Super Mario 64 settles how a player should move through 3D

What happened

Moving a character through three-dimensional space had been an unsolved control problem. Digital pads gave eight directions and nothing in between, and fixed cameras hid whatever the designer had failed to anticipate. Nintendo put an analog stick at the center of its controller, so pressure translated into speed and direction continuously, then handed the camera to a character who trailed Mario around and could be swung with a second set of buttons. Neither idea was obvious beforehand. Both became requirements almost immediately afterward.

The game built its levels as playgrounds rather than corridors, with several objectives in each and no fixed order for tackling them, and it spent its opening minutes teaching a vocabulary of jumps that everything later assumed. Reviewers at the time treated it mainly as a demonstration of what the hardware could do. In retrospect the hardware matters far less than the grammar it established, which subsequent designers borrowed with very little modification for the better part of a decade.

Nintendo's decision to stay with cartridges cut both ways. Loading was nearly instantaneous and the medium resisted copying, but capacity was small and manufacturing was expensive and slow compared with pressing discs. Publishers planning long games with recorded music and video went to Sony instead, and the console's library stayed thinner than its competitor's. The machine sold well and produced a run of respected first-party games, yet the storage decision is generally treated as the reason it finished second.

The world at the time

Polygonal graphics had already arrived in arcades and on the disc-based consoles from Sony and Sega, but the games using them were mostly racers and fighters, forms in which movement is tightly constrained. Nobody had yet shown that a character could run, climb and jump around an open space without the player fighting the camera the entire time.

What it changed

Analog sticks became standard on every console controller within about a year. The choice of cartridges pushed several major Japanese publishers toward the PlayStation, a shift that shaped the rest of the generation. Nintendo's design work here fed directly into the three-dimensional adventure it released two years later, and the four controller ports built into the machine made living-room multiplayer a defining feature of the system.