With the release of Super Mario 3D All-Stars, many gamers are discovering, or rediscovering,
the joy of Super Mario 64.
This game set the standard for controlling characters in a 3D space, and most games released
today owe a lot to the lessons learned from this N64 launch title.
This is all thanks…to Sega, oddly enough.
Originally, Super Mario 64 was designed to run, not on the Nintendo 64 controller, but
on a Sega game pad.
According to coder Giles Goddard, who worked on the game, development on Super Mario 64
began long before the Nintendo 64 was fully designed.
Rather than have a traditional development kit, the team had an emulator, running on
a very large (and very expensive) computer called an SGI Onyx.
Goddard said:
“It started way before there was any hardware, it started on these Onyx emulators, the old
SGI Onyx.
They had an N64 emulator, the first thing we got from SGI.
It was an emulation of the API, not the hardware.”
Work on the game wasn’t like most titles.
First and foremost, overseer Shigeru Miyamoto wanted to make sure that Mario looked like
Mario; that his animation looked good and felt like an extension of the series’ previous
2D games.
Goddard said:
“The animation was quite central to what he was doing.
A lot of the animation was actually in there before any of the game.
The Mario that Miyamoto had running around basically looked as he did in the final version.”
As this was one of the first major projects that the team had worked on in a 3D space,
they focused heavily on getting character movement and camera control just right.
This was made more difficult because, at the time, there wasn’t a finished Nintendo 64
controller to use to test the game.
While work initially started with a keyboard and mouse, the developers quickly moved on
to testing the game using a controller – but not a Nintendo controller.
Said Goddard:
“We had no controllers for six months, we had a simple serial port on the back of the
emulator boards.
The entire game was done with these Indy emulator boards, hardware boards basically emulating
the N64.
These serial ports – we plugged modified Sega controllers in – most of us were using
these modified Sega joypads.”
Goddard doesn’t give a reason for using Sega controllers instead of Nintendo ones,
but this could well be because of the differences between how the two companies had approach
directional movement up to this point.
Nintendo had initially popularised a cross-shaped D-pad on their controllers years ago as a
compact answer to arcade-style joysticks.
Because Nintendo held a patent on these, other companies had to get inventive when using
a similar control system.
Sega’s answer is sometimes known as the D-button.
It’s a single flat pad which allows for eight directions of input rather than just
the four offered by Nintendo controllers.
The player can easily roll their thumb from one direction of movement to another.
This slight difference became increasingly useful as games became more complex – for
example, it’s perfect for rolling Sonic the Hedgehog down slopes.
It was also a far better fit for testing a 3D game like Mario 64 than a Super Nintendo
controller.
As time went on, Goddard says, his team were provided with a steady stream of N64 controllers
to test out on Super Mario 64.
He said:
“We had various prototypes – there were lots of them, probably at least 100 prototypes,
mostly based around the central stick, how that moved, how well it moved, what shape
the thing around it should be.”
Mario 64 was the perfect game to test out these prototypes.
The existing work that had been done testing the game on Sega game pads then informed the
feel of the final N64 controller.
Said Goddard:
“It wasn’t so much that [the] controller dictated Mario 64…probably more the other
way around.”
So if you enjoy the way Super Mario 64 controls, and, by extension, you enjoy playing on pretty
much any modern games controller, by all means thank Nintendo for their innovation.
But also thank Sega, without whom this experimentation wouldn’t have been possible.
The moral of the story is that, as fun as friendly rivalries might be, when we all work
together, sharing our talents and insights, we can make things better for everyone.