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.

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.

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)

Blatant historical revisionism.

Millenials were cooking up horrifically bad videogame creepypasta before any zoomer ever touched a keyboard.

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.

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.

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.

I am a millenial, and mining out huge caves in the darkness of Minecraft gave existential terror.

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?

As a gen z-er.. can't say I ever felt like mario64 was liminal or heard it describes that way lol

Nah all n64 games are spooky

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV_ZN-8uy4w&t=0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SybPxb_DjZ4&t=0

Honestly I felt the same when the game came out.

What even is a liminal space? Seriously, I looked up the definition and still don’t know.

B3313 comes to mind when you want liminal space vibes. It literally feels like dreams a ROM-hacker would have. I've had similar dreams when I was ROM-Hacking Luigi's Mansion.

Anyway, I am as old as Mario 64 and I do agree on the spook vibes. Mainly the graphics at that era have this horrifying vibe to them. Mainly Super Mario RPG comes to mind for horrifying graphics.

My friends all had SM64, but for some reason I never actually played it until it came out on the Switch. I can get why people like it nostalgically, but it plays awfully. The camera is basically impossible to control so you spend most of the game guessing what's going on around you

I thought this was about gen Z’s obsession with backrooms/horror games at first lmao

Who seriously thinks SM64 is creepy?

I grew up with the Sega Genesis, PS1 and then PS2. The PS1 side had games that were more lively, less lonely than SM64. Compare the game to something like even the first Spyro the Dragon, and SM64 immediately feels empty. Add to that the overtly creepy level Big Boo's Mansion, or the less creepy Hazy Maze Cave, or the surreal Wet Dry Town with the creepy cave music, the infinite stairs at the top of the castle, rooms that are huge but sport almost nothing except paintings, only a single big clock, a population of only one or two servants to the princess, levels like Lethal Lava Land which is just otherwise inhabitable platforms on top of a lava ocean - the game ends up feeling creepy whether the ~~programmers~~ lawyers at Ninten intended or not. How about the room with the Tiny Big Island paintings, one side is huge while the other side's wall is within arm's reach? Also Mario is always being recorded by the Lakitu cameraman, and you're watching him through that lens.

Besides, creepypastas were all the rage during the 2010s, and the 3D Mario had just enough ingredients to make them work - the ultimate culmination of all this being the B31133 romhack. (Correct me if I got the numbers wrong).

I've never seen zoomers get scared of this game

Getting old is weird.

Boomer ass post