Some facts about Super Mario 64 (Nintendo, 1996), the best video game ever made, and its creator: It’s either the eighth or the 10th game in the Mario series, depending on your standards, and the fourth or the sixth to be designed directly by Shigeru Miyamoto. Miyamoto is the kind of guy, like Herodotus or Francis Bacon, who is called the “father” of something, in this case modern video games, and though his isn’t an indisputable paternity suspicious evidence certainly abounds. Miyamoto’s original Super Mario Bros., in which a small cartoon Italian plumber runs and jumps through environments inhabited by malevolent creatures, created a genre whose basic mechanics infiltrated a great deal of subsequent genres, with a star character who has become one of the most recognizable icons in the world despite (or perhaps because of) having a skeletal personality constructed entirely of ethnic clichés.
SM64, the first 3D entry in the series, is and isn’t much like its predecessors. In the mid-90s, as technology first began to allow 3D environments to be created on-the-fly by computer processers priced such that your mom could be convinced to buy you one, game designers tried several times to extrude platform game design into a third dimension, without much success or much indication that they knew exactly why they were doing this or what could be accomplished. SM64 was the first wholly successful 3D platformer—where the player spends a lot of time jumping from platform to platform trying not to fall—and the first to transport the running-jumping-head bopping style into a 3D environment and leave behind the bits that simply didn’t fit. Like all of its predecessors, it sent Mario through a series of self-contained levels on a very vague quest to rescue a princess.
Like only some of its predecessors, it was a masterpiece.
Some notes on structure. SM64 relies on what’s usually called a “hub world” or “overworld”—a relatively placid environment from which the player can access the game’s levels in the order he likes. Hub worlds vary greatly in complexity; some games use them as glorified menus, asking a player to open a door or enter a room when he might as well be selecting a level from a list. Others sprinkle the hub with interactivity out of what sometimes seems a sense of guilt: you can fiddle with this or that, you can watch your character watch TV or pretend to eat or you can take some time off from the game proper. (Designs of this type sometimes seem to be unaware that when most people want to take some time off from something, they stop doing it.)
SM64’s hub is one of the most detailed and best integrated in the history of gaming. At the game’s beginning, Mario stands outside a sprawling, empty castle full of galleries of living paintings that act as portals to other levels; halls, gates, basements, attics, courtyards, trapdoors; a moat (which, once drained, reveals a few extra secrets); and an apparently empty room with a secret door to a slide. It’s probably larger than any other environment in the game. It’s also fun to explore.
Exploration was never a part of earlier Mario games. Even the near-flawless Super Mario Bros. 3 invariably directed the player left-to-right across two-dimensional landscapes, and the goal of every level was to reach the point of extreme rightness.. This was a design decision, but it was also a limitation of technology—games like the original Legend of Zelda had large environments through which the player could wander at will, but they did it by reducing Mario’s two dimensions to one: a player would look straight down at the top of his character’s head, and move him left and right, up and down, with both axes representing movement along the same plane. The Mario games, which centered on jumping, didn’t have a dimension to spare. The move to 3D meant they had an extra one lying around, and SM64 drops Mario into expansive worlds through which there’s no prescribed direction of motion: the player wanders, he explores, he finds secrets and enemies under, around and behind things, rather than questing always for Extreme Rightness*. SM64 rewards care, curiosity, and perception as much as can a game that’s still mostly about stomping on the heads of ambulatory mushrooms.
The game’s detail isn’t restricted to environment. It’s a testament to Miyamoto’s imagination that SM64’s characters, which do not inhabit anything like a coherent universe and exist only in their relationship to Mario—which aren’t characters at all, really, but collections of hindrances**—nevertheless have personality. The ghosts who shrink and vanish when Mario faces them but swell with malevolent glee when he looks away are first and foremost a problem, a dynamic to master: the player has to exploit their shyness to keep them away, and make sure he doesn’t turn his back for long. There’s nothing excessive or ornamental in the mechanic. But it’s fundamentally human, and when it’s introduced the player doesn’t think of it as a dry piece of design but understands it immediately, subconsciously: Oh, I see, they’re shy***.
It’s the subtlety and efficiency with which Mario games teach the player that allows them get so complicated while staying simple. By the SM64’s late levels, an eight-year-old kid can find himself ascending a tall chute by ricocheting off its parallel walls with precise timing, aiming a kick towards an approaching monster on the way up, and jumping onto a moving flying carpet from which the game will immediately begin trying to dislodge him. He will do all this using no techniques or moves not available to him from the very beginning of the game, because unlike other games which ramp up their complexity by rewarding the player with new moves as he progresses, the Mario of SM64 never learns how to do more than the half-dozen available to him at the beginning, none of which are very complicated. It’s the player who learns new things: new ways to interact with his environment, new implications of its details and new uses for moves he thought he fully understood. Adding new moves to a game is a way of simulating mastery—the character gets better at what he does as he progresses through his adventure. SM64 uses no such simulation; it’s about real mastery. Mario doesn’t get better—the player does.
Which brings us to the word “art.” Devotees of video games have always been eager to apply this word to their hobby, and outsiders have been predictably resistant in the disinterested and slightly annoyed way**** that tends to inflame true believers into goofy proclamations. It also tends to inflame game designers, who fight back by stuffing reams and reams of (usually pretty turgid) plot into their games, hoping the values of literature and cinema will carry them to the plateau of Seriousness. Concerning games like this, the dissenters are absolutely right: the requirements of video-game interactivity get in the way of drama and character in so many disastrous ways that the use of literary trappings has always been and can only be ornamental. John Carmack, the designer of Doom, said that a plot in a video game is like a plot in a porno: it’s there, but it’s not why you’re there. This only pretends to be Philistine.
But of course drama and character aren’t what video games are about. They’re about mechanics, about grace, about the subtleties and difficulties of teaching a player how to do something, about the working relationship between the designer and the player—a relationship that’s part love affair and part antagonism. In SM64’s elegance—in the purity of its mechanics and in the detail of its environments, which exist to challenge but never confound the player; in its deft, simple characterizations—there’s the same kind of tingle induced by, say, a Pollock painting: another artifact bereft of Ideas but full of the same mechanical confidence, the same playful push-and-pull between artist and audience. Understand that this isn’t a way to classify every decent video game as great art. I love a lot of games but there aren’t many games like this, since this is the best one ever made.
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* This remained the case for SM64’s less luminous sequel, Super Mario Sunshine, but not so much for the Wii game Super Mario Galaxy. Mario’s still leaping through 3D environments in Galaxy, but the player’s much more likely to spend an entire level more or less being told exactly where to run—the return of Extreme Rightness, disguised by the showy twists and turns 3D allows. In this, Galaxy is more a (terrific) sequel to Super Mario Bros. 3 than a successor to SM64.
** In 1993, when the live-action film version of Super Mario Bros. tried to pull all of the series’ iconography together into a functioning fictional world capable of supporting a narrative, they ended up with a stunningly ghastly Blade Runner thing in which steaming taxicabs navigate a dystopian Manhattan and Dennis Hopper forces his enemies into a “de-evolution machine” which, for some reason, reduces their heads to prosthetic nubs atop incongruously hulking bodies. This is what happens when you think you have source material but actually don’t.
*** See also the Bob-ombs, Platonic bombs with metal feet, rotating wind-up keys and blinking anime eyes, who putter in pointless circles until Mario approaches, whereupon their fuse ignites and they barrel after him in kamikaze desperation.
**** The most famous dissenter is probably Roger Ebert, who wrote that games’ interactivity precluded artistry, which was ironic because Roger Ebert also wrote one of the smartest and most enthusiastic game reviews ever written, about an obscure game with definite artistic ambition.
