Mario64 does have kind of a creepy liminal vibe to it.
Long ass empty hallways, rooms with just a giant mirror, no sound except kind of haunting/enchanting music and the echo of your footsteps.
It is objectively a pretty creepy / empty vibe to it, because in the game bowser has taken over the castle, so its supposed to be a bit spooky/creepy in a bunch of spots.
Til I’m a zoomer lol
They aren’t wrong though. Mario 64 (and even Ocarina of Time too) were great because of how much they evolved videogames as a whole, but as pioneers they have a lot of flaws that game devs took a bit longer to figure out.
I don’t think OoT is as liminal because they put a lot of effort into adding atmosphere. There’s a lot of background animal noises and bugs flying around. It’s low tech, but the environments don’t feel empty in the same way as the polished and clean Mario 64 environments.
IIRC the reason Luigi isn’t in Mario 64 is that they couldn’t afford the extra few kilobytes that would take.
It’s not like they wanted parts of the game to be empty, cartridges were tiny. Mario 64 had a one megabyte cartridge. They had to cut things to the bone to manage to fit the game on that.
Small correction - Mario 64 was on an 8MB cartridge.
There were some 4MB games, but a 1MB cartridge never existed.
Mmm. The source I found probably got megabytes and megabits mixed up. Cartridges often seemed to have their capacity listed in megabits for some reason.
Yeah possibly, if they converted in the wrong direction.
There are 8 bits in a byte, so 8MB cartridges like Mario 64 were generally advertised as 64 Megabit. But if someone got mixed up they could’ve assumed the 8MB figure was actually 8Mbit and then divided by 8 to reach the wrong conclusion of 1MB.
As to why they advertised things using megabits back in the day, that’s pretty easy: bigger numbers seem more impressive in marketing!
Also the reason why everything on N64 were just shaded polygons (to save space) and in the PlayStation it was all texture mapped
Luigi isn’t, but Yoshi is =P
Ok zoomer
The “every copy of Mario 64 is personalised” is a really old creepypasta / meme that was definitely a thing before most zoomers were active on the internet.
And the PTSD thing is just stupid, sorry.
When consoles were less powerful, all spaces were liminal, and as nobody expected anything else, none were. Now, the fact that it’s not bustling with photorealistic NPCs feels spooky and unsettling (along with the historical details, which feel creepy in the way that vaporwave makes you feel)
So you’re saying when say N64 was the cutting edge, everyone playing it was loving how new and realistic everything felt.
Now compare that to the younger generation that grew up with consoles way way more powerful and saw games that had fully fleshed out cities and citizens and systems to make places feel alive. So going back to tech that’s 30 years old feels very empty and unsettling by contrast?
I think this is exactly what’s happening.
I thought every new generation of games looked “photorealistic” on release. Every time I thought it couldn’t get more realistic, they got more realistic.
To be fair, now I can’t unsee it anymore, after seeing it in that light.
Honestly I don’t think it’s even necessarily a matter of photo-realism but moreso that 3d games from even later into the generation were more cluttered visually. Funny enough I’ve played some PS2 games that emulate the open sparseness style of the N64/PS1 era to invoke horror vibes.
Blatant historical revisionism.
Millenials were cooking up horrifically bad videogame creepypasta before any zoomer ever touched a keyboard.
lol.
BEN DROWNED
… I did kind of have my own creepy experience with an actual Majora’s Mask cart I picked up at a used game store like a decade ago.
Had one single save file.
Only had the couples mask.
Had completely forgone basically the entire rest of the the main actual game, only focused on the couple, saved maybe 3 ish ‘hours’ before the impact.
Had focused the entire playthrough on ensuring that a relationship would work out… in a world left utterly doomed by the hero not being the hero.
And of course they ultimately abadoned the entire game, leading eventually to me buying it, being utterly baffled by this … unconvential play through, the kind of person who would do that playthrough.
Early 2010s millennials were all about this shit and the popularization of horror game reaction videos.
Second quote sounds like a huge strawman. Did anyone acutally say anything remotely similar that anon heard or read about?
That said, I can kinda see it. SM64 looks super weird if you’re not used to the style, and it adds that “early 3d graphics” weirdness to it that younger people might only know from horror games. And TBH Mario games have always been kinda trippy.
Any Austin is great though.
Kids today will never understand what it’s like when dealing with hard limits on computer and console was the default.
I remember when I was a kid, and we got our first two PCs (as opposed to the standard Apple IIe and occasional black& white Macintosh) in the computer room in highschool school and those machines struggled just so hard to run 90s Photoshop at all. Or having to install the memory expansion in that N64 just so it could play most games. Oh, or disk swapping (floppy or CD).
In grade school you played green-on-black Math Muncher and Oregon Trail or you got bullied up by the shithead kids who played sports.
Or having to install the memory expansion in that N64 just so it could play most games
There are only two games that require the expansion pack…
Millennials invented Creepypasta for old Nintendo games. You’ll find old video game horror stories smeared across everything from Pseudopod to SCP.
I swear to fucking God, you people have zero perspective. Who do you think wrote the Secret Level episode for Pacman?
What do you mean you people? I’ll have you know I belong to a fringe group so specific, it consists of only me! And the offense taken scales inversely to group size! Also, what you said doesn’t even apply to us!
I am a millenial, and mining out huge caves in the darkness of Minecraft gave existential terror.
In general it wasn’t too bad but there were some times playing late at night, deep underground when the ambient noise that plays when you’re near caves or whatever would spook me.
On the one hand, yeah, Mario 64 is … kind of hauntingly sparse in places.
It is kind of especially weird that when you get dropped into the world, after the very sonically and visually engaging start screen and menus… you get dropped outside of the castle, which has no soundtrack, beyond like occasional birds chirping.
Its a massive tonal shift. Its meant to be just literally quickly skipped through, but if you… don’t play the game as much as explore the game… its dissonant.
Then you go into the castle, uplifting music, but… its empty. Echoey. Camera angles / Sight lines emphasize empty space… its meant to maximize your ability to to be acrobatic, but… if you just walk, slowly… very large empty space, full of huge rooms that seemingly only exist to have huge paintings in them.
Which you are… alone, in.
An entire empty castle… where is everyone?
Yeah, thats all weird.
On the other hand…
What’s wrong with Zoomers? Alphas?
Oh, constant over stimulation and external judgement.
The absence of those things thus feels like a graveyard, where… you suspect those things somehow are there, they’re just hiding… because normally, those things always are there.
Simplicity, minimalism and a lack of obvious direction and feedback thus = absence… a suspicious, meancing lack of engagement.
It leaves you alone.
With your own thoughts.
Your own unguided, undirected thoughts.
You could say the brainrotted are haunted by their own conditioned expectations.
Wdym alone the toads are there for you
Aren’t there like… 2, 3 of them, in this huge fucking castle?
And they never move…?
I don’t know.
Its been like 25 years since I last played that game lol.
The castle really isn’t that big, my man.
Also, we’re there as Mario because Peach has been kidnapped (again) and Bowser has taken over the castle so… it’s a miracle there are actually any Toads, and not Koopatroopas.
They’re ghostly lol
Fade away when you’re not nearby.
As a gen z-er… can’t say I ever felt like mario64 was liminal or heard it describes that way lol
Some of the bits in the castle feel kinda weird from what I can remember as a kid
I think that probably has something to do with the castle being mostly empty. There’s the ghost of Toad(?), but not much else.
Nah all n64 games are spooky
An especially haunted copy of Hey You Pikachu
‘Pikachu! Speak’
‘Pika, your mother sucks cocks in hell, piii.’
Tell me a single spooky thing in the Pokemon games. Stadium or Snap either one.
You 2 having this conversation
Well… Jacksepticeye, Pewdiepie, and Markiplier are all millenials and they’re the ones that pioneered such reactions to the most mundane shit in videogames.
Zoomers didn’t start talking like that in isolation.
Any Austin on Youtube has a channel that is somewhat dedicated to exploring luminal spaces in games. His videos on SM64 give a good impression about how this applies there.
Honestly I felt the same when the game came out.
