Mario 64 Is Deeply Unsettling

"When the ground rises to the surface, the human face decomposes in this mirror in which both determinations and the indeterminate combine in a single determination which 'makes' the difference."

I was watching a video today of a modded Super Mario 64, but it was not immediately clear to me I was watching a modded game. The video began typically enough with Mario being made to jump and crouch in bizarre ways that trigger game-warping behavior. A cacophony of Italianinisms gives way to a sudden explosion of physicality from Mario, an impossible somersault, a noclip without T-pose. In the particular video that I watched, Mario opened a mysterious grey door in the starting area that led down a grey tunnel deep under the map. I watched with dread, and later learned that it was some kind of reference to another videogame (NieR:Automata’s hidden church door).

There is a long history of locating game-breaking exploits in Mario 64 that let you bypass areas, teleport around, climb up infinite staircases, and generally do things you weren’t ostensibly meant to do (though a Deleuzean friend of mine, Billy Dean Goehring, does insist that there is no determining instance of a right way to play a game). I am a fan of gamebreaking exploits: they open up games in exciting ways, they reveal new paradigms of the game, and otherwise encourage the partaking of a joy of play beyond intention. I think it is pretty cool that Mario 64 has such a long tradition of being messed with, and I yet find it unsettling.

I got to play Mario 64 for two weeks when it released, but this ended when my dad decided the Playstation was the more economic system. He unceremoniously sold our N64 and bought us a Playstation. (Soon after, my mom met a grocery store cashier who offered to install a chip in my Playstation and sell us burned copies of videogames for $10 each, which is how I ended up playing Metal Gear Solid). In the couple of weeks I had the game, I accumulated a host of horrifying experiences I have never forgotten.

The music that played as you ran up the endless staircase. The ambience of the first floor inside the castle. The echoes of Bowser’s laugh upon your death. Mario’s scream when he fell too far. The tortured grin of Chain Chomps portending a masticated death. The gigantic eel that swam smoothly in the watery ether that Mario experienced as a suffocating sludge; a drowning death to a satanic symphony to an audience of an abyssal water snake.

I began writing this hoping to understand why Mario 64 fills me with dread to this day, now twenty six years after its release. Perhaps its the game I have reencountered most often, and perhaps other games from that era also implanted themselves in my unconscious in menacing ways. Perhaps it lodged itself in me by way of its audacious presentation as the first three-dimensional game I encountered. For the first time, I was playing a game with depth, and this game used that depth to generate an infinite staircase I could never climb such that the TV opened up in front of me as an endless hole whose bottom I could never fathom. Years later, when I would learn of a booty-hopping glitch that let you get “up” the staircase, how else could it appear to me but as violation of a taboo deeper than any other, Freud and Lévi-Strauss be damned.