A Super Mario 64 fan has been working for the past month to port the game to the Game Boy Advance, rewriting the game's code from scratch, with various features being added every week or so.

Super Mario 64 is probably the most iconic platformer out there at the moment, pushing the boundaries of the Nintendo 64 and pretty much defining 3D platformers, inspiring many of the titles we have today. It's been the subject of hundreds of fan projects over the years, but YouTuber Joshua Barretto has managed to come up with quite a unique one, somehow porting the title to the Game Boy Advance.

First shared by Nintendo Life (thanks Kotaku), Barretto posted a video of their project a few days ago, which is the most recent in a long line of videos going back to May. Every couple of weeks, Barretto posts a new video explaining all the nifty features being introduced in each update, as Super Mario 64 gradually begins to look like an actual Game Boy Advance game. For example, this most recent update shows off new additions such as movement mechanics, a pause menu, and various graphical options.

Super Mario 64 Is Being Ported To The Game Boy Advance By A Fan

While this feat is impressive in itself, what makes Barretto's recent more unbelievable is how much progress they've made over the course of a month. In Barretto's first video about the project (which is embedded above), you can see that Mario is essentially just a triangle running around, a far cry from his more detailed model as seen in the most recent update video.

The reason that Mario looks like this in Barretto's earlier video is because they're actually rebuilding Super MArio 64 from the ground up after realizing a direct port wouldn't work due to the technical limitations of the Game Boy Advance. In the description of Barretto's first video, they explain that they'd like to release the code that they're writing into the public domain in the future, though they have to make sure no official assets are in the project to avoid the dreaded legal arm of Nintendo.

Barretto has made some impressive progress in the past month, so who knows what the project will look like in one or two months? For now, we'll watch with interest, and hope that we'll get to run around Peach's castle as a goofy little pixel Mario in the near future.



Posted: Jul 03, 2024 2:06 pm
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion

Source: https://www.thegamer.com/super-mario-64-fan-is-porting-to-game-boy-advance/