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The Wii U re-release of Super Mario 64 seems like the perfect time for a retrospective, especially when you realise it's been nearly 20 years since its release in 1996. But there's something about the idea of a retrospective that doesn't quite fit this game. Hindsight is often ahistorical, free of the day-to-day chatter and contemporary context. A pioneering work like Super Mario 64, on the other hand, is impossible to divorce from its context because those same factors made it more than a great game. Super Mario 64 was not the first 3D game by a long shot, and not even the first 3D platformer. The game seems like a pioneer because it became the template for true 3D design - and so is now something of a legendary creation. The problem is that a lot of the accepted wisdom about the making of Mario 64 turns out to be either exaggerated or untrue, and even the things we can be sure of are pretty vague.
The N64's launch was not pushed back solely so that Miyamoto could finish his masterpiece: Nintendo claimed the delay was to 'mature' software, but the initial run of hardware had performed below expectations. It is also said that the N64's unique controller was built solely around the game's demands: the pad was being prototyped at the time Mario 64 was being made, and so it (among others) was used for a lot of testing. The mess of correlation and causality, when myth gets involved, is hard to disentangle.
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