Acting for Two: The game popularized Charles Martinet's role as the voice of Mario. Fans have also noticed that various enemies, such as Bob-ombs, appear to use pitch-shifted versions of Martinet's Mario voice clips, extending Martinet's repertoire to multiple characters in a single game. Furthermore, the sounds of Bowser and Boo laughing are pitched versions of a Stock Sound Effect, "Comical Laugh: Male", distributed with the General Series 6000 sound effects pack in the early 1990s; coincidentally, this laugh was also performed by Charles Martinet, who confirmed◊ that he had provided recordings for this library.
Ascended Fanon: There have been many rumors as to how to play as Luigi in the original. He would later be playable in the DS version.
Content Leak: A significant portion of the game's source code was leaked to the public on July 24, 2020, alongside a large trove of other archival Nintendo files and assets. Among other things, the source code leak revealed the lost assets for Luigi's model and textures, and a text file revealing that the game was in development from September 7, 1994 to May 20, 1996. Contrary to popular belief, the various fan ports of the game to other platforms were not made from this code; they are based on a long-running reverse engineering project which coincidentally matured around the same time the leak happened.
Super Mario 64 2, intended for the doomed N64 Disk Drive. It was to star co-op multiplayer, and a playable Luigi, though footage was never shown; the stress of trying to get the game finished before its ultimate cancellation directly motivated Shigeru Miyamoto to stop directing video games. Even before that, rumors started going around that the original Mario 64 was named at one point Super Mario FX (actually a code name for the FX chip) and was destined to the SNES before being completely scrapped. This was proven to be false though.
End of an Era: The final finished game of any kind directed by Shigeru Miyamoto, and consequently the last to see the same kind of sweeping innovation that marked his career as a game director. Miyamoto did direct Super Mario 64 2, but the Development Hell and ultimate cancellation of the project left him too burnt out to go on.
Killer App: For the Nintendo 64, it was Nintendo's shining moment and one of the few franchises that not only survived the Video Game 3D Leap, but practically codified 3D Platforming games for years to come. The Nintendo DS port, on the other hand, brought in many people who would play the new, fun, addictive mini games almost nonstop, and bought this game and the DS for those features alone.
Manual Misprint: The DS remake lists the character's stats for speed, power, and jump in the manual. They aren't exactly accurate.
Luigi is given 1/3 in power, and 3/3 in the other two categories. His strength is equal to Mario's, as is his jump height, apart from his extremely high backwards somersault. He's slower than Mario, but still faster than Wario. However, he can glide, run on water, has more control over his momentum in midair, and is the fastest swimmer by far.
Yoshi is given 0/3 in power, 2/3 in speed, and 3/3 in jump. He's the weakest character and shares his speed with Luigi. His flutter jump can get him a lot of height, but his jump height without it is lower than Mario's, and he can only do it from a normal or double jump.
Wario's given 3/3 in power, and 1/3 in the other two. This is actually completely accurate.
When Mario is drowning in quicksand, his head expands (unseen to the player) so the top is visible. Otherwise, Mario's cap wouldn't be visible as he makes a Last Grasp at Life.
Many spherical objects in the game, such as iron balls, Keronpa Balls, and the main bodies of Bob-Ombs, and Chuckyas are actually just images of a ball that billboards towards the player regardless of angle, something that's only really noticable when the shine on the sphere's top left part stays there regardless of the angle it's viewed at. The Chain Chomp at Bob-Omb Battlefield is one of the exceptions to this.
The Original Darrin: Nintendo got the original voice of Peach's lines in 64 (Leslie Swan) to rerecord the newly translated lines in DS over using Peach's then-current voice actor (Jen Taylor), largely due to the nostalgia factor.
Updated Re-release: A year after its initial Japanese release, Super Mario 64 was given a "Shindou Pak Taiou" edition (commonly known as the Shindou Edition) that added Rumble Pak support, included a new Easter Egg on the title screen (in which pressing R fills the background with copies of Mario's face), and carried over all the changes made to the international version of the game. However, the release also altered many of Mario's voice clips and patched out the Backwards Long Jump and numerous other glitches, leading it to become more contested among western fans. This was the version used for Super Mario 3D All-Stars.
The "L is real 2041"/"2401" plaque on the statue in the castle courtyard's pond (where you can also find the Boos). Despite being so fuzzy it could just as easily read "Eternal Star", this was commonly interpreted as some way to unlock Luigi. Although Luigi was planned for the game, he and his assets were removed before release due to hardware limitations. The game has been hacked to the core in the decades since, and the only traces of Luigi are vestigial: unused arrays with the Mario object and an unused second slot. It took a leak of early Super Mario 64 source code to surface the model data for Luigi, confirming that the development for him had gotten pretty far before he was scrapped. Humorously, the length of time between the release of 64 and the leak was twenty-four years and a month, aka 2401.
A connected rumor is that the perceived number on the plaque represents the total number of coins in the game. Plenty of missions see Mario collecting coins for a Power Star, and each main course saves the player's coin high score, so it might make sense that collecting all of them could unlock Luigi. The only problem is, there are 2657 unique coins in the game, not 2401. Others claimed that the number was a lap count to run around the fountain or the castle grounds. After all, the nearby course introduces Mr. I, an enemy defeated by running around it until it rolls its eye. In both cases, the alleged unlock conditions were hard to falsify due to the amount of effort required with no indication of progress.
Another interpretation of the text on the plaque is "L is real in Paper M", supposedly hinting at Luigi's role in the far-off Paper Mario 64. Apparently the graphics designers had five years of foresight about the North American release date of Paper Mario. And were still off by a day, as it was released there on February 5, which would be 2501. Not to mention that "Paper M" was still named Super Mario RPG 2 at the time of Super Mario 64's release, and went through several titles before releasing first in Japan as Mario Story.
Some thought the plaque's lower line read "Pit Mario xy". A pretty vague instruction for a game full of bottomless pits, especially given that the courses' world axes are invisible.
Because The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is built on Super Mario 64's game engine, several assets from the former game are reused in the latter, one of them being the "L is real" plaque. This led to more than a few rumors claiming that there was some sort of connection between the two games beyond technical stuff, as younger players most likely weren't aware of the fact that video games could reuse each other's engines. Some players figured the instructions from reading the sign in Ocarina could be applied to 64 to solve the mystery. There were even claims that you could find Luigi in Ocarina of Time or Link in Super Mario 64. The infamous plaque's presence in Ocarina of Time, however, is also commonly used to disprove the L is real rumor.
A Nintendo representative confirmed, back in the day, that the sign means literally nothing,◊ and was just put there as a troll move by the developers solely to get people to speculate. While Luigi was later included in 64 DS, Nintendo brought back the courtyard area in Super Mario Odyssey, where the plaque's texture is as blurry as ever.
Similarly, there was a rumor that Waluigi could be unlocked in DS. A rumor that stayed persistent until the game was finally data mined.
That you can ride and control Yoshi. Yoshi himself appears in the game as an Easter Egg upon collecting all 120 Power Stars, and a Yoshi egg texture exists in the game (complete with animation), but the feature was never actually included in the final version. Yoshi would first be rideable in a 3D Mario title starting Super Mario Sunshine, and would later appear in Super Mario 64's DS remake as a fully playable standalone character — in fact, he's the first character you play as, with Mario needing to be unlocked.
That there are other powerups, such as Ninja Mario, Fire Mario, and Naked Mario.
That you can find Bowser's submarine from Dire, Dire Docks after it vanishes upon getting the first star.
The DS version's file select screen shows a black box on the back-right tower of Peach's Castle. Rumors spread that hitting this black box with the cannon in the courtyard would do X thing, ranging from unlocking Waluigi above, to weirder rumors. The box is visible in E3 2004 gameplay footage, though its purpose is still unknown, so the file select image was just of an earlier version of the castle grounds.
An early Nintendo Power preview said Bowser could "Breath fire and snort ice", but he only ever does the former ingame. "Snorting ice" would later be used by the robotic Bowser in Luigi's Mansion.
32 courses were originally planned, but only 15 wound up in the final game due to the memory limitations of the N64's game paks.
A multiplayer function with Luigi was planned early on, but scrapped due to hardware limitations, as the team couldn't include both him and the elaborate level designs they wanted. While shadows of the scrapped multiplayer feature still exist in the final game's code, assets for Luigi only emerged in the July 24, 2020 "gigaleak" of archival material from Nintendo's servers, and were promptly decompiled and reassembled by fans.
Originally, the goalposts from the original Super Mario Bros. were to be featured, but Miyamoto and co. decided it was more fun to have Power Stars as the goals instead. This scrapped idea would eventually evolve into the gameplay style introduced in Super Mario 3D Land.
A scrapped item for the Big Boo's Haunt level included a "Boo Key", and there was a counter for the amount of Boo Keys Mario collected (PAL versions replaced the key icon with "Ü", which itself is unused even in the German translation).
The early version of Mario's triple jump was a spin jump that allowed him to float down rather than a very high arc full of flips. The early triple jump would eventually make it into the final game, performed by Mario whenever he gets caught by a Tweester or bounces off a Fly Guy or a Spindrift, and this floaty descent was given as a basic ability to Luigi when backflipping in the DS remake.
The game's code has an unfinished model of a proposed Blaarg enemy, based on the creatures from Super Mario World.
In early builds of the game, some of the voices were different; Mario had a more screechy, child-like voice supplied by stock voice clips from the Warner Bros. sound library (via CDs released for professional purposes); in the final game, he'd be voiced by Charles Martinet with a heavy Italian accent and a somewhat deeper voice (though still high-pitched for a grown man like Mario). Similarly, Bowser's voice clips are unaltered in early builds, resulting in him sounding more tiger-like compared to the pitched-down versions used in the final game. Given that Martinet was cast as Mario all the way back in 1990 and had already been voicing him in video games since 1994, it's likely that these early audio clips were just placeholders.
The castle paintings all have three vertical sections, which can be independently set to any warp destination (similar to Wet-Dry World's water level gimmick). What was planned with a single painting that can lead to multiple levels is unclear, but it's not used in the final game, as every painting has the same target for all three stripes.
The Shoshinkai '95 previews showcase an early version of the castle grounds closely resembling the castle layout from Super Mario RPG.
Among the files included in the 2020 Gigaleak are two enemies that were never implemented in the final game:
The first, interchangeably referred to in the code as Motos and Motosman, can pick up and throw Mario and can be picked up and thrown in turn, similarly to the Big Bob-omb and Chuckya. However, unlike those two, Motos can't be defeated unless it is thrown into lava. This plus strings of code tying it to Lethal Lava Land and Bowser in the Fire Sea imply that it was eventually replaced by the Bully and/or Big Bully enemies.
The second unused enemy is a generic grasshopper character, which didn't get past an untextured model and a simple hopping animation.
Super Mario 64 DS was originally announced as Super Mario 64 x 4 and would have featured co-op multiplayer, as an early screenshot◊ showed Yoshi, Mario, Luigi, and Wario all fighting Bowser at once.
There was a preview screenshot of Mario, Luigi, and Wario wearing Wing Caps and Yoshi with Magic Wings which implied that the Wing, Metal, and Vanish abilities would've been universally shared with everyone. While any character can use the Wings item in the local multiplayer competitive mode, they are limited to Mario in the main adventure.
Super Mario 64 DS contains unused animations for Peach depicting her walking, running, and jumping, which are distinct from the animations used to depict her in motion during the game's ending. Interestingly, the filenames for these animations don't contain the "op" or "ed" prefixes used to distinguish her animations for the game's opening and ending sequences, though they're all still stored together in the folder used for NPC assets.
Working Title: The game was known as Ultra 64 MARIO Brothers for a while in development, tying in with how the Nintendo 64 was originally shown off as the Ultra 64, to the point there was a title screen made for it. The model for the "Ultra" part was uncovered among assets included in the 2020 Gigaleak.
Other Trivia
To date, there are two coins in the game that are considered impossible to get, even with glitch exploitation and TAS tricks; one is a coin hidden underground in the larger version of Tiny-Huge Island note Not to be confused with a similar coin that spawns under where the bowling balls roll out, which player pannenkoek2012 eventually managed to acquire, and another is a coin in the unreachable "Mystery Goomba" in Bowser in the Sky (a Goomba that accidentally spawns out of bounds on the level's death barrier).
Mario and MIPS the rabbit were the first two characters created for the game. MIPS, who is named after the microprocessor of the same name used in the Nintendo 64, was extensively used in early N64 test simulations, but was kept in the final game because the development team liked him a lot.
extending Martinet's repertoire to multiple characters in a single game. Furthermore, the sounds of Bowser and Boo laughing are pitched versions of a Stock Sound Effect, "Comical Laugh: Male", distributed with the General Series 6000 sound effects pack in the early 1990s; coincidentally, this laugh was also performed by Charles Martinet, who confirmed
