Those who were around at the time will know just how much of a big deal Super Mario 64 was when it released in 1996. It represented not only the first 3D Mario game, but also the next step forward in video game technology. It was quite something, I can assure you.
Fast-forward nearly two decades, and someone is taking the classic N64 game and essentially “demaking” it to run on the Game Boy Advance. Yes, that’s right, it’s being rebuilt from scratch to run on hardware that’s not been on the market since 2008/2009 (depending on the region).
In the video above, we get a glimpse of the project in its current state, which is being done by coder Joshua Barretto. A cursory glance shows that we do, indeed, have a recognizable version of Super Mario 64 that’s being recreated to run on the GBA.
Super Mario 64: Now with pixels!
According to a report from DSO Gaming, Barretto’s demake is utilizing meshes from the Nintendo DS port of the original game. While it’s still very much in development, keep in mind that this is meant to be running on defunct hardware that was originally released in 2001.
You can check the trajectory of the fan project by going back across some of their older videos. In this one – uploaded just a few weeks ago – we can compare and contrast. In the footage, we see that Mario himself is just a red triangle; a red triangle with a shadow, mind.
The castle from Mario 64 is still very much present, but looking at the latest video, we can see that Barretto has made quite a lot of progress. In less than two months, they’ve added in the actual character model, new movement mechanics, a pause menu, better textures, and some bug fixes.
There’s even a settings menu, something that wasn’t present on the Nintendo 64 OG. We get to see options for reducing the resolution and view distance, plus the ability to disable detailed textures to make the game run smoother.
At the moment, there’s no release date for this Game Boy Advance rebuild of Super Mario 64. And, as far as I can tell, it’s just coming to the console itself, so you’d need to actually have a GBA to play it. If I had one concern, it’s how Nintendo will react if it sees its IP being demade for ancient hardware. I hope they go easy on Barretto. I’m getting tired of big legal teams bringing their litigation hammers down on regular folk.
