which is why a group of modders have tinkered away with a PC port that features touched up graphics, and now includes ray-tracing.
Fans have modified Super Mario 64 in all sorts of ways over the years, including having Peach’s Castle included in GoldenEye 007. The game has been remixed numerous times by fans, and speedrunners have unlocked almost every time save making it a blazing fast run to watch. The game has started to show its age though, which is why this PC port of the game looks amazing.
The addition of ray-tracing to Super Mario 64 drastically changes how the game looks. The water effects are perhaps the first thing the player notices as YouTuber Dario dives into Wet-Dry World. The shimmer of the water looks impressive compared to the very flat blue of the original Super Mario 64. Ray tracing is one of the big advancement in recent years, with more powerful graphics cards able to produce impressive lighting effects in games like Control. When applied to Super Mario 64, it looks like a completely different game compared to the original 1996 version.
While fans were very excited when Super Mario 3D All-Stars was announced, the Super Mario 64 included in that official bundle is a pretty straightforward port without ray-tracing included. In this version, the reflections on the water, the light produced by the fireballs, and the buzz of electricity from the Amps (the floating metal orbs) all look so impressive.
Sometimes a Super Mario 64 mod chooses to deviate from the original in a more substantial way, like the Doom Mario 64 mod. Adopting the HUD from Doom, while overhauling other aspects of the visuals to turn Mario 64 into a Doom-variant must have taken a lot of time. That is something that can’t be said enough about these fan communities, is the amount of time spent on these projects is truly something to behold.
Even when Nintendo clamps down with a copyright complaint against the creators of the PC port, it might slow fans down, but it doesn’t stop them. New fanmade projects are always popping up, to see ray tracing in Super Mario 64 doesn’t even come as a surprise given how much love for this game the mod community has.
Super Mario 64 is available now as part of Super Mario 3D All-Stars on Nintendo Switch.
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