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To get one of the ‘secret’ castle stars in Super Mario 64, you need to catch a yellow rabbit. It’s there, unexpectedly, when Mario unlocks a door in the basement of Peach’s castle, hopping to and fro. There’s no indication of its purpose, or that you’ll be rewarded for capturing it; no precedent for Mario stumbling upon a rabbit in any of his games, no hint they even existed in his universe. You just try to catch it because, in this warped, consistently inconsistent, logically illogical, so-surreal-it’s-real universe, it seems like the thing to do. And because it’s fun.
It’s a throwaway moment, but it also says a lot about this era-defining game.
Super Mario 64 was a voyage of discovery for everyone: Shigeru Miyamoto, his design team, EAD’s coders, and last but definitely not least, us. It’s often said that its achievement was transposing Mario’s world into 3D but, with the exception of the vertiginous Bowser stages, it did nothing of the sort. It made an entirely new world for him, and around him. If Ocarina Of Time was a translation, Mario 64 was a whole new language.
And it didn’t stop at defining the exploration of 3D space: it broke every conceivable boundary, and this coming from the mind that had previously let the 2D Mario run outside the edge of the screen. Who says a level needs to have a start and an end? Why can’t it be an open space? Who says it needs to be the same every time you go in it? Who says you should do what the game says you’re supposed to be doing? Why should levels be connected together in a string – can’t they grow organically out of a hub? If so, why should the game stop in the hub? Does everything in the levels really need to have a point, anyway? And let’s face it, does a level even need to be a space at all? Couldn’t it be – say – a rabbit?