The first time I saw images of SM64... was in a videogame magazine in the mid-1996. I have NO words to explain what I felt:
I could not believe what I was seeing. I really couldn't.
I was a pre-teen child, and I've just seen Toy Story in the theaters just... very very few months ago, because that movie appeared in Europe in March 1996 (I searched internet to be correct about the date), which was just a HUGE 3D animation event.
So... just few months later, you had in your hands... images of a game, that, basically seemed like a fever dream. I mean, I can, for example, remember how the "first person" images (which, in fact shows Mario's head and shoulders just next to the camera) were just SO real, so insaaaaane... Just that detail. It was like a Toy Story movie... in a game form. Just few months later!!
You cannot understand, if you did not lived that era, what THAT supposed for a child who used to like Videogames by then, and understood what 3D textured games were, and how much it costed to produce and how new that technology was in domestic machines (I was a fan of Virtua Racing or Virtua Foghter games, for example, and I'd already seen and played some early 3D games in PC).
That SM64 was a fuc****g real 3D world, using a "REAL Mario", which, indeed, SEEMED like MARIO (not a "monster polygonal puppet" trying to be Mario): that little 2D sprite you were familiar to see in NES and SNES, IN GLORIOUS 3D. Not a dumb cartoon from the weekends.
Then, around the end of the year, I saw the first video of the game in motion, in a VHS tape from another magazine. And it was just... IN-CREDIBLE.
I think THAT is the MOST IMPRESSIVE videogame real action I've EVER SEEN EVER. EVER.
That gameplay... was fluid as hell, and was like to see the future 10... 15, maybe 20 years ahead.
By then, I was a huge fan of Saturn games (Sega Rally, Daytona, Panzer Dragoon, Virtua Fighter 1, Remix and 2, Virtua Cop, Victory Goal, Clockwork Knight... I wanted every one of them) but after that video... I waited a FULL year, to get a N64 with Mario 64 (because, as always, Europe was left as the last marked, and N64 would not appear in PAL markets until March 1997... so forget to get the new console until Xmas 1997. That was, btw, a good reason N64 did not sold BETTER in Europe: That lost Xmas season. Also... the massive piracy in PSX there, but... ok).
The game was so fucking awesome, even in late 1997 or 1998 it was a masterpiece. I always though many PSX fans never understood how many of their "big" action 3D games were just crap, not because its graphics (some of them used a lot of nice prerredered backgrounds), but because never played something like SM64 and never got those AMAZING controls in its games.
The only similar thing I saw in a PSX during those years, to impress me at something barely barely similar levels, were FFVII (which was a BEAUTIFUL GAME, with great Characters and music), Metal Gear Solid, which I consider the BEST game in that console, and maybe Driver and its sequel Driver 2. Gran Turismo 1 and 2 were beautiful, but boring as hell to me.
But SM64? The FREEDOM you had was unexplainable. Remember, the previous generation was the 16 Bits, which was basically "the 8Bits" with better 2D graphics, more fast and with better sound.
Even the camera controls you get in SM64 are EXCELLENT (almost a perfect camera for a 3D game from 1996, and probably even better than some cameras in actual games). And I know many many people trashtalked about it almost since its launch (none of them real players of the game). The camera only shows real gameplay problems in a VERY VERY closed spaces with lots of obstacles, and that is basically "the inside of the igloo" in the second snow world (Snowman's Land), which is a VERY little part of that world. Which by the way, is the only original part I can remember Nintendo totally suppressed (and changed for another one) in Super Mario 64 DS, that expanded remake, released 8 years later.
Probably one of the MOST important games in History
sm64coopdx.com
