World-bending ‘Mario 64’ VR Mod Makes the 30 Year-old Classic Feel Magical Once Again

This post was originally published on this site

Super Mario 64 (1996) was a seminal platformer that, for many, was also the first true 3D game they ever played. Now, with the help of AI vibecoding and a decompiled version of the game, you might be able reexperience the magic in mixed reality.

XR creative technologist and developer Lucas Martinic released a video of Super Mario 64 working on a Pico headset, essentially making for a floating 3D ‘magic window’ of sorts. It’s a cool effect we’ve seen in a number of other VR vibecoded projects recently.

But then the user actually picks up Mario by the scruff of his collar, plucking him out of the Mushroom Kingdom and placing him onto his table. Check it out in the video below, courtesy Martinic:

Work was initially started a few months ago based on Jonas Jakobi’s SM64 implementation on Quest 3, which was initially released in 2023.

Martinic, also behind 3D asset library Polyfork, decided to start fresh with a decompiled version version of the game however, using Claude’s Opus 5.5 model and PICO CLI, a command-line development toolkit that connects AI coding assistants to Pico’s spatial-computing and XR development tools.

As it is, Martinic says the mod doesn’t use any “stereoscopic crap,” which we take to mean it doesn’t use any of the more familiar porting hacks, such as alternate frame rendering, or extrapolating a second eye view from the depth buffer, which doesn’t always deliver the best results.

Since the modder is working from a decompiled version of Super Mario 64, it likely allows for true stereoscopic rendering. Notably, Martinic says it runs at 90fps natively.

There’s no telling when the mod will be made available. We’re keeping an eye on Martinic’s wesbite, where he says more info on the mod is “coming soon,” and also his personal GitHub.

The post World-bending ‘Mario 64’ VR Mod Makes the 30 Year-old Classic Feel Magical Once Again appeared first on Road to VR.