Super Mario 64marks a monumental moment in the history of gaming, both as a whole and especially in the speedrunning community. Though by today’s standards the game is clearly dated, there is still a huge amount of love for it, including anunofficialSuper Mario 64PC port.
Recently, a ton of old Nintendo 64-era data leaked online in a phenomenon which is being referred to as the Gigaleak. Among the many impressive finds in this goldmine of information is a document which claims thatSuper Mario 64took only 622 days to develop from start to finish. This comes out to about three and a half months short of two years.
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The Gigaleak has done a lot of great things for the Nintendo community, including providing fans with theuncompressed voice files fromStar Fox 64, but finds like this really help to bring greater appreciation for the hard work that Nintendo put into its projects back then.
Though it may seem like a lot, in the context of today’s world, 622 days is nothing in terms of video game development time.Final Fantasy 15was infamously in development for ten years, and other triple A games take upwards of five years or more to release, so a high profile game with a two year turn around is almost unheard of at this point. This wouldn’t be so amazing if it weren’t for the fact thatSuper Mario 64effectively defined a genre and has continued to still be influential 24 years after it released.
TheGigaleak revealed a lot aboutSuper Mario 64, but it should be said that the document above refers specifically to development time, andSuper Mario 64’s game director, Shigeru Miyamoto, that the concept for a 3D Mario game started about a year before this. Even overestimating, though, it seems like from concept to final product the game was created in at most three years time; still an impressive achievement. The tweet above shows that the game began development on September 7th, 1994, and was finished by May 20th, 1996.
In general, fans are thrilled to learn this new information. Many are comparing their own birthdays to when development on the game was finished, with many discovering thatSuper Mario 64is the exact same age as they are. Others are simply thrilled to get more of an inside look at the development process of such a beloved gem, showing that gamers may be more interested in thebehind the scenes parts of a gamethan developers think.
Super Mario 64is available now on Nintendo 64, PC, Wii, and Wii U.
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