Super Mario turns 64 Today

Thirty years of 3D games, all tracing back to one castle.

Thirty years ago today, Super Mario 64 didn't just launch a new game, it launched a new era. When Nintendo released the N64 in 1996, the world got its first real look at what three-dimensional gaming could be.

The influence of Super Mario 64 is almost impossible to overstate. It established the camera and control systems that virtually every 3D action game after it would borrow from. It introduced the concept of a hub world connecting individual levels — a structure that Banjo-Kazooie, Spyro, Jak and Daxter, and countless others built entire franchises on.

Game designers in the late '90s weren't just inspired by Mario 64, they were reverse engineering it, trying to figure out how Nintendo made movement that fluid, that responsive, that fun.

Three decades later, the game holds up in ways that still surprise people. Load it up today and the joy is immediate, that first jump, that first triple jump, the way Mario flips and spins through the air with a weight that still feels perfect. Super Mario 64 didn't just define a console generation. It defined what 3D gaming was supposed to feel like, and the industry has been chasing that standard ever since. Happy 30th to the greatest 3D platformer ever made.