Welcome back to a new video everybody! Do you think Super Mario 64 is unsettling? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks to everyone for the support, it means a lot!
Growing up it has become creepy in different ways, as a kid i sucked at the game but had lots of fun just hanging outside the castle, however when the boo's start appearing when you collect 15 stars, the fears begin, the boo mansion, hazy mazy cave, shifting lava land even, all these worlds locked in the basement were so creepy lol, i used to abou rolly roger bay at all costs, i hated that eel But now i can relate to other people when it comes to the "emptiness" of this game, things feel desolate, fake and even distorted, it's such a bizarre game but i love it
I never noticed it but all of the levels (even bob omb battlefield) felt kinda lonely when played. Mario probably felt kinda put on his own & was probably worried about the others like Luigi or other characters.
@@PressStartToContinueYT i remember playing super mario 64 on my n64 and i went to hazy maze cave and then my parents are asleep also my brother. Next i notice that my parents turn off the lights in my house while i have my room light on. After that i felt scared and i quickly turn off the game and go to sleep. I remember the other time that i was in hazy maze cave and i was going where dorry is at and some reason in the far distance of the game was pitch black and i saw dorry's face and i got scared from so i quickly turn off the game and play another n64 game.
The silence at the start is actually brilliant. It was the first time for many people to experience 3D gaming. The silence made the experience stand out more and made the player focus on the movement.
This is very interesting to me, because I’ve been playing this game literally since I could hold a controller. It’s like a big security blanket to me, playing it feels so comfy and warm and safe. The idea that it could be creepy in any way is honestly hard to comprehend. Whenever I boot up this game I feel like I’ve come home, no matter where I am.
i think the guy was just being dramatic for the sake of his thesis (which still doesn't make it work) everything he brought up in the video has for one already been touched on in other videos and memed into oblivion, but it's also stuff that's just not that scary. like do people really find anything in mario 64 terrifying? you could argue that some things could be seen as unnerving to like maybe a child and perhaps that does have some validity but this video says literally nothing new.
Exactly, the only thing anyone seems to be right about it is wet dry world, its not really creepy but it is kinda odd. He s gotta be lying saying stuff like the bowser face after you die is scary.
EELS... If you want to hear a song which really shows why EELS are scary, search for a video named Eels that's uploaded by mastershake1000 Well the secondary part of the video ain't that important, but the first song. Eels Eels Eels Eels Eels Eels Eels up inside you, finding an entrance where they can, eels up inside you, finding an entrance where they can. Boring through your tummy, through your mind, through your anus. EELS! EELS! That song is stuck in my head every time I hear the word Eel.
Old consoles definitely make things a lot more creepy which is why when Flowey, turns all hyper realistic when he goes into Omega Flowey, it’s just jarring because it’s limitations you thought where in place, but it’s even worse when things are scary in the limitations of that game. Though i must say that Mario 64 box art is creepy uncanny valley.
64 was such a great artistic limbo for creators. You either sunk with making excuses for "better hardware", or you worked with what you had to your advantage to create awesome pieces of work ( ua-cam.com/video/15E98H-9gu0/v-deo.html )
It's weirder when you consider other games of the N64 era though. Ocarina of Time and Paper Mario were my childhood N64 games, but they never unnerved me (except for when they wanted to, of course).
Say, this is gonna sound really weird, but hear me out- the castle mirrors the anatomy of princess Peach herself. Also the blue penguins reappear as birds in Odyssey and they're tiny. Mario isn't exactly Mario, he's as Peach banishing Bowser from being an hypnotic influence over her mind, and Peach is certainly in an unconscious yet not dead limbo. But there's no way to explain these things within the game without showing blood, there's a lot of sparkle and glitter that distracts people from thinking. Oh well
As a kid, I deadass believed that Bowser just murdered all the toads in the castle and I thought the ghostly apparitions of the toads you approach were the ghosts helping you save the princess from their fate.
@@kiriu_idk Very very true. Like the cave with that sign the captain telling you to stay out. Falling rock pillars. Like pirates are secretly watching you or something. At least the eel made me feel not alone
@@kiriu_idk I actually always loved the eel for some reason it made me feel so *not alone* in the level 😅 I guess that level felt so lonely because he had like no enemies in it! I loved playing the final level chasing the eel around.
Question for you: if you've played Mario 64 DS, did you ever feel creeped out, because looking back on it, there were a bunch of creepy things that were even exclusive to this game. A lot of what you said in this video still applies, but version this game also had things like the entirely white room behind the mirror, the lifeless character paintings, and even some of the new levels such as the Goomboss area felt oddly empty lifeless. I think the improved graphics and additional playable characters did a lot to make the game feel less creepy, but there are still a whole bunch of things that add to the weird, dreamlike feeling
@@PressStartToContinueYT Mario: If none of that-a was real, how can I be sure anything is-a real? Is not-a possible, neigh, probable, that my entire existence is the product of my or someone else's imagination?
@@parker-boy98 Luigi: Hypocrite that-a you are, big bro, for you trust the imagination of-a yourself or another to tell you it is all one's imagination. Will-a you fight? Or will-a you get a game over like a Goomba?
The one that really got me asking questions is wet wet dry world on how the background is a flooded island and I’m wondering how the town got flooded and what town that is and Is it a real tow that actually got sunken in real life
@Jack and Bt Sandwich I don't remember where I had seen it at this point because it's been awhile, but I know someone had matched the in game textures with the full size images somehow. I saw most of them on a website that showed the original images that were used, I'm wanting to say the original images were left in the game files but I'm not certain.
Maybe this was just me, but as a kid, I always noticed the castle didn't have any of the normal things you'd find in a living space. So like, no kitchen, no bedroom for Peach, etc (which Paper Mario did have which I think is interesting). Maybe that could also be a subconscious reason the castle feels unnerving sometimes, since you just can't find any of the rooms you'd associate with a place people actually live in?
I'm glad I'm not the only kid who noticed that! I was the sort of kid who liked to imagine how the characters lived in their world when I wasn't there, but Peach's castle always felt so weird to me because (like you said) I couldn't imagine anyone actually living there, or how anything in the castle actually worked. It was designed as bizarrely as the mansion in the first Resident Evil game.
It reminded me of a playground or my kindergarten. I never thought of the bathroom or kitchen because those are private spaces where kids shouldn't be playing, so I remember thinking "It makes sense!". This game reminded me of how my imagination soared when I was forced to wait for my mom on a wait room or when I escaped a grown up social situation to play alone or just explore the place I was. I even used to imagine repetitive patterns like avoiding stepping on black tiles, or the classic "the floor is lava". All of this is in this game, and that makes it awesome to me.
I was never really afraid of this game, but the "empty" feeling of the castle hub made me feel unnerved. The only thing I really hated was the Boss Bass/Bubba in Tiny-Huge Island. I've always hated underwater enemies in games, especially when they ate me. The skull and crossbones in the secret slide in Tall, Tall Mountain bugged me, too.
I used to be afraid of the giant eel in Jolly Roger bay. It's size, the way it moved in the water and the wide jaw full of jagged teeth. I couldn't bring myself to take on the objective of getting it to come out of its nesting hole so Mario can retrieve the star from the tail. Later on I realized that the creature follows a set course and doesn't just swim freely about the water, which gave some reassurance that it isn't programmed to target you. Still a creepy encounter for anyone playing the game for the first time.
Yeah bro as a kid I only remember feelings of joy playing SM64. Maybe some fear from the lava and sand levels, and the Bowser cackle, but surely that's normal regardless.
I literally made my kids shut this off. This is flat earth style thinking. I’m sure it’s just in good fun but unless you are an adult thinking back there’s no reason to sit here and let this guy insist one of the brightest, most loved, colorful, cheerful games on the N64 is “terrifying and can bring on sudden deep feelings of loneliness”. What a heap of bologna.
It makes no sense. Its not creepy, terrifying or dreadful at all. People are weird. But then again they gotta make vids for youtube so they just go on about utter nonsense. Then in the comments if course you’ll find the experts that have a masters degree in whatever the video is about.
You know a game is a classic when even if it's overtly really positive and colourful, there's this very subtle, distant macabre or melancholy quality to it. Makes it way more emotionally complex and life-like without ever needing to obviously make it known. All the legendary old games had it. That element of genuine risk or danger.
It's the uncanny valley effect of that first jump into 3D. It's the "Oh, this is _real_ now"... except the emptiness shows you subconsciously that it isn't. Even a kid playing Super Mario World doesn't look at it and feel like it's a real place they could actually reach out and touch, or somewhere they could explore if they could just teleport through the screen. But with a control stick, and the ability to move _forward_ towards anything you can see and jump to, that illusion of "reality" is created. The push-pull of "is this real" on your subconscious begins.
As much as I loved this game as a kid, I could never pinpoint why it made me feel sort of sad. This hits the nail on the head. It was Mario, alone, with creepy villains sparsely spread out in barren levels with subdued music and the sense of Bowser watching every move.
Me many years ago: "The painting of the evil fire isn't scary.... It's just a flame. It's a childish image." Me now: "OH, dayum! That's Satan and more! Because of the reasons I am including in my pending video 'Mario is of the devil' "
Same. It has this subtle vibe of surreal emptiness that lingers no matter what area of the game you are in. Sunshine and Galaxy doesn't feel anything like 64. Those games feel warmer. There are residents to talk to. 64 just makes me feel paranoid. And what makes it even scarier to me is the game isn't even trying to do it. It just is all these things by nature.
Honestly every time I played SM64 I always got that disconnected feeling. I remember having fever dreams when I was younger about levels that never existed but seemed so real
i had a reoccuring dream for probably 10 years straight that i would get every few months. it was the level outside after you drain the water. i would just slide endlessly down that gray slope with little platforms and there was always a weird black and white static look and sound like a tv that lost its signal. oddly this dream was connected to a taste. the taste when you are really congested or you choke on some water when swimming. any of these things could trigger the dream and to this day 20+ years later that taste still reminds me of it. i could never grab stsy on a ledge. id always hold on for a second then a faceless person would walk over and peel my fingers off the ledge. id wake up after about 50 platform attempts plunging into the blackness below
I've had a period when I'd get some relatively uncomfortable dreams around it as well, with alternative versions of levels or even brand new ones. The most mysterious is that although I liked watching content related to this game, this isn't one from my childhood. I got to play the DS version, yet never had a dream of it. Only the original 64 version
I never thought the "it's just not the same" feeling applied only to Mario 64. I got that feeling playing any copy of a game that wasn't mine. Because you know it's not yours, it doesn't feel the same. You played the game your way, you got to know it your way, so when you play a different copy, that personal connection isn't there. The copy isn't personalized, but the experience is. But even so, this "creepypasta" is one of my favorites.
I agree with this. I think as more and more games started getting saveable progress, playing someone else's copy, and therefore their save, would definitely be a different experience. Like a copy of SMB1 doesn't matter, you pick up any copy of that game and just play it from the beginning like always. But a game like Mario 64, you play someone's copy and god only knows what they're up to, what stars they got that maybe you didn't and vice-versa.
I've played the game countless hours since the 90s and it never really creeped me out. The eel, the piano, and the Bowser laugh were the only things that scared me as a child.
The most unsettling thing for me now is the room with the painting for Tiny-Huge Island. Something about how detailed the goombas are and the size of the painting gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Lol when I see that painting I think of small goomba and his dad lol. Dad: Did you hear Koopa the Quick had his toe fall off? Son: what noo Dad: He called a toe truck to fix it. Son: awwww daaaad! you're the funniest! :D
Oh my lord, 11 year old me, was not a fan of the Mad Piano. I didn't get 120 Stars in the game until years later because I didn't want to deal with it, and even then Big Boo's Haunt was the last place I tackled with strategy guide in tow. Nintendo must have realized what they did with the piano as it hasn't returned outside of a Mario Party 2 cameo as far as I'm aware. A more recent thing I found out about that's creepy to me, is how before beating Bob-Omb Battlefield for the first time, there is a gutter at the bottom of the mountain where 2 big cannonballs are rolling around, but after you beat King Bob-Omb, when you go back to Bob-Omb Battlefield for the rest of the stars, that same gutter now has 3 big cannonballs rolling around. Am I to infer that Mario killed King Bom-Omb, and now his lifeless corpse is rolling around at the bottom of the mountain? WTF Nintendo.
The scariest thing for was just when you first walk into Peach’s castle and the suspenseful music and Bowser starts laughing. Other than that nothing scared me.
I never felt like mario 64 was scary, i always focused on the gorgeus music in each level, amazing levels, and fun characters. I always tought of it as an fun platformer.
What you said about being inside the castle being familiar yet unnerving reminds me of a reoccurring dream/nightmare I have. I’m at home alone most of the time, it usually starts out familiar until I open a door or turn a corner that leads to a hall, stairways, or rooms I have never seen before or if I have, they are pulled from other places I have been before. Nothing bad typically happens, but it’s still very unusual being somewhere familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
I've had dreams like that all my life. But the most reoccuring ones I get are being in a dark basement, playing an unfamiliar version of doom 2 where everything is unnaturally more terrifying. The line between game and reality gets blurred, and I'm either living in it, or I get this feeling that a Revenant is about to come out of the monitor. And every time I think "shit, it's actually real this time". Sounds are legit terrifying and I can replay them for a long time in my head after I've woken up. I am 36 now, and played the shit out of that game back when it was new. Clearly enough to incur lasting damage.
For the same reasons you mention how it can be creepy, I found it wondrous, mysterious, and peaceful. But certainly ethereal. A dreamlike place. Its bathic atmosphere implies something meaningful, but any such meaning is ambiguous and unknown. Ethereal, but not scary to me. It was a quiet place filled with deep places and mysterious things, away from the clutter of life.
That's a great comment! I totally agree with you about the dreamlike appealing that this game has and I see 2 reasons for it: 1- The Liminal Space aesthetic that this game has 2- The weirdness and lack of logic and consistance thar everything seems to have. There's no clear objective, no real allies or friends, even the themes are strange, you enter through paintings to fantastical and mysterious worlds that sometimes makes you wonder about it (Wet Dry World and its abandoned underwater city) but you never get an answear.
If it’s quiet and away from the clutter of life, it’s fine but it’s also empty, and as you said, mysterious. I’m quiet but I’d always like to have people around me because being alone is just surreal. It gives off the illusion of nothingness.
I recently replayed Mario 64 for the first time in many many years. I honestly just don’t find it creepy. At no point in my entire play through did I feel even remotely creeped out. I find the over world very comforting. The silence and the birds chirping outside, followed by the music inside, it’s very calming and serene. Nothing creepy in the slightest to me.
Honestly, same! It never felt empty to me either. Granted, most of my time playing it was in a loud daycare, but even when I played alone, the birds singing and waterfall flowing were a pleasant soundscape, then the warm inviting music of the castle always felt so. Wet-dry world in my mind was mostly invaded by the elevator hurry thing and the stupid catapult mice and the chuck ya.
Mario 64 gives me the same vibes as when I search for "liminal spaces" on the internet. Something seems kinda off yet fascinating. Moreover, no matter how much I love Odyssey or Galaxy, Mario 64 will always have a special place in my memories, a truly nostalgic and charming game.
Even the castle theme "inside the castle walls" gives me an empty, sad feeling of isolation. I always thought I was just overthinking it as a kid but 64 really is an almost empty-feeling game. Good video.
While walking around the castle searching for levels or hidden stars I never really thought about how creepy the castle theme is. I think the first time I noticed that was when I had to go to the toilet in the middle of the night. Hearing the faint sound of the castle theme coming from my room while walking back to it without any lights on made me feel very uncomfortable. When I finally came back to my room the feeling didn't go away. Instead I became very conscious about the castle theme and how empty the castle is. Entering any level made me feel a little better with the exception of Wet-Dry World.
Yeah the game suffers a bit of the “uncanny valley” syndrome in some ways, Banjo-Kazooie and Rareware games in general always had a much more organic, lively feel to them that made them feel less lonely
The only thing that ever gave me slight chills was the looping steps song everything else seems normal to me… (Also how do y’all get to feel these emotions?)
Funny enough, I think a lot of the things you described as creepy are the things that makes this my favorite Mario game. I love the dreamlike atmosphere, the mystery, I think most of the weird faces are cute and charming (I always felt bad for the Whomp’s because they had bandaids on their backs and felt bad for hurting them). I find liminal spaces weirdly calming, and the strange disconnectedness of this entry made it more interesting for me to explore compared to Galaxy and Oddyssey. I think I especially liked the water staged despite the anxiety I’d get from Mario’s health ticking down because I’ve always liked more slow-paced games. The only things I really remember being afraid of were: the evil piano, the eel in that one water level, the time limit for being underwater, that electric ball that flies around you as you go up a pole, dying, running out of air underwater, and the platforming areas you’d go through before fighting Bowser. Everything else was a delight even though I was garbage at the game, the feeling of mystery and discovery drawing me in. I was terrified of any ‘real’ horror game/movie, but Mario 64 filled me with nothing but fascination. (As a Sidenote, even though I’m still pretty pathetic when it comes to ‘real’ horror, I loved basically every RPGmaker horror game I played during its boom and find things other people find creepy like vintage porcelain dolls pretty and cute. So, y’know, maybe its just me lol.)
The thing that always made me feel uncomfortable while playing Super Mario 64 was the suffocating, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. While you have a lot of platforms and areas to explore, the stages feel like they are very limited, like they're inside a small box and you're trying your best to escape it. I wouldn't say I'm claustrophobic, but I hate the feeling when I have to be in a tight space. This game made me feel this way. It was one of my favourite games as a kid, but it made feel physically and mentally ill when I played it for long periods of time. It still does to this day and I'm 27. It's a really weird and uncomfortable feeling that it's really hard to describe.
I think this game might be why I have casadastraphobia (fear of falling upwards into the sky, its a real phobia, look it up) due to the sky boxes being infinite sky textures without any other detail, whenever Mario fell off any floating surface and there was nothing to land on gave me so much discomfort, it felt like he was going to fall forever. Even as a child I vividly remember that lying on the grass to see clouds made me feel like I was going to be pulled by the sky off the ground. To this day, this discomfort has not ceased.
@@snowflakeowl1762 That's pretty creepy, and i actually thought about this when i was a kid, like, just randomly being thrown into the sky without something to land at a high speed, it's very frighting actually. But at least there's no way that could happen to you in real life, interesting nonetheless.
@@snowflakeowl1762 I have dreams in which it is impossible to stay on the ground and it is a desperate fight to find things to stay anchored to the earth. Seemingly relates to this game as well
I found so many glitches on tony hawks underground to get out of the map because so many games make me feel as if it's trying to keep me inside the map. But i wasn't scared. I just did my best to escape.
Glover always gave me the impression that everyone seemed to get from SM64. Especially the hub area in the beginning of the game. Still an N64 game weirdly enough. I guess the outdated tech really does contribute a lot to the uncanny feeling.
Glover's levels were nightmare fuel for me as a kid, the claustrophobic tutorial cave, the devastated hub world, the never ending pits in the sky level... Then there's Rocket: Robot on Wheels, oh boy, that game is something else, the first world (a circus world) has these creepy clowns that mimic your moves and your abilities, i just can't explain why they're so terrifying to me, you feel like they're gonna kill you in an instant lol The N64 was an awesome console, but a creepy one at that
Oh god, yeah. Glover was some super creepy shit, with its depressing, isolated world and dreamlike levels which were literally all floating above an abyss or endless sky. The overworld slowly being restored didn’t alleviate those vibes either, as it was still devoid of NPCs or evidence of outside civilization. It just felt haunted, even if I knew that wasn’t the intent. Eventually, playing Glover gave me nightmares, and I had to stop playing lmaooo What a time to be a kid.
Glover was *weird.* To this day I have no idea why the initial hub area was full of Silent Hill fog and deformed geometry. As a child, I was convinced that something bad was going to happen if I stayed in the overworld for too long, so I was always too afraid to explore it.
I found the locked doors in the castle to be scary when I was a kid, because they would make the scary bowser noise. I would try to stay as far away from them as possible until I got the key.
Glad that you mentioned the endless falling being weird. Ever had an adrenaline rush from falling in a videogame? Also the graphics are a huge point to me. GTA San Andreas was also fairly spooky to me, due to the render distance, fog and unclear textures.
Playing resident evil 7 on the ps vr. There is a stage near the end and you are on a ship it think. and you jump down an elevator shaft. i could feel my stomach do the woooaaaaah thing on that. Crazy how your brain makes stuff seem more real. Skyrim vr, if i play standing up and the character is running and stops. My body actually does tip forward a bit. Doesnt do it if im sitting down.
@@StevedaveTodd Ah yes, artificial movement in VR can be wild. I think that's in part what I like about Boneworks. It's a great VR shooter, too. It lets you freely run, climb, jump, grab enemies even. It has a pretty high terminal velocity, jumping from high places and sticking the landing feels wild!
The game is a deep fever dream. I think Mario has eaten so many Mushrooms that he no longer exists in reality so instead he exists in a trippy, liminal and warped reality where everything is smiling even the stuff that wants to hurt you.
Yeah it’s one of those things where in retrospect I can understand how someone COULD feel that way but neither I nor none of my siblings were scared of it as kids
Fr I really did try to suspend disbelieve for this one but this guy kept saying stuff like "Dont you find it creepy how outside was quiet?" Like dude, not really lmaooo
I've played 64 and 64 ds, and I feel like the ds version is the more unsettling of the two. Maybe it was the fact that it was a game that I could, and did, play through the night in bed. The Bowser silhouette when you die seems more sinister, and for a while I was convinced that the face would look creepier the more lives you lost. Big Boo's Haunt is downright creepy, especially the level where you unlock Luigi. I didnt want to go through the door where King Boos laugh was the loudest. Why would I go closer toward something that scared the pants off me? The fact that Bowser was able to capture Mario, Luigi, and Wario on top of Peach. Where does the fourth door in the rec room go? Why does the game pointedly tell me that I cant hear anything behind it, instead of being noninteractable or heck, not even being there in the first place? All in all, 64 has its unsettling moments, but 64 ds outright terrified me at times.
yeah I've never thought about the DS version being creepier, but you've made some good points. That and the grainier appearance of the DS adds into that too!
@@PressStartToContinueYT By the way, I really liked the sub topic of the enemy textures. I really like to compare Whomps Fortress and Throwback Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy 2, which is just a recreation of WF. While I never necessarily got any negative vibes while playing the stage in 64, I get a much happier feeling when I play it in Galaxy 2, and I think its partly because of the enemy's design, which are more in line with the modern designs we see today. If I remember correctly, theres also more pink Bobombs to talk to, which may also make it feel less isolated.
I agree! But also, the white door is a secret star where if you catch all the white rabbits that randomly spawn around, you get 8 keys and can go in and get a star. Although, even creepier, if you re enter the room after collecting the star, you just hear boos laughing and your character exits with a scared “mama mia” or something along those lines…
The lack of characters is also because of limitations. The same happens with the paintings: They were forced to exagerate poses and expressions or camera angles for those pictures because they needed the resultant low resolution image to be clearly readable (theatre actors do the same so you can see them from far away) Think it like this: Mario64 was the first game of its kind, so no one was sure about anything and they tried to do their best. All that creepyness and weird sensations you get are because we live in a natural 3d space. Being this a recreation, it feels familiar to your mind, but little details like the lack of characters and sound, weird colours or confusing low resolution backgrounds, itch in the dephs of your brain: Your logica tells you everything is ok, but natural survival instinct claims there’s something enterely wrong there, and that traduces into one simple thought mechanic: possible danger = fear. There’s nothing wrong with poor Mario’s basic 3D world. Its just your mind being tricky and intelligent.
I was 13 when I first played it and it blew my mind at the time. I think another reason for the emptiness in the game was to not overwhelm kids in a 3D environment. In retrospect it looks somewhere between a dev sandbox and a finished game. If you look back at the first Super Mario Bros, it had that same lonely feeling in certain stages. Super Mario Bros 3 is really where they were able to make it feel like a living and breathing environment.
Dev sandbox id disagree it’s very well polished no glitches or bugs while you are playing, it wasn’t comprised by limitations rather simply made because limitations finally allowed it to be, ive payed $100 for lesser gaming experiences
I definitely always felt a strange feeling when seeing this game for the first time. Like you're living out a dream that you can't wake up from and someone's watching..
This game terrifies me as a little kid. My Nintendo 64 was in the basement as a kid and every time I died in this game, Bowsers laugh would scare the shit out of me and I would run upstairs. After a few seconds I would walk back down and continue playing lol
That reminds me of renting 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘯𝘦𝘺’𝘴 𝘏𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘛𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 and peeking over from behind the sofa the watch Night at Bald Mountain over and over again despite having to close my eyes as the ghostly effects rose from their graves and galloped through the air
When I was a kid, the DS version of SM64 terrified me because of the hidden level inside that haunted mansion where you'd fight King Boo to unlock Luigi. You spend most of the level listening to King Boo's laugh to know which door (of a possible 4) to go through, because going through the wrong door takes you back to the start of the level. That laugh, paired with the merry-go-round music at the very start of the level, always terrified me. I never beat the level until I got a new copy of the game a few years ago
I love the notion that the technological limits of the N64 have led to people feeling like these games are creepy when the game designers more than likely never intended to do so. M64, the Zelda series, even Starfox and Goldeneye.
@@CarlosCFC92even OoT felt really eerie at times. Obviously the ReDead and nighttime, but Hyrule Field and really almost every environment always creeped me out even though it felt like home lol
I’ve just felt people love scaring themselves and try too hard to make this game creepy. It’s one of the greatest games of all time and in all of my years I never felt it was scary.
Apparently the canonical reason Peach’s castle is so empty is because she has two. One where all of her furniture is, and another for all of her artwork.
@@Edz519 Because the ds version features her bedroom, her game room, with lots of furniture, etc..etc..But she could totally have bedrooms in both castle so it doesn't make it totally unimaginable
Does anyone else remember seeing the promotional renderings found in the instruction book or in strategy guides? The one of metal Mario (you know, THE metal Mario render) still gets me today - it’s clearly meant to be Hazy Maze Cave, yet that exact area isn’t anywhere in the stage. It’s almost like an official reimagining, or cut content. It’s all so funny, because Miyamoto stated in an interview he didn’t want SM64 to feel dangerous per se, but merely “mysterious”. That’s why so many characters aren’t hostile, and why there’s not many obstacle course moments throughout the game. If only the original creators could see what they’ve done to our childhoods, ha.
This game feels like a dream. Like when Link woke the wind fish and realized that the love and friendship he created with all the characters, was all destroyed. His friends all stopped existing if he chose to wake up. The scariest élément is that it seems that nintendo realized hpw creepy their game was and over compensated with the cute elements and bright colored text and it just makes the etherial nightmare feeling increase. Zelda Ocarina of time (used same engine and released around same time) is also often quite lonely, but the story, characters and even enemies give it life.
I think OOT has a similar feeling at times though. Most especially when you become adult link and walk out to castle town for the first time. I think for me, it's the wide open spaces with absolutely nothing going on that gets to me. Well, that and the Redeads.
Starting from when I young, and even to this day, I sometimes have dreams of completely made up environments and levels inside SM64. One was a huge, descending spiral staircase with no end. One was this overgrown swamp area in the Tick Tock Clock place for some reason. One was this foggy, medieval abandoned village with water fountains everywhere. Some were just, completely surreal and fragmented setpieces with no rhyme or purpose. They have always unsettled me, but like you said, they also always gave me this kind of, nostalgic and wistful feeling whenever I think back to them. That's why fanmade levels from SM64 ROMhacks have always been so surreal to me to the point where I get genuinely uneasy trying to watch any playthroughs of them, and why the custom levels displayed in Greenio's Personalised Copy ARG affected me so badly because they looked and felt *real*, like, another universe where the 64DD was a success and SM64 got its expansion to include more stuff. Made me think back to my dreams. Of visions of things that could have occured in another reality, separate from ours. Psychological anomalies that feel so real, and yet aren't. Man, liminal spaces fucked me up bad.
See, this is the detail that gets me the most: So many people have had dreams about this game. I used to have full-blown nightmares about this game, with monsters that weren't in the game, levels that were surrealistic and impossible to actually complete, and music that the game doesn't have. So many of us have had dreams about this game, and yet, I haven't heard too many people talking about having dreams about other games. Not that they aren't, of course, but that's just what I have noticed. What is it about this game specifically that causes us to dream about it more than other games?
Never thought of it from this perspective, but you put into words something I had vague feelings about from the game but could never really point out...
This is just a dude yapping. If this game is unsettling to anyone they’re insanely soft. It’s one of the brightest and happiest games from my childhood. The music, the worlds, everything. Even the haunted world, whatever it was called, was a “fun” spooky feeling. Will people just accept anything if some dude on the internet says it?
mario 64 always felt like it was missing something to me as a kid, even when playing the DS port with all the bonus characters and multiplayer modes. going back to the n64 version only amplifies that feeling
This reminded me of how when I was little, I had a CRT TV in my room with the N64 hooked up to it, and I remember sometimes at night as I laid in bed I would stare at the screen in fear because for some reason I had this looming feeling that the screen would turn on by itself, I thought either a game would start up, or just something random would come on. I had this feeling that if I looked away it would turn on, maybe with the image of Mario drowning or something. I haven't thought about this in years and forgot about it but somehow this video made me remember it. Really unsettling even now when I think about it. I had a lot of these weird fears as a kid
Omg I had this fear too !!!!! Even in the 90s when a TV channel had technical difficulties and they would put a screen up I always thought I was gonna get jumpscared 😅
Dam. This did bring back some weird memories. I used to stare into the static when tv would go off for the night. There was something awful happening and I couldn't process it. I also remember the tv turning on randomly on in the middle of the night, but I almost always blacked out and couldn't remember it the next day. I have maybe two or three memories I've unrepressed do to ...questionable substances. Thinking about those memories puts me in a feedback loop. I get a glimpse of what they said, then my mind empties, and I have the feeling I can recall so I think again, reexperience, and end up in the same place. It's mentally and physically taxing so I give up trying to remember, and am just left with questions
CRTs are just so creepy in general. The constant visual 'hum' and appearance of activity even when they are off is super unsettling. As a kid I had one in my room, and the light from the street lamp outside would bounce off the curved glass and it was so weird to watch. It never really felt fully turned off, and I always felt like it would turn on or something would reach out of it as a kid.
5:54 By definition, Peaches castle is actually the *most* liminal space in the game. Liminal space definition: In architecture, liminal spaces are defined as "the physical spaces between one destination and the next." Common examples of such spaces include hallways, airports, and streets. The castle is the space between every level, and by definition is a liminal space.
And it could be that liminal spaces like these mentioned, scare people so much because they don't generally exist in nature, being that nature is fractal and spaces in nature seamlessly compliment one another.
This game felt more wholesome to me than a lot of 64 games, though he is alone in a large castle, a lot of the music was really uplifting and calming the only part that was kinda scary to me as a kid was Boo’s mansion
when i played it as a child, it didn't freak me out quite as much as it does now, looking back. however, i did always feel kinda odd roaming through all those empty spaces. when i stopped playing, it almost felt as if i had woken up from a strange dream. the aspect that adds to that feeling the most, for me, are the endless hallways that got you running towards those huge paintings. the further you'd go, the more they'd move away from you (at one point, you'd even fall, as we could see in your video). most of my nightmares are like that, especially when i was younger. really eerie for a game developed for children!
I remember a vivid nightmare I had from Mario 64 where I was trapped in peach's castle and bowser just showed up in the main room. There was no way to fight him and I would just have to run away, but no matter what room you go to he manages to find you anyway. I think playing Super Mario 64 so much (in my case the DS version) kind of broke me of my fear of video games. Though there was a period of time where that specific mechanic of an invincible boss chasing you indefinitely still freaked the fuck out of me.
This game IMMEDIATELY scared the living shit out of me as a kid. From hearing that creepy music to bowser’s laugh when u walk up to a door u cant open yet, to a boo randomly appearing in the back castle hall. Not to mention how eerie peach and bowser’s portraits around the castle looked. Nightmares for DAYYYYYS LOL
I always found SM64 unsettling because it's so unclear what it is. It's hard to tell if it could be a game trying to pass as a dream, a dream trying to pass as a game, or something else entirely.
Personally, I never found the game scary in any way, except for some odd reason Jolly Roger bay and wet dry world always upset me and made me feel incredibly sad. The music is meant to be serene but to me it always felt depressing, cold and lonely.
*as you sit there, upset as a kid, your mom comes in with a tray full of warm cookies and nice milk, hugging you abd wrapping a blanket around you as she urges her little soldier on, making you feel warm inside and giving you courage as she watches you patiently get through the level, proud of you the entire way*
In my case, the creepy feeling while playing SM 64 came years later. And for marios death-animations, i was rather fascinated how believable mario got back then. The game where i was creeped out right at the beginning, was Banjo Kazooie. I had nightmares of this game, but i think it was because of the new sensations i had to get used to. But its not a surprise that we felt like this. The change from 2D to 3D games was such a big impact, where we as kids weren't prepared for. xD
As a kid i always dreamed of mario 64 rooms that i know dont exist but that for some reason i could feel they were there, when mario 64 made a comeback in this years i knew i wasnt alone in this.
SAME! I always dreamed of a giant underground floor through entering in the castle moat. The were always doors that were never opened because there was just so much down there.
Dude I used to have dreams of the game like that too, it was incredibly creepy. I thought I was the only person who acc was scared of this game until i found this video but so many people have experienced what I did. I still love the game, just as a kid I found it so unnerving and creepy.
I always dreaded the underwater levels or any levels that involved swimming ! I would stop playing and have my cousin play through them. Another thing I always did feel “lonely” playing the game.
Ever since I was a kid I always feared big houses, like mansions or in this case castles. Just like, the idea of a home being so huge that two people could potentially be inside it, living their lives, without knowing of the other person's prescence. That's the feeling Peach's Castle in 64 gave me, just the unnerving feeling of somebody being able to open a door in the castle and you, as Mario, being so far away from said door that you cant even hear it
I find a lot of these theories/creepypastas fascinating, and they're very fun to read and watch but SM64 itself has never really creeped me out at all. it's probably because I grew up with the DS port where the castle definitely felt more alive and "lived in," with the rabbits everywhere and the rec room and such, which made it seem much less like a liminal space. that probably extended over when I played the original, as if my experiences in the DS version were telling me "there's nothing scary about this castle my guy, just focus on not dying for the 100th time in RR" nowadays I'm an avid watcher of SM64 speedruns, and seeing people tear apart stages like SSL and WDW on a regular basis takes away any creepiness factor that I would've gotten from them. don't get me started on the TASes. the geometry of the desolate castle exterior is just another tool for the almighty reality warper mario to be used to phase through reality and travel dozens of parallel universes away in his quest to open the moat door underwater and gank bowser in the fire sea where he would least expect it
The Mario death animations were creepy for many gamers and I'm surprised that the Bowser silhouette isn't on the SM64 Conspiracy Iceberg because it's wild the first time you see it. Funny enough, Bowser's Fury also contains a variant of the infamous silhouette.
I think it’s a mixture of realness and dreamlike qualities that get mixed up in our little kid brains. Conflating the two in our memories. I think this is mostly with early 3D games. Polygons that are almost real but just not quite there. And environments and music that is simply dreamlike is the only way I can explain it. Great video
For me, the scariest thing wasn’t necessarily just the Bowser laugh, but it’s the sound effect with the Bowser laugh whenever you try to enter a door that you’re not allowed to enter because you don’t have enough stars (including the first time you enter the castle). Even as someone who casually plays through the 16 star run, intentionally going to the 70 star door without enough stars meant hearing the creepy noise before you entered the 70 star door. The endless stair music was a close second. But oddly, nothing else bothered me. Most of the things mentioned in the video felt like a charm rather than a creepy feeling. Maybe that’s just a me thing though.
yeah the sound effect scared me a lot. i really liked when he said “i really try to not die because it scared me a lot”. i haven’t think about it but i also hated to die because of the animation and sounds. i really tried my best to not try to open a door i couldn’t enter because of the music and bowsers laugh
I will never forget when me and my siblings first saw the giant Boo in the hallway leading to the courtyard. The fact that it wasn't there before freaked us all out and we ran into our room and hid under the blankets 😂
I think I cried a little. And was terrified of going to the basement for a while. Whenever I had to I would run as quick as possible and tried not to look in boo's direction.
The game was insanely popular among all us kids in elementary and middle school, and literally none of us were scared or unsettled. This weird narrative is built upon on very recent memes that have gotten carried away. At best you could argue some of the visuals look a little garish in HD, but certainly not back then when played on a CRT. The game was very warm, bright, colorful and overall pleasant. Even Big Boo's Haunt is mostly silly spooky (in a little kid's halloween party sort of way) than actually terrifying.
For many, it's not about the color tone or music, it's about the feelings wandering the castle alone can evoke in areas that have liminal qualities. It doesn't give this effect to everyone, but to many it does. Minecraft has this same phenomenon for many. Horror can have less to do with the visual aesthetics and more to do with the lack of information left to the imagination and dreamlike spaces that can evoke that feeling of dread in a lot of people. Not everyone, but a good subset.
@@JoryStultz1234 I still don't buy that, because those liminal qualities if present would've affected somebody, anybody, back then. But they didn't. You're not going to find anyone tell you they were creeped out by that. Maybe the piano in _Big Boos Haunt_ or the painting for _Lethal Lava Land,_ and that's only if you're a little kid. This liminal dread is a very recent phenomena caused by people who explicitly delve into creepypasta/SPC type content. Same with old multiplayer maps in Valve games; new players exploring these maps offline for the 1st time report that "liminal space" feeling, yet in the 00s I knew kids who's whole idea of fun was downloading multiplayer maps off sites like FPSBanana and just exploring them; seeing the work the mapper put into designing his custom map. You're only going to find this liminal space fear if you go out and look for it. It's not there naturally.
@@xlixity You are speaking for yourself only. I have always found the game to feel off in a dreamy way and that makes some people feel strange. You don't have to buy anything for someone to have a different opinion than you, just humility.
@@xlixity "those liminal qualities if present would've affected somebody, anybody, back then. But they didn't." Bruh, you're not the main character. People have been talking about this for decades, increasingly so as they grew up and found the words to describe it. I felt lots of joy exploring this game as a kid, but also had many moments of unexplained paranoia and dread in the empty spaces that I didn't feel again til I played games like Slender years later. Regardless of whether you and your friends were the ultimate gigachads you describe, SM64 had a haunting effect on me and many others sometimes in between our much more frequent moments of enjoyment. It's not like we got so scared we stopped playing; obviously we didn't, cause we all remember the whole game. The human mind and the wide matrix in which it processes and interprets what it experiences is more complex than you give it credit for.
Oh no, the picture of peach turned into bowser. The madness. Stick to playing a leapfrog or something more your speed, might die from fright playing rated E Games
@@SuicidalOrphan I've played dead space countless times and never felt in panic. I've played resi7 countless times as well and only got frightened once. But I think lavender town's song is unsettling and can't listen to it for long. Let people be different, edgelord.
You know what i totally understand why you mentioned empty feeling when playing this game. This game was a blast when i was a kid, played it everyday and i remember i dreamed about sm64 and i was actually stuck in that "empty" world. Really disturbing
I’ve literally always had this feeling and have never been able to describe it but this video does just that. Even when i was younger, it creeped me out. What would really creep me out is the thought of all the empty rooms with nothing inside of them, while i was somewhere else. Always felt like something was lurking 2 rooms over
I didn’t understand why it made me so unsettled as a kid because the feeling came and went. I still have a copy on ds played it a year or so ago and realised it was because of the emptiness in certain areas and most definitely the feeling of something nearby like you describe. I find it crazy, but it also relieves me, that so many others experienced the same thing
I always felt like something was watching me. There were times that Id be so afraid, i would just stand in the corner and watch the game to see if something would pop out. This would occured to me mostly on the lava and boo level.
This is my take on the reasoning behind the creepiness this game emanates. As a child, this was my first and one of my favorite games. I was 7. I was extremely excited to not only play this game for the first time, but to also explore every area of the game. It was all new to me. Now, as an adult...it’s a much different perspective. This to me now is a vessel of beautiful yet far away memories echoing from the distant past. It’s like visiting a playground at an elementary school you used to attend but as an adult. It’s a distant memory and the playground has already served its purpose many years ago but it will continue to stand there to perpetually remind you that there is nothing else here for you. Super Mario 64 is a vessel of your memories when you were a kid. But now as an adult when you play it, the castle feels so lonely as you and only you can remember those memories.
This is exactly how it makes me feel. I think when we were younger maybe we didn’t notice how empty the worlds of these games really were. Our memories of them are much more vibrant, so when we revisit them they seem hauntingly empty and quiet. This can be genuinely upsetting when you realise that it means you will never be able to relive those memories the same way. You will never be able to revisit that world in your childhood memories because it never really existed the way you remember it.
Well you're right. Because when you're a child you do not pay attention to the texture, you just get frustrated and encouraged by your own brother(s), telling you to run away from the pokey but you don't and die and then all the "aww"s come up. Remember: When the brain doesn't know it acts like it's a common accurance, but once the brain knows that thing becomes your fear (Yeah i'm bad at this, you can make this better)
When was a kid I was so horrified of the Lethal Lava Land Painting, so much to were every time I went to got down there I would cover my eyes when it was visible.
I don’t remember being scared of it when I was a kid but I do remember not wanting to play it by myself. I think it’s the emptiness of the castle yet things are everywhere
This was a pleasure to listen through! The uncanny, claustrophobic, and empty atmosphere of Mario 64 is such an interesting topic and yours is one of the better takes ☺️ I hadn’t heard of liminal space before this video…it really helps explain what makes certain sections of Peach’s Castle so unsettling. The hallway the Boo leads you down, the false floor to Bowser in the Dark World, and the endless stairs all put an eerie spin on this phenomenon, which is probably why they stick in my mind most when thinking back on the game…
Welcome back to a new video everybody! Do you think Super Mario 64 is unsettling? Let me know in the comments below. Thanks to everyone for the support, it means a lot!
You said 2401, but wrote 2041
Lol thanks. I’m a bit dyslexic
Growing up it has become creepy in different ways, as a kid i sucked at the game but had lots of fun just hanging outside the castle, however when the boo's start appearing when you collect 15 stars, the fears begin, the boo mansion, hazy mazy cave, shifting lava land even, all these worlds locked in the basement were so creepy lol, i used to abou rolly roger bay at all costs, i hated that eel
But now i can relate to other people when it comes to the "emptiness" of this game, things feel desolate, fake and even distorted, it's such a bizarre game but i love it
I never noticed it but all of the levels (even bob omb battlefield) felt kinda lonely when played. Mario probably felt kinda put on his own & was probably worried about the others like Luigi or other characters.
@@PressStartToContinueYT i remember playing super mario 64 on my n64 and i went to hazy maze cave and then my parents are asleep also my brother. Next i notice that my parents turn off the lights in my house while i have my room light on. After that i felt scared and i quickly turn off the game and go to sleep. I remember the other time that i was in hazy maze cave and i was going where dorry is at and some reason in the far distance of the game was pitch black and i saw dorry's face and i got scared from so i quickly turn off the game and play another n64 game.
In this episode, Bowser uses psychological torture to get inside mario's head
Phycology, also known as algology, is a scientific field of study that is about algae.
Now what is phycological torture?
@@dashua1735 fixed
Bowser:” Gwahahahaha!”
@@dashua1735 torture using algae
So is that also the reason mario throws bowser Into bombs
The silence at the start is actually brilliant. It was the first time for many people to experience 3D gaming. The silence made the experience stand out more and made the player focus on the movement.
that's a good point!
Yea while there are many creepy things in this game, that part wasn't one of them.
the word you are looking for is ambiance.
This is very interesting to me, because I’ve been playing this game literally since I could hold a controller. It’s like a big security blanket to me, playing it feels so comfy and warm and safe. The idea that it could be creepy in any way is honestly hard to comprehend. Whenever I boot up this game I feel like I’ve come home, no matter where I am.
Good. The game is great, so do not let these easily-frightened people change your mind.
i think the guy was just being dramatic for the sake of his thesis (which still doesn't make it work) everything he brought up in the video has for one already been touched on in other videos and memed into oblivion, but it's also stuff that's just not that scary. like do people really find anything in mario 64 terrifying? you could argue that some things could be seen as unnerving to like maybe a child and perhaps that does have some validity but this video says literally nothing new.
Exactly, the only thing anyone seems to be right about it is wet dry world, its not really creepy but it is kinda odd. He s gotta be lying saying stuff like the bowser face after you die is scary.
I feel the same way when I play Ninja Gaiden III for NES.
@@BirdLeaf23 I remember playing that level so much, idk why, but it was my favorite
Top 10 Things that Scared Me in SM64:
10. It
9. Didn't
8. Really
7. Scare
6. Me
5. I
4. Found
3. It
2. Peaceful
1. THE EELS.
The older, less detailed models are the scariest version for no reason whatsoever
EELS... If you want to hear a song which really shows why EELS are scary, search for a video named Eels that's uploaded by mastershake1000 Well the secondary part of the video ain't that important, but the first song.
Eels Eels Eels Eels Eels Eels Eels up inside you, finding an entrance where they can, eels up inside you, finding an entrance where they can. Boring through your tummy, through your mind, through your anus. EELS! EELS!
That song is stuck in my head every time I hear the word Eel.
@@austria-hungary7680ever play shrek 2 one ps2, the alligators get me every time
@@King710. I know
The fucking piano man
The limitations of the console definitely create an odd sensations when you break it down.
Old consoles definitely make things a lot more creepy which is why when Flowey, turns all hyper realistic when he goes into Omega Flowey, it’s just jarring because it’s limitations you thought where in place, but it’s even worse when things are scary in the limitations of that game. Though i must say that Mario 64 box art is creepy uncanny valley.
64 was such a great artistic limbo for creators. You either sunk with making excuses for "better hardware", or you worked with what you had to your advantage to create awesome pieces of work ( ua-cam.com/video/15E98H-9gu0/v-deo.html )
@BaBa BaBa NES world?
@@joshshrum2764 OMORI does the same afaik. Cutesy little pixel dream RPG… until you enter real life.
It's weirder when you consider other games of the N64 era though. Ocarina of Time and Paper Mario were my childhood N64 games, but they never unnerved me (except for when they wanted to, of course).
As a child I believed in the L is Real conspiracy and the idea that Luigi was hiding somewhere in the game made it very spooky
But didn't they discover Luigi's source code recently?
@@steveluvscows2490 Yes, his assets were found in the gigaleak 24 years and 1 month after the game's release and it still doesn't feel real
i wasted hours trying to unlock Luigi
U and everyone else, but I too, fell for it as well
Similarly, I thought Herobrine was hiding somewhere in my Minecraft world as a kid. It was rather unsettling, lmao.
“This time, it’s personalized.”
Ok but the username I LOVE IT
Say, this is gonna sound really weird, but hear me out- the castle mirrors the anatomy of princess Peach herself. Also the blue penguins reappear as birds in Odyssey and they're tiny. Mario isn't exactly Mario, he's as Peach banishing Bowser from being an hypnotic influence over her mind, and Peach is certainly in an unconscious yet not dead limbo. But there's no way to explain these things within the game without showing blood, there's a lot of sparkle and glitter that distracts people from thinking. Oh well
Mama mia
Literally every Super Mario 64 Creepypasta:
King
As a kid, I deadass believed that Bowser just murdered all the toads in the castle and I thought the ghostly apparitions of the toads you approach were the ghosts helping you save the princess from their fate.
Lol me too, it just seemed like the logical explanation to me as a kid
yknow i love that thought, new theory idea /pos
deadass.... cringe.
For real there never really there only like apparitions and hes all over the castle like a ghsot or hologram ? Star wars? Hmmm?
Oh my God lmao that's awesome
Also, the paintings, they're literally all worlds frozen in time. Everyone and thing in that world is forever stuck in a painting prison.
I always thought judging by the game manual and the Nintendo Power guide that the paintings were portals to other worlds.
Oh shit you’re right
Hello you
@@PressStartToContinueYT oh yeah swear again
its just a painting bro.... youre overthinking
Wet dry world made me feel scared as a kid because of the town. I felt like the town was empty because everyone probably drowned from flooding.
the water levels in general terrified me as a kid because they just felt so ominous and still they feel the same
@@kiriu_idk Very very true. Like the cave with that sign the captain telling you to stay out. Falling rock pillars. Like pirates are secretly watching you or something. At least the eel made me feel not alone
@@watergirl929 yeah the eel especially scared me as a kid
@@kiriu_idk I actually always loved the eel for some reason it made me feel so *not alone* in the level 😅 I guess that level felt so lonely because he had like no enemies in it! I loved playing the final level chasing the eel around.
But where are the bodies
Question for you: if you've played Mario 64 DS, did you ever feel creeped out, because looking back on it, there were a bunch of creepy things that were even exclusive to this game. A lot of what you said in this video still applies, but version this game also had things like the entirely white room behind the mirror, the lifeless character paintings, and even some of the new levels such as the Goomboss area felt oddly empty lifeless. I think the improved graphics and additional playable characters did a lot to make the game feel less creepy, but there are still a whole bunch of things that add to the weird, dreamlike feeling
yeah, the ds version has its fair share of creepiness too. The graininess of the DS adds to it.
I've only played the DS version, yup- definetly creepy,
Well it's obviously not real, it's a video game.
@@PressStartToContinueYT Mario: If none of that-a was real, how can I be sure anything is-a real? Is not-a possible, neigh, probable, that my entire existence is the product of my or someone else's imagination?
@@parker-boy98 Luigi: Hypocrite that-a you are, big bro, for you trust the imagination of-a yourself or another to tell you it is all one's imagination. Will-a you fight? Or will-a you get a game over like a Goomba?
This guy: “I just feel alone..”
Lakitu: 👋😀📸
This is a w comment
The amount of disrespect that lakitu has is insane.
Lakitu was the OG companion
Lakitu in most games: *Exists.*
Players: KILL HIM! KILL HIM!
Lakitu: *Exists in Mario Kart and Mario 64.*
Players: At ease, lovely camera man. :)
I think latitu exists purely to annoy the crap out of us with the trash camera angles
The uncannily realistic textures in some places are what gets me.
@Jack and Bt Sandwich I just mean in general. I can't really name a specific one.
The one that really got me asking questions is wet wet dry world on how the background is a flooded island and I’m wondering how the town got flooded and what town that is and Is it a real tow that actually got sunken in real life
@Jack and Bt Sandwich I think at the least, the first Bowser level's background is an edited image of a forest
@Jack and Bt Sandwich I don't remember where I had seen it at this point because it's been awhile, but I know someone had matched the in game textures with the full size images somehow. I saw most of them on a website that showed the original images that were used, I'm wanting to say the original images were left in the game files but I'm not certain.
Realistic bricks and rocks I remember. Really weird.
Maybe this was just me, but as a kid, I always noticed the castle didn't have any of the normal things you'd find in a living space. So like, no kitchen, no bedroom for Peach, etc (which Paper Mario did have which I think is interesting). Maybe that could also be a subconscious reason the castle feels unnerving sometimes, since you just can't find any of the rooms you'd associate with a place people actually live in?
This game is great.
Intresting
I'm glad I'm not the only kid who noticed that! I was the sort of kid who liked to imagine how the characters lived in their world when I wasn't there, but Peach's castle always felt so weird to me because (like you said) I couldn't imagine anyone actually living there, or how anything in the castle actually worked. It was designed as bizarrely as the mansion in the first Resident Evil game.
It reminded me of a playground or my kindergarten. I never thought of the bathroom or kitchen because those are private spaces where kids shouldn't be playing, so I remember thinking "It makes sense!". This game reminded me of how my imagination soared when I was forced to wait for my mom on a wait room or when I escaped a grown up social situation to play alone or just explore the place I was. I even used to imagine repetitive patterns like avoiding stepping on black tiles, or the classic "the floor is lava". All of this is in this game, and that makes it awesome to me.
peach actually has a room in 64 lol
I was never really afraid of this game, but the "empty" feeling of the castle hub made me feel unnerved. The only thing I really hated was the Boss Bass/Bubba in Tiny-Huge Island. I've always hated underwater enemies in games, especially when they ate me. The skull and crossbones in the secret slide in Tall, Tall Mountain bugged me, too.
I used to be afraid of the giant eel in Jolly Roger bay. It's size, the way it moved in the water and the wide jaw full of jagged teeth. I couldn't bring myself to take on the objective of getting it to come out of its nesting hole so Mario can retrieve the star from the tail. Later on I realized that the creature follows a set course and doesn't just swim freely about the water, which gave some reassurance that it isn't programmed to target you. Still a creepy encounter for anyone playing the game for the first time.
@@scorpionwins6378 The eel did used to startle me when it lunged out. The Mad Piano made me jump, too.
What are you talking about? The game is great.
@@scottchaison1001 I didn't say it wasn't.
I took 10 minutes wandering around the castle at the start and gave up on the game when I was unable to beat the first bomb boss. I hate the controls.
Terminally online people when a game has empty rooms 😰
Shut up
The game was made on a cartridge with a small capacity... I'm terrified
True
This episode is a perfect example of what happens when you overthink things
well that's my job!
Yeah bro as a kid I only remember feelings of joy playing SM64. Maybe some fear from the lava and sand levels, and the Bowser cackle, but surely that's normal regardless.
There's never a real argument made throughout the whole video somehow, just rnd bias and inflated use of the word creepy.
Frl
I literally made my kids shut this off. This is flat earth style thinking. I’m sure it’s just in good fun but unless you are an adult thinking back there’s no reason to sit here and let this guy insist one of the brightest, most loved, colorful, cheerful games on the N64 is “terrifying and can bring on sudden deep feelings of loneliness”. What a heap of bologna.
I had no idea that anyone ever thought of Super Mario 64 as creepy and/or scary in any remote way. I certainly never have.
It makes no sense. Its not creepy, terrifying or dreadful at all. People are weird. But then again they gotta make vids for youtube so they just go on about utter nonsense. Then in the comments if course you’ll find the experts that have a masters degree in whatever the video is about.
@@garrysmith5562 You 🧠n't?
What's bad in it?
@@garrysmith5562 Yeah this video looked promising ended up being somehow worse than qanon. conspiracy theories 0 content.
you never played wet dry world? or approached that piano? lol
I find it dreamlike instead of creepy.
It reminds of a Cartoon from the 60s
Same, except for that eel
yes
It is literally that
Yes. Surreal is the word that comes to mind for me
You know a game is a classic when even if it's overtly really positive and colourful, there's this very subtle, distant macabre or melancholy quality to it. Makes it way more emotionally complex and life-like without ever needing to obviously make it known. All the legendary old games had it. That element of genuine risk or danger.
It's the uncanny valley effect of that first jump into 3D. It's the "Oh, this is _real_ now"... except the emptiness shows you subconsciously that it isn't.
Even a kid playing Super Mario World doesn't look at it and feel like it's a real place they could actually reach out and touch, or somewhere they could explore if they could just teleport through the screen. But with a control stick, and the ability to move _forward_ towards anything you can see and jump to, that illusion of "reality" is created. The push-pull of "is this real" on your subconscious begins.
Like Ocarina of Time too. Less subtle about it was Majora’s Mask
As much as I loved this game as a kid, I could never pinpoint why it made me feel sort of sad. This hits the nail on the head. It was Mario, alone, with creepy villains sparsely spread out in barren levels with subdued music and the sense of Bowser watching every move.
Me many years ago: "The painting of the evil fire isn't scary.... It's just a flame. It's a childish image."
Me now: "OH, dayum! That's Satan and more! Because of the reasons I am including in my pending video 'Mario is of the devil' "
Same. It has this subtle vibe of surreal emptiness that lingers no matter what area of the game you are in. Sunshine and Galaxy doesn't feel anything like 64. Those games feel warmer. There are residents to talk to. 64 just makes me feel paranoid. And what makes it even scarier to me is the game isn't even trying to do it. It just is all these things by nature.
I get the same feeling in Minecraft I think it’s the feeling of loneliness and the large open dreamlike atmosphere adds to it
It's pretty Grim dark when you think about it
It's funny tho think how this game is more of a Creepypasta than most
Honestly every time I played SM64 I always got that disconnected feeling. I remember having fever dreams when I was younger about levels that never existed but seemed so real
i had a reoccuring dream for probably 10 years straight that i would get every few months. it was the level outside after you drain the water. i would just slide endlessly down that gray slope with little platforms and there was always a weird black and white static look and sound like a tv that lost its signal. oddly this dream was connected to a taste. the taste when you are really congested or you choke on some water when swimming. any of these things could trigger the dream and to this day 20+ years later that taste still reminds me of it. i could never grab stsy on a ledge. id always hold on for a second then a faceless person would walk over and peel my fingers off the ledge. id wake up after about 50 platform attempts plunging into the blackness below
@@NorThenX047 Crazy how the brain works huh?
Seriously I would have non stop dreams of this game
Go play B3313
I've had a period when I'd get some relatively uncomfortable dreams around it as well, with alternative versions of levels or even brand new ones. The most mysterious is that although I liked watching content related to this game, this isn't one from my childhood. I got to play the DS version, yet never had a dream of it. Only the original 64 version
I never thought the "it's just not the same" feeling applied only to Mario 64. I got that feeling playing any copy of a game that wasn't mine. Because you know it's not yours, it doesn't feel the same. You played the game your way, you got to know it your way, so when you play a different copy, that personal connection isn't there.
The copy isn't personalized, but the experience is. But even so, this "creepypasta" is one of my favorites.
Agreed!
I never got that feeling with games unless they had custom settings. Mario 64 is different in that regard
I agree with this. I think as more and more games started getting saveable progress, playing someone else's copy, and therefore their save, would definitely be a different experience.
Like a copy of SMB1 doesn't matter, you pick up any copy of that game and just play it from the beginning like always. But a game like Mario 64, you play someone's copy and god only knows what they're up to, what stars they got that maybe you didn't and vice-versa.
More youtuber bullshit
I've played the game countless hours since the 90s and it never really creeped me out. The eel, the piano, and the Bowser laugh were the only things that scared me as a child.
The most unsettling thing for me now is the room with the painting for Tiny-Huge Island. Something about how detailed the goombas are and the size of the painting gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Walking to the big painting can be very unsettling.
SAME
Lol when I see that painting I think of small goomba and his dad lol.
Dad: Did you hear Koopa the Quick had his toe fall off?
Son: what noo
Dad: He called a toe truck to fix it.
Son: awwww daaaad! you're the funniest! :D
@@zitherq5761 That is adorable.
YES it’s that room and the entirety of wet dry world that make me feel some type of way…
Oh my lord, 11 year old me, was not a fan of the Mad Piano. I didn't get 120 Stars in the game until years later because I didn't want to deal with it, and even then Big Boo's Haunt was the last place I tackled with strategy guide in tow. Nintendo must have realized what they did with the piano as it hasn't returned outside of a Mario Party 2 cameo as far as I'm aware.
A more recent thing I found out about that's creepy to me, is how before beating Bob-Omb Battlefield for the first time, there is a gutter at the bottom of the mountain where 2 big cannonballs are rolling around, but after you beat King Bob-Omb, when you go back to Bob-Omb Battlefield for the rest of the stars, that same gutter now has 3 big cannonballs rolling around. Am I to infer that Mario killed King Bom-Omb, and now his lifeless corpse is rolling around at the bottom of the mountain? WTF Nintendo.
Big Boo’s Haunt, in general is way to disturbing for a kids game.
Yeah that was pretty messed up
@@joshshrum2764 Pft, wussy.
No. That 3rd Ball Thing was simply to increase the difficulty from the first star to the second Star a bit.
For some reason, I wasn't scared of the piano, I honestly thought it was kinda cool.
The scariest thing for was just when you first walk into Peach’s castle and the suspenseful music and Bowser starts laughing. Other than that nothing scared me.
What are you talking about?
You psychopath!
@@scottchaison1001 when you start up a new save and go into the castle for the first time...
Couldn't agree more. When I was a kid I was always terrified when I started a new game to enter the castle for this reason alone.
Same! I would turn the sound off when that part came up 😂
I never felt like mario 64 was scary, i always focused on the gorgeus music in each level, amazing levels, and fun characters. I always tought of it as an fun platformer.
Dire Dire docks is such a beautiful soundtrack .
What you said about being inside the castle being familiar yet unnerving reminds me of a reoccurring dream/nightmare I have. I’m at home alone most of the time, it usually starts out familiar until I open a door or turn a corner that leads to a hall, stairways, or rooms I have never seen before or if I have, they are pulled from other places I have been before. Nothing bad typically happens, but it’s still very unusual being somewhere familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.
omg, I've had a similar dream too. like I know where I am and I don't at the same time
I've had dreams like that all my life. But the most reoccuring ones I get are being in a dark basement, playing an unfamiliar version of doom 2 where everything is unnaturally more terrifying. The line between game and reality gets blurred, and I'm either living in it, or I get this feeling that a Revenant is about to come out of the monitor. And every time I think "shit, it's actually real this time". Sounds are legit terrifying and I can replay them for a long time in my head after I've woken up.
I am 36 now, and played the shit out of that game back when it was new. Clearly enough to incur lasting damage.
Fr it’s so weird
All my dreams have something wrong with the floor plan of my house. I rarely notice until after I wake up.
For the same reasons you mention how it can be creepy, I found it wondrous, mysterious, and peaceful. But certainly ethereal. A dreamlike place. Its bathic atmosphere implies something meaningful, but any such meaning is ambiguous and unknown. Ethereal, but not scary to me. It was a quiet place filled with deep places and mysterious things, away from the clutter of life.
That's a great comment! I totally agree with you about the dreamlike appealing that this game has and I see 2 reasons for it:
1- The Liminal Space aesthetic that this game has
2- The weirdness and lack of logic and consistance thar everything seems to have. There's no clear objective, no real allies or friends, even the themes are strange, you enter through paintings to fantastical and mysterious worlds that sometimes makes you wonder about it (Wet Dry World and its abandoned underwater city) but you never get an answear.
Yes, exactly! Very well put
What a beautiful comment.
If it’s quiet and away from the clutter of life, it’s fine but it’s also empty, and as you said, mysterious.
I’m quiet but I’d always like to have people around me because being alone is just surreal. It gives off the illusion of nothingness.
SM64's abstract nature is one of my favorite things about it.
I recently replayed Mario 64 for the first time in many many years. I honestly just don’t find it creepy. At no point in my entire play through did I feel even remotely creeped out. I find the over world very comforting. The silence and the birds chirping outside, followed by the music inside, it’s very calming and serene. Nothing creepy in the slightest to me.
Cry about it kid
@@CosmicHarmony58 Sounds like you're crying. Did you get spooked by the game little buddy. Poor muffin. You'll be alight.
@@CosmicHarmony58 said the baby
Honestly, same! It never felt empty to me either. Granted, most of my time playing it was in a loud daycare, but even when I played alone, the birds singing and waterfall flowing were a pleasant soundscape, then the warm inviting music of the castle always felt so. Wet-dry world in my mind was mostly invaded by the elevator hurry thing and the stupid catapult mice and the chuck ya.
@@CosmicHarmony58 snowflake, getting creeped out by a game lmao
If mario scares you at all you really need to get out more
Fr 😂😭😭
Mario 64 gives me the same vibes as when I search for "liminal spaces" on the internet. Something seems kinda off yet fascinating. Moreover, no matter how much I love Odyssey or Galaxy, Mario 64 will always have a special place in my memories, a truly nostalgic and charming game.
Indeed, much of the interior is just liminal spaces!
True Tho. There's just a mysterious aura to the game
That's the way I felt about it, the noises and stuff where just off and the feeling of being alone but I always wanted to explore more
No sunshine :/ the disrespect
@@Firelordcujo07 Elitist detected 😂
The Bowser painting for me. Even at my age now I still think its pretty creepy. I wish the personalization tapes were still popular
That’s a good point
The bowser paintings legitimately scarred me as a kid, it always seemed like it was starting directly into my eyes
As a kid, the simple bowser laugh when entering the castle was enough to scare the hell out of me
Thank god im not the only one who thought this when they were younger
@@ello-olle that sound before he laughed was an instant no for me back then
Even the castle theme "inside the castle walls" gives me an empty, sad feeling of isolation. I always thought I was just overthinking it as a kid but 64 really is an almost empty-feeling game. Good video.
While walking around the castle searching for levels or hidden stars I never really thought about how creepy the castle theme is. I think the first time I noticed that was when I had to go to the toilet in the middle of the night. Hearing the faint sound of the castle theme coming from my room while walking back to it without any lights on made me feel very uncomfortable. When I finally came back to my room the feeling didn't go away. Instead I became very conscious about the castle theme and how empty the castle is. Entering any level made me feel a little better with the exception of Wet-Dry World.
weirdly when i play on console, it's slightly louder and lower pitch, not joking btw
Yeah the game suffers a bit of the “uncanny valley” syndrome in some ways, Banjo-Kazooie and Rareware games in general always had a much more organic, lively feel to them that made them feel less lonely
yep, for sure, it sounds like noise is echoing thru the halls, emphasizing the emptiness, and the ambiguity of what's around the corner.
The only thing that ever gave me slight chills was the looping steps song everything else seems normal to me…
(Also how do y’all get to feel these emotions?)
Funny enough, I think a lot of the things you described as creepy are the things that makes this my favorite Mario game. I love the dreamlike atmosphere, the mystery, I think most of the weird faces are cute and charming (I always felt bad for the Whomp’s because they had bandaids on their backs and felt bad for hurting them). I find liminal spaces weirdly calming, and the strange disconnectedness of this entry made it more interesting for me to explore compared to Galaxy and Oddyssey. I think I especially liked the water staged despite the anxiety I’d get from Mario’s health ticking down because I’ve always liked more slow-paced games.
The only things I really remember being afraid of were: the evil piano, the eel in that one water level, the time limit for being underwater, that electric ball that flies around you as you go up a pole, dying, running out of air underwater, and the platforming areas you’d go through before fighting Bowser. Everything else was a delight even though I was garbage at the game, the feeling of mystery and discovery drawing me in. I was terrified of any ‘real’ horror game/movie, but Mario 64 filled me with nothing but fascination.
(As a Sidenote, even though I’m still pretty pathetic when it comes to ‘real’ horror, I loved basically every RPGmaker horror game I played during its boom and find things other people find creepy like vintage porcelain dolls pretty and cute. So, y’know, maybe its just me lol.)
WEIRDO
@@PressStartToContinueYT LMAO YEAH THATS FAIR
I was also scared of that underwater black drain hole in one of the water courses! Otherwise really the same ones as you. 😊
The thing that always made me feel uncomfortable while playing Super Mario 64 was the suffocating, almost claustrophobic atmosphere. While you have a lot of platforms and areas to explore, the stages feel like they are very limited, like they're inside a small box and you're trying your best to escape it. I wouldn't say I'm claustrophobic, but I hate the feeling when I have to be in a tight space. This game made me feel this way. It was one of my favourite games as a kid, but it made feel physically and mentally ill when I played it for long periods of time. It still does to this day and I'm 27. It's a really weird and uncomfortable feeling that it's really hard to describe.
I think this game might be why I have casadastraphobia (fear of falling upwards into the sky, its a real phobia, look it up) due to the sky boxes being infinite sky textures without any other detail, whenever Mario fell off any floating surface and there was nothing to land on gave me so much discomfort, it felt like he was going to fall forever.
Even as a child I vividly remember that lying on the grass to see clouds made me feel like I was going to be pulled by the sky off the ground. To this day, this discomfort has not ceased.
@@snowflakeowl1762 That's pretty creepy, and i actually thought about this when i was a kid, like, just randomly being thrown into the sky without something to land at a high speed, it's very frighting actually. But at least there's no way that could happen to you in real life, interesting nonetheless.
@@snowflakeowl1762 I have dreams in which it is impossible to stay on the ground and it is a desperate fight to find things to stay anchored to the earth. Seemingly relates to this game as well
@@5T3LTH you should go rock climbing
I found so many glitches on tony hawks underground to get out of the map because so many games make me feel as if it's trying to keep me inside the map. But i wasn't scared. I just did my best to escape.
Glover always gave me the impression that everyone seemed to get from SM64. Especially the hub area in the beginning of the game.
Still an N64 game weirdly enough. I guess the outdated tech really does contribute a lot to the uncanny feeling.
Glover's levels were nightmare fuel for me as a kid, the claustrophobic tutorial cave, the devastated hub world, the never ending pits in the sky level...
Then there's Rocket: Robot on Wheels, oh boy, that game is something else, the first world (a circus world) has these creepy clowns that mimic your moves and your abilities, i just can't explain why they're so terrifying to me, you feel like they're gonna kill you in an instant lol
The N64 was an awesome console, but a creepy one at that
@@Josuh Took the words right out of my mouth, honestly. Somehow I forgot about the circus level, so thanks for me reminding me of that. Lol
I love that game! The first castle scene is fun and exciting! 😉⚡️
Oh god, yeah. Glover was some super creepy shit, with its depressing, isolated world and dreamlike levels which were literally all floating above an abyss or endless sky. The overworld slowly being restored didn’t alleviate those vibes either, as it was still devoid of NPCs or evidence of outside civilization. It just felt haunted, even if I knew that wasn’t the intent. Eventually, playing Glover gave me nightmares, and I had to stop playing lmaooo
What a time to be a kid.
Glover was *weird.* To this day I have no idea why the initial hub area was full of Silent Hill fog and deformed geometry. As a child, I was convinced that something bad was going to happen if I stayed in the overworld for too long, so I was always too afraid to explore it.
I found the locked doors in the castle to be scary when I was a kid, because they would make the scary bowser noise. I would try to stay as far away from them as possible until I got the key.
I thought I was the only one 😂
That noise still sends shivers down my spine when I hear it today.
literally me 😭
Lol
I always thought that bowser laughing was himself mocking/taunting you for not being able to get in
Scariest part was the janky camera angles lol
Glad that you mentioned the endless falling being weird. Ever had an adrenaline rush from falling in a videogame? Also the graphics are a huge point to me. GTA San Andreas was also fairly spooky to me, due to the render distance, fog and unclear textures.
Playing resident evil 7 on the ps vr. There is a stage near the end and you are on a ship it think. and you jump down an elevator shaft. i could feel my stomach do the woooaaaaah thing on that. Crazy how your brain makes stuff seem more real. Skyrim vr, if i play standing up and the character is running and stops. My body actually does tip forward a bit. Doesnt do it if im sitting down.
@@StevedaveTodd Ah yes, artificial movement in VR can be wild. I think that's in part what I like about Boneworks. It's a great VR shooter, too. It lets you freely run, climb, jump, grab enemies even. It has a pretty high terminal velocity, jumping from high places and sticking the landing feels wild!
I used to search for Bigfoot after watching UA-camrs uploading as if the game has bigfoot.
I guess what it really comes down to is that I'm not looking for an epic experience with Mario games. Replace it with Link and exploring is fun again.
Mind you I enjoy and and have beaten Mario 1-3, world, and I'm like Mario maker. 3D Mario just doesn't work for me.
The game is a deep fever dream. I think Mario has eaten so many Mushrooms that he no longer exists in reality so instead he exists in a trippy, liminal and warped reality where everything is smiling even the stuff that wants to hurt you.
Thats scarey asf when u think about it
Never felt that Mario 64 was a horror game. I liked how quiet it was outside. Very peaceful.
I agree, Mario 64 was a fun platform game. Ocarina of Time on the other hand...
Yeah this video just seems like a retroactive justification of creepypasta vibes, Mario 64 was just a fun game
Yeah it’s one of those things where in retrospect I can understand how someone COULD feel that way but neither I nor none of my siblings were scared of it as kids
Fr
I really did try to suspend disbelieve for this one but this guy kept saying stuff like "Dont you find it creepy how outside was quiet?"
Like dude, not really lmaooo
Yup. Not at all scary. This is just dumb.
“Super Mario 64 was not intended to be a horror game”
Thanks for pointing that out, I wouldn’t have known otherwise
Hahah
I've played 64 and 64 ds, and I feel like the ds version is the more unsettling of the two. Maybe it was the fact that it was a game that I could, and did, play through the night in bed. The Bowser silhouette when you die seems more sinister, and for a while I was convinced that the face would look creepier the more lives you lost. Big Boo's Haunt is downright creepy, especially the level where you unlock Luigi. I didnt want to go through the door where King Boos laugh was the loudest. Why would I go closer toward something that scared the pants off me? The fact that Bowser was able to capture Mario, Luigi, and Wario on top of Peach. Where does the fourth door in the rec room go? Why does the game pointedly tell me that I cant hear anything behind it, instead of being noninteractable or heck, not even being there in the first place? All in all, 64 has its unsettling moments, but 64 ds outright terrified me at times.
yeah I've never thought about the DS version being creepier, but you've made some good points. That and the grainier appearance of the DS adds into that too!
@@PressStartToContinueYT By the way, I really liked the sub topic of the enemy textures. I really like to compare Whomps Fortress and Throwback Galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy 2, which is just a recreation of WF. While I never necessarily got any negative vibes while playing the stage in 64, I get a much happier feeling when I play it in Galaxy 2, and I think its partly because of the enemy's design, which are more in line with the modern designs we see today. If I remember correctly, theres also more pink Bobombs to talk to, which may also make it feel less isolated.
@@joshbryan2261 bruh galaxy 2 scary as fuck
Still trying to figure out the white door
I agree! But also, the white door is a secret star where if you catch all the white rabbits that randomly spawn around, you get 8 keys and can go in and get a star. Although, even creepier, if you re enter the room after collecting the star, you just hear boos laughing and your character exits with a scared “mama mia” or something along those lines…
The lack of characters is also because of limitations. The same happens with the paintings: They were forced to exagerate poses and expressions or camera angles for those pictures because they needed the resultant low resolution image to be clearly readable (theatre actors do the same so you can see them from far away)
Think it like this: Mario64 was the first game of its kind, so no one was sure about anything and they tried to do their best. All that creepyness and weird sensations you get are because we live in a natural 3d space. Being this a recreation, it feels familiar to your mind, but little details like the lack of characters and sound, weird colours or confusing low resolution backgrounds, itch in the dephs of your brain: Your logica tells you everything is ok, but natural survival instinct claims there’s something enterely wrong there, and that traduces into one simple thought mechanic: possible danger = fear.
There’s nothing wrong with poor Mario’s basic 3D world. Its just your mind being tricky and intelligent.
great comments, thanks for watching!
Good commment
You nailed it, I was gonna comment about that uncanny valley feeling.
I was 13 when I first played it and it blew my mind at the time. I think another reason for the emptiness in the game was to not overwhelm kids in a 3D environment. In retrospect it looks somewhere between a dev sandbox and a finished game. If you look back at the first Super Mario Bros, it had that same lonely feeling in certain stages. Super Mario Bros 3 is really where they were able to make it feel like a living and breathing environment.
Dev sandbox id disagree it’s very well polished no glitches or bugs while you are playing,
it wasn’t comprised by limitations rather simply made because limitations finally allowed it to be, ive payed $100 for lesser gaming experiences
@@streetcarstv5088 Bruh the game is full of glitches wtf are you talking about?
I definitely always felt a strange feeling when seeing this game for the first time. Like you're living out a dream that you can't wake up from and someone's watching..
This game terrifies me as a little kid. My Nintendo 64 was in the basement as a kid and every time I died in this game, Bowsers laugh would scare the shit out of me and I would run upstairs. After a few seconds I would walk back down and continue playing lol
😂❤
That reminds me of renting 𝘋𝘪𝘴𝘯𝘦𝘺’𝘴 𝘏𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘛𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵
and peeking over from behind the sofa the watch Night at Bald Mountain over and over again despite having to close my eyes as the ghostly effects rose from their graves and galloped through the air
Reminds me of when I used to run away from the bathroom after flushing the toilet 😂
Lmaooo
Nice try Pajeet, come up with a better story next time
When I was a kid, the DS version of SM64 terrified me because of the hidden level inside that haunted mansion where you'd fight King Boo to unlock Luigi. You spend most of the level listening to King Boo's laugh to know which door (of a possible 4) to go through, because going through the wrong door takes you back to the start of the level. That laugh, paired with the merry-go-round music at the very start of the level, always terrified me. I never beat the level until I got a new copy of the game a few years ago
OMG i love the DS version.. and yea that level spooked me too xD
I liked that level when I was younger. Actually, I liked all the character unlock levels.
Same here
Lol dumb
I love the notion that the technological limits of the N64 have led to people feeling like these games are creepy when the game designers more than likely never intended to do so. M64, the Zelda series, even Starfox and Goldeneye.
Sure thing Joe, Majora's Mask was never intended to be creepy.
@@CarlosCFC92even OoT felt really eerie at times. Obviously the ReDead and nighttime, but Hyrule Field and really almost every environment always creeped me out even though it felt like home lol
@@tpike1296 I'm not the only one with that, lol... I couldn't play it properly as a kid because of how eerie it felt to me.
@@tpike1296as a kid I refused to play when night cycle hit and would spam the sun song so I could play in the day again since it scared me so bad 😭
To be fair, Pigma Dengar still looks creepy to me, I never liked how he looked as a zombie-like pig.
DUDE mario 64 is le hecking LIMINAL PERSONALIZED NEGATIVE EMOTIONAL EEL ICEBERG i can't even look at it without SHITTING AND CRYING
I’ve just felt people love scaring themselves and try too hard to make this game creepy. It’s one of the greatest games of all time and in all of my years I never felt it was scary.
well I guess you're lucky then!
Super Mario Galaxy was my favorite
Same
same here
Absolutely agree. People are dramatic.
Apparently the canonical reason Peach’s castle is so empty is because she has two. One where all of her furniture is, and another for all of her artwork.
Well that’d make a lot of sense
SM64DS: Am i a Joke to you?
@@garsrandom4358 y
@@Edz519 Because the ds version features her bedroom, her game room, with lots of furniture, etc..etc..But she could totally have bedrooms in both castle so it doesn't make it totally unimaginable
Does anyone else remember seeing the promotional renderings found in the instruction book or in strategy guides? The one of metal Mario (you know, THE metal Mario render) still gets me today - it’s clearly meant to be Hazy Maze Cave, yet that exact area isn’t anywhere in the stage. It’s almost like an official reimagining, or cut content.
It’s all so funny, because Miyamoto stated in an interview he didn’t want SM64 to feel dangerous per se, but merely “mysterious”. That’s why so many characters aren’t hostile, and why there’s not many obstacle course moments throughout the game.
If only the original creators could see what they’ve done to our childhoods, ha.
Oh yes, that renderrrrrr!
I actually had legit nightmares about some of the maps from super mario 64 or dreams where bowser was literally chasing you around the castle.
me 2 and i never played through the hole game because it never felt right xD maybe i was too easily scared but im glad i was not the only one
This game feels like a dream. Like when Link woke the wind fish and realized that the love and friendship he created with all the characters, was all destroyed. His friends all stopped existing if he chose to wake up.
The scariest élément is that it seems that nintendo realized hpw creepy their game was and over compensated with the cute elements and bright colored text and it just makes the etherial nightmare feeling increase.
Zelda Ocarina of time (used same engine and released around same time) is also often quite lonely, but the story, characters and even enemies give it life.
U
U
I think OOT has a similar feeling at times though. Most especially when you become adult link and walk out to castle town for the first time. I think for me, it's the wide open spaces with absolutely nothing going on that gets to me. Well, that and the Redeads.
Starting from when I young, and even to this day, I sometimes have dreams of completely made up environments and levels inside SM64. One was a huge, descending spiral staircase with no end. One was this overgrown swamp area in the Tick Tock Clock place for some reason. One was this foggy, medieval abandoned village with water fountains everywhere. Some were just, completely surreal and fragmented setpieces with no rhyme or purpose. They have always unsettled me, but like you said, they also always gave me this kind of, nostalgic and wistful feeling whenever I think back to them.
That's why fanmade levels from SM64 ROMhacks have always been so surreal to me to the point where I get genuinely uneasy trying to watch any playthroughs of them, and why the custom levels displayed in Greenio's Personalised Copy ARG affected me so badly because they looked and felt *real*, like, another universe where the 64DD was a success and SM64 got its expansion to include more stuff.
Made me think back to my dreams. Of visions of things that could have occured in another reality, separate from ours. Psychological anomalies that feel so real, and yet aren't.
Man, liminal spaces fucked me up bad.
See, this is the detail that gets me the most: So many people have had dreams about this game. I used to have full-blown nightmares about this game, with monsters that weren't in the game, levels that were surrealistic and impossible to actually complete, and music that the game doesn't have.
So many of us have had dreams about this game, and yet, I haven't heard too many people talking about having dreams about other games. Not that they aren't, of course, but that's just what I have noticed.
What is it about this game specifically that causes us to dream about it more than other games?
Not reading all dat
Never thought of it from this perspective, but you put into words something I had vague feelings about from the game but could never really point out...
This is just a dude yapping. If this game is unsettling to anyone they’re insanely soft. It’s one of the brightest and happiest games from my childhood. The music, the worlds, everything. Even the haunted world, whatever it was called, was a “fun” spooky feeling.
Will people just accept anything if some dude on the internet says it?
mario 64 always felt like it was missing something to me as a kid, even when playing the DS port with all the bonus characters and multiplayer modes. going back to the n64 version only amplifies that feeling
This reminded me of how when I was little, I had a CRT TV in my room with the N64 hooked up to it, and I remember sometimes at night as I laid in bed I would stare at the screen in fear because for some reason I had this looming feeling that the screen would turn on by itself, I thought either a game would start up, or just something random would come on. I had this feeling that if I looked away it would turn on, maybe with the image of Mario drowning or something. I haven't thought about this in years and forgot about it but somehow this video made me remember it. Really unsettling even now when I think about it. I had a lot of these weird fears as a kid
You're Not Alone in That. I Had A Fear Of My TV Randomly Jumpscaring Me When I Was About 5. idk why.
Omg I had this fear too !!!!! Even in the 90s when a TV channel had technical difficulties and they would put a screen up I always thought I was gonna get jumpscared 😅
Dam. This did bring back some weird memories. I used to stare into the static when tv would go off for the night. There was something awful happening and I couldn't process it. I also remember the tv turning on randomly on in the middle of the night, but I almost always blacked out and couldn't remember it the next day. I have maybe two or three memories I've unrepressed do to ...questionable substances. Thinking about those memories puts me in a feedback loop. I get a glimpse of what they said, then my mind empties, and I have the feeling I can recall so I think again, reexperience, and end up in the same place. It's mentally and physically taxing so I give up trying to remember, and am just left with questions
CRTs are just so creepy in general. The constant visual 'hum' and appearance of activity even when they are off is super unsettling. As a kid I had one in my room, and the light from the street lamp outside would bounce off the curved glass and it was so weird to watch. It never really felt fully turned off, and I always felt like it would turn on or something would reach out of it as a kid.
Some of these tvs really turned on at random with seemingly no input ime.
5:54
By definition, Peaches castle is actually the *most* liminal space in the game.
Liminal space definition: In architecture, liminal spaces are defined as "the physical spaces between one destination and the next." Common examples of such spaces include hallways, airports, and streets.
The castle is the space between every level, and by definition is a liminal space.
yea that part annoyed me, he has no idea what a liminal space actually is
And it could be that liminal spaces like these mentioned, scare people so much because they don't generally exist in nature, being that nature is fractal and spaces in nature seamlessly compliment one another.
@@bathroomshy
A lot about the way he explains things annoys me. The script he's reading from feels very half-baked the whole way through.
This game felt more wholesome to me than a lot of 64 games, though he is alone in a large castle, a lot of the music was really uplifting and calming the only part that was kinda scary to me as a kid was Boo’s mansion
Honestly I take that back 😭 I can’t forget about the eel from jolly rogers bay and the going on the slide, but other than that mario made me happy 😃
@@Thereheeis The eel, Boo's mansion and the endless starecase always creeped me out as a kid no matter how wholesome the rest of the game was.
when i played it as a child, it didn't freak me out quite as much as it does now, looking back. however, i did always feel kinda odd roaming through all those empty spaces. when i stopped playing, it almost felt as if i had woken up from a strange dream.
the aspect that adds to that feeling the most, for me, are the endless hallways that got you running towards those huge paintings. the further you'd go, the more they'd move away from you (at one point, you'd even fall, as we could see in your video). most of my nightmares are like that, especially when i was younger. really eerie for a game developed for children!
I always found those little black orbs in Bowser levels to be creepy. When they shoot fireballs they emit this organic, breathy sigh
I remember a vivid nightmare I had from Mario 64 where I was trapped in peach's castle and bowser just showed up in the main room. There was no way to fight him and I would just have to run away, but no matter what room you go to he manages to find you anyway.
I think playing Super Mario 64 so much (in my case the DS version) kind of broke me of my fear of video games. Though there was a period of time where that specific mechanic of an invincible boss chasing you indefinitely still freaked the fuck out of me.
omfg it’s super mario 64 i’m gonna shit my pants i’m so scared
This game IMMEDIATELY scared the living shit out of me as a kid. From hearing that creepy music to bowser’s laugh when u walk up to a door u cant open yet, to a boo randomly appearing in the back castle hall. Not to mention how eerie peach and bowser’s portraits around the castle looked. Nightmares for DAYYYYYS LOL
Damn someone understands me
The Music when he laughs is a HUGE no no in my book.
Nah the frikin water maps gave me the creeps as a kid I literally couldn't play them alone. Cause you'd have to dive deep in that water . Fuckin aye
@@dinaramadani1671something About being alone in this watermaps lmao I bet this game fucked me up more than I can comprehend lol
The bowser laugh at the unopened door is the reason I couldn’t progress in the game as a kid
I always found SM64 unsettling because it's so unclear what it is. It's hard to tell if it could be a game trying to pass as a dream, a dream trying to pass as a game, or something else entirely.
Personally, I never found the game scary in any way, except for some odd reason Jolly Roger bay and wet dry world always upset me and made me feel incredibly sad. The music is meant to be serene but to me it always felt depressing, cold and lonely.
@Anatoli Smorrin Jolly Roger Bay and Dire Dire Docks are separate levels in SM64, in Tooie it's Jolly Rogers Lagoon
I loved that music! I thought it was awesome how it changed whether you were in the water or not.
interesting, its one of my all time favourite just chill musical pieces
*as you sit there, upset as a kid, your mom comes in with a tray full of warm cookies and nice milk, hugging you abd wrapping a blanket around you as she urges her little soldier on, making you feel warm inside and giving you courage as she watches you patiently get through the level, proud of you the entire way*
@@DkKombo Thank you for this delightful thought.
In my case, the creepy feeling while playing SM 64 came years later. And for marios death-animations, i was rather fascinated how believable mario got back then.
The game where i was creeped out right at the beginning, was Banjo Kazooie. I had nightmares of this game, but i think it was because of the new sensations i had to get used to. But its not a surprise that we felt like this. The change from 2D to 3D games was such a big impact, where we as kids weren't prepared for. xD
As a kid i always dreamed of mario 64 rooms that i know dont exist but that for some reason i could feel they were there, when mario 64 made a comeback in this years i knew i wasnt alone in this.
SAME! I always dreamed of a giant underground floor through entering in the castle moat. The were always doors that were never opened because there was just so much down there.
I dreamed of a sort of attic sunroof as well as a conservatory for the castle, and a bigger garden
Dude I used to have dreams of the game like that too, it was incredibly creepy.
I thought I was the only person who acc was scared of this game until i found this video but so many people have experienced what I did.
I still love the game, just as a kid I found it so unnerving and creepy.
I always dreaded the underwater levels or any levels that involved swimming ! I would stop playing and have my cousin play through them.
Another thing I always did feel “lonely” playing the game.
Same. To this day I still can’t play the water levels
me neither, y do u think that is? i always finded this game creepy and never knew why, thats why i clicked this video xD
Dude that underwater level with the Giant eel still haunts my nightmares.
Ever since I was a kid I always feared big houses, like mansions or in this case castles. Just like, the idea of a home being so huge that two people could potentially be inside it, living their lives, without knowing of the other person's prescence. That's the feeling Peach's Castle in 64 gave me, just the unnerving feeling of somebody being able to open a door in the castle and you, as Mario, being so far away from said door that you cant even hear it
@mlg noob damn, you beat me to it
I blame the Casper movie as a kid for giving me the fear of big houses lol
@@aphoticphoton
I blame broke ass parents and capitalism
This is actually crazy that Miyamoto's games are tied to his experiences as a child. Did he have a strange dream? Or was it something dark??
I find a lot of these theories/creepypastas fascinating, and they're very fun to read and watch but SM64 itself has never really creeped me out at all. it's probably because I grew up with the DS port where the castle definitely felt more alive and "lived in," with the rabbits everywhere and the rec room and such, which made it seem much less like a liminal space. that probably extended over when I played the original, as if my experiences in the DS version were telling me "there's nothing scary about this castle my guy, just focus on not dying for the 100th time in RR"
nowadays I'm an avid watcher of SM64 speedruns, and seeing people tear apart stages like SSL and WDW on a regular basis takes away any creepiness factor that I would've gotten from them. don't get me started on the TASes. the geometry of the desolate castle exterior is just another tool for the almighty reality warper mario to be used to phase through reality and travel dozens of parallel universes away in his quest to open the moat door underwater and gank bowser in the fire sea where he would least expect it
I agree with everything you said, I had the exact same experience
It isn't scary, people are just being dorks and jumping on this dumb bandwagon for whatever reason.
The Mario death animations were creepy for many gamers and I'm surprised that the Bowser silhouette isn't on the SM64 Conspiracy Iceberg because it's wild the first time you see it. Funny enough, Bowser's Fury also contains a variant of the infamous silhouette.
I noticed that! I was like, wait....I've seen this somewhere before!
@@PressStartToContinueYT It's really cool that Nintendo finally fixed that Bowser Face and gave him back his laugh.
The emptiness of the beginning outside of Peach's castle has always been slightly unnerving for me. You really did describe it perfectly.
I think it’s a mixture of realness and dreamlike qualities that get mixed up in our little kid brains. Conflating the two in our memories. I think this is mostly with early 3D games. Polygons that are almost real but just not quite there. And environments and music that is simply dreamlike is the only way I can explain it. Great video
For me, the scariest thing wasn’t necessarily just the Bowser laugh, but it’s the sound effect with the Bowser laugh whenever you try to enter a door that you’re not allowed to enter because you don’t have enough stars (including the first time you enter the castle). Even as someone who casually plays through the 16 star run, intentionally going to the 70 star door without enough stars meant hearing the creepy noise before you entered the 70 star door. The endless stair music was a close second.
But oddly, nothing else bothered me. Most of the things mentioned in the video felt like a charm rather than a creepy feeling. Maybe that’s just a me thing though.
yeah the sound effect scared me a lot. i really liked when he said “i really try to not die because it scared me a lot”. i haven’t think about it but i also hated to die because of the animation and sounds. i really tried my best to not try to open a door i couldn’t enter because of the music and bowsers laugh
A great man once said: "So long gay Bowser." Really makes you think.
🤣🤣🤣🤣
I will never forget when me and my siblings first saw the giant Boo in the hallway leading to the courtyard. The fact that it wasn't there before freaked us all out and we ran into our room and hid under the blankets 😂
I think I cried a little. And was terrified of going to the basement for a while. Whenever I had to I would run as quick as possible and tried not to look in boo's direction.
😭
I couldn't play that damn haunted house level.
The music was scary as hell.
That piano jumpscare.
And that damn carousel music
The game was insanely popular among all us kids in elementary and middle school, and literally none of us were scared or unsettled. This weird narrative is built upon on very recent memes that have gotten carried away. At best you could argue some of the visuals look a little garish in HD, but certainly not back then when played on a CRT. The game was very warm, bright, colorful and overall pleasant. Even Big Boo's Haunt is mostly silly spooky (in a little kid's halloween party sort of way) than actually terrifying.
For many, it's not about the color tone or music, it's about the feelings wandering the castle alone can evoke in areas that have liminal qualities. It doesn't give this effect to everyone, but to many it does. Minecraft has this same phenomenon for many. Horror can have less to do with the visual aesthetics and more to do with the lack of information left to the imagination and dreamlike spaces that can evoke that feeling of dread in a lot of people. Not everyone, but a good subset.
@@JoryStultz1234 I still don't buy that, because those liminal qualities if present would've affected somebody, anybody, back then. But they didn't.
You're not going to find anyone tell you they were creeped out by that. Maybe the piano in _Big Boos Haunt_ or the painting for _Lethal Lava Land,_ and that's only if you're a little kid.
This liminal dread is a very recent phenomena caused by people who explicitly delve into creepypasta/SPC type content.
Same with old multiplayer maps in Valve games; new players exploring these maps offline for the 1st time report that "liminal space" feeling, yet in the 00s I knew kids who's whole idea of fun was downloading multiplayer maps off sites like FPSBanana and just exploring them; seeing the work the mapper put into designing his custom map.
You're only going to find this liminal space fear if you go out and look for it. It's not there naturally.
@@xlixity You are speaking for yourself only. I have always found the game to feel off in a dreamy way and that makes some people feel strange. You don't have to buy anything for someone to have a different opinion than you, just humility.
This game actively gave me nightmares as a child, I don't think this is all bullshit.
@@xlixity "those liminal qualities if present would've affected somebody, anybody, back then. But they didn't."
Bruh, you're not the main character. People have been talking about this for decades, increasingly so as they grew up and found the words to describe it. I felt lots of joy exploring this game as a kid, but also had many moments of unexplained paranoia and dread in the empty spaces that I didn't feel again til I played games like Slender years later.
Regardless of whether you and your friends were the ultimate gigachads you describe, SM64 had a haunting effect on me and many others sometimes in between our much more frequent moments of enjoyment. It's not like we got so scared we stopped playing; obviously we didn't, cause we all remember the whole game. The human mind and the wide matrix in which it processes and interprets what it experiences is more complex than you give it credit for.
5:04 Well, the princess' castle is a good example of unsettling and empty space, but with the song, it just isn't scary.
That Peach painting turning into Bowser as you run down a long, dark hallway scared the absolute shit out of me as a kid, and still does now… 🥴🥴
How?
I remember that
Oh no, the picture of peach turned into bowser. The madness. Stick to playing a leapfrog or something more your speed, might die from fright playing rated E Games
omg lol yess that is soo unsettling and anxiety inducing, trippy scary
@@SuicidalOrphan I've played dead space countless times and never felt in panic. I've played resi7 countless times as well and only got frightened once. But I think lavender town's song is unsettling and can't listen to it for long. Let people be different, edgelord.
4:17 scared the fuck out of me.
You know what i totally understand why you mentioned empty feeling when playing this game. This game was a blast when i was a kid, played it everyday and i remember i dreamed about sm64 and i was actually stuck in that "empty" world. Really disturbing
I’ve literally always had this feeling and have never been able to describe it but this video does just that.
Even when i was younger, it creeped me out. What would really creep me out is the thought of all the empty rooms with nothing inside of them, while i was somewhere else. Always felt like something was lurking 2 rooms over
it’s literally so unsettling like i even get creeped out thinking of it now , will never play it again
This is exactly how I feel about the game. I didn’t realize what it was that scared me, but this describes it perfectly
@@reillyangeline Exactly
I didn’t understand why it made me so unsettled as a kid because the feeling came and went. I still have a copy on ds played it a year or so ago and realised it was because of the emptiness in certain areas and most definitely the feeling of something nearby like you describe. I find it crazy, but it also relieves me, that so many others experienced the same thing
Yes it's an empty Mario themed 3D world. I would play it with Link, but 3d Mario just doesn't jive with me.
Bowser's laugh upon entering the castle terrified me as a young child to the point where I wouldn't play for weeks.
I always felt like something was watching me. There were times that Id be so afraid, i would just stand in the corner and watch the game to see if something would pop out. This would occured to me mostly on the lava and boo level.
lakitu....
I mean Lakitu is literally following you the entire time.
11:31 sums up this whole video
This game gave me the most unnerving, empty feeling every time I would walk through the castle. I thought I was just weird
Exact same, such a lonely
I just found it very difficult as a kid but not scary
That loneliness was comforting to me
This is my take on the reasoning behind the creepiness this game emanates. As a child, this was my first and one of my favorite games. I was 7. I was extremely excited to not only play this game for the first time, but to also explore every area of the game. It was all new to me. Now, as an adult...it’s a much different perspective. This to me now is a vessel of beautiful yet far away memories echoing from the distant past. It’s like visiting a playground at an elementary school you used to attend but as an adult. It’s a distant memory and the playground has already served its purpose many years ago but it will continue to stand there to perpetually remind you that there is nothing else here for you. Super Mario 64 is a vessel of your memories when you were a kid. But now as an adult when you play it, the castle feels so lonely as you and only you can remember those memories.
I’m a kid and you’re making me afraid to play
This is exactly how it makes me feel. I think when we were younger maybe we didn’t notice how empty the worlds of these games really were. Our memories of them are much more vibrant, so when we revisit them they seem hauntingly empty and quiet. This can be genuinely upsetting when you realise that it means you will never be able to relive those memories the same way. You will never be able to revisit that world in your childhood memories because it never really existed the way you remember it.
Well you're right. Because when you're a child you do not pay attention to the texture, you just get frustrated and encouraged by your own brother(s), telling you to run away from the pokey but you don't and die and then all the "aww"s come up.
Remember: When the brain doesn't know it acts like it's a common accurance, but once the brain knows that thing becomes your fear
(Yeah i'm bad at this, you can make this better)
Your comment hit me hard. Extremely accurate, and the simile about an old playground is poignant af and super accurate
Uncle fester out here with the overbearing existentialism
It's weird hearing this because that game always felt comforting to me. Despite the vastness of the castle it never really felt empty.
"Yo, Super Mario 64 is super creepy, right? Right??"
.... No.
When was a kid I was so horrified of the Lethal Lava Land Painting, so much to were every time I went to got down there I would cover my eyes when it was visible.
I went to got down there - BoyOHBoy 2022
I don’t remember being scared of it when I was a kid but I do remember not wanting to play it by myself. I think it’s the emptiness of the castle yet things are everywhere
This was a pleasure to listen through! The uncanny, claustrophobic, and empty atmosphere of Mario 64 is such an interesting topic and yours is one of the better takes ☺️ I hadn’t heard of liminal space before this video…it really helps explain what makes certain sections of Peach’s Castle so unsettling. The hallway the Boo leads you down, the false floor to Bowser in the Dark World, and the endless stairs all put an eerie spin on this phenomenon, which is probably why they stick in my mind most when thinking back on the game…
@Leroy Jenkins Hello! I remember your comments, thank you so much 😊
I know right? It's something I never really thought of until re-playing it recently. Thanks for watching man
Nice pfp