I am a millenial, and mining out huge caves in the darkness of Minecraft gave existential terror.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2026
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I grew up with the Sega Genesis, PS1 and then PS2. The PS1 side had games that were more lively, less lonely than SM64. Compare the game to something like even the first Spyro the Dragon, and SM64 immediately feels empty. Add to that the overtly creepy level Big Boo's Mansion, or the less creepy Hazy Maze Cave, or the surreal Wet Dry Town with the creepy cave music, the infinite stairs at the top of the castle, rooms that are huge but sport almost nothing except paintings, only a single big clock, a population of only one or two servants to the princess, levels like Lethal Lava Land which is just otherwise inhabitable platforms on top of a lava ocean - the game ends up feeling creepy whether the ~~programmers~~ lawyers at Ninten intended or not. How about the room with the Tiny Bit Island paintings, one side is huge while the other side's wall is within arm's reach? Also Mario is always being recorded by the Lakitu cameraman, and you're watching him through that lens.
Besides, creepypastas were all the rage during the 2010s, and the 3D Mario had just enough ingredients to make them work - the ultimate culmination of all this being the B31133 romhack. (Correct me if I got the numbers wrong).
I've never seen zoomers get scared of this game
On the one hand, yeah, Mario 64 is ... kind of hauntingly sparse in places.
It is kind of especially weird that when you get dropped into the world, after the very sonically and visually engaging start screen and menus... you get dropped outside of the castle, which has no soundtrack, beyond like occasional birds chirping.
Its a massive tonal shift. Its meant to be just literally quickly skipped through, but if you... don't play the game as much as explore the game... its dissonant.
Then you go into the castle, uplifting music, but... its empty. Echoey. Camera angles / Sight lines emphasize empty space... its meant to maximize your ability to to be acrobatic, but... if you just walk, slowly... very large empty space, full of huge rooms that seemingly only exist to have huge paintings in them.
Which you are... alone, in.
An entire empty castle... where is everyone?
Yeah, thats all weird.
On the other hand...
What's wrong with Zoomers? Alphas?
Oh, constant over stimulation and external judgement.
The absence of those things thus feels like a graveyard, where... you suspect those things somehow are there, they're just hiding... because normally, those things always are there.
Simplicity, minimalism and a lack of obvious direction and feedback thus = absence... a suspicious, meancing lack of engagement.
It leaves you alone.
With your own thoughts.
Your own unguided, undirected thoughts.
You could say the brainrotted are haunted by their own conditioned expectations.
Wdym alone the toads are there for you
Aren't there like... 2, 3 of them, in this huge fucking castle?
And they never move...?
I don't know.
Its been like 25 years since I last played that game lol.
Blatant historical revisionism.
Millenials were cooking up horrifically bad videogame creepypasta before any zoomer ever touched a keyboard.
lol.
BEN DROWNED
... I did kind of have my own creepy experience with an actual Majora's Mask cart I picked up at a used game store like a decade ago.
Had one single save file.
Only had the couples mask.
Had completely forgone basically the entire rest of the the main actual game, only focused on the couple, saved maybe 3 ish 'hours' before the impact.
Had focused the entire playthrough on ensuring that a relationship would work out... in a world left utterly doomed by the hero not being the hero.
And of course they ultimately abadoned the entire game, leading eventually to me buying it, being utterly baffled by this ... unconvential play through, the kind of person who would do that playthrough.
Early 2010s millennials were all about this shit and the popularization of horror game reaction videos.
Zoomers actually like mario64
funny anon mentions it, i found ancient DOS games creepy as fuck in my day too.
Museum Madness had that effect on me.
I kept expecting something to... catch me, felt like I was being watched, that there was some lurking enemy, or that the robot buddy dude would suddenly decide I was a threat, and turn on me, or like, accidentally explode or something.
I preferred TIE Fighter. At least I knew I was fighting something.
damn, just remembered there was this horror game that is supposed to emulate that feeling with old games with spirits and stuff, it may have released and it might be good and i can't remember what it's called.
i got to play pirated xwing vs tie fighter with a proper joystick back in the day. good times.
Logitech 3D Pro.
TIE Fighter, G Police, Sim Copter... all the way through the Battlefields up to 4, Arma 1-3, various flight sims.
I genuinely have no idea how that thing has lasted an actual 20 years with minimal drift.
they definitely aren't building anything like they used to anymore. planned obsolescence and stuff. mine probably still works if i could find it and get that old game port thing working.
i spent what felt like 1000s of hours on sim copter and sim city 2000. it was so cool being able to build the city and fly it too back then.
I still kind of can't believe no one else has done that.
Its legitimately baffling to me.
Oh, yeah, our one game just is a level editor for our other game.
... I can't think of another example of anybody ever doing that.
They'd work in Streets of Sim City as well.
Did you ever play any of the early online 3D games where you could build your own little spaces? I remember one where you started in a central hub then could move to this endless plane of green space where people had built homes and similar. It was so empty of people yet full of random things. Nightmare material.
early minecraft had that vibe to me, especially the free to play creative mode they had on their website.
Mario64 does have kind of a creepy liminal vibe to it.
Long ass empty hallways, rooms with just a giant mirror, no sound except kind of haunting/enchanting music and the echo of your footsteps.
It is objectively a pretty creepy / empty vibe to it, because in the game bowser has taken over the castle, so its supposed to be a bit spooky/creepy in a bunch of spots.
Til I'm a zoomer lol
The “every copy of Mario 64 is personalised” is a really old creepypasta / meme that was definitely a thing before most zoomers were active on the internet.
And the PTSD thing is just stupid, sorry.
Any Austin on Youtube has a channel that is somewhat dedicated to exploring luminal spaces in games. His videos on SM64 give a good impression about how this applies there.
They aren't wrong though. Mario 64 (and even Ocarina of Time too) were great because of how much they evolved videogames as a whole, but as pioneers they have a lot of flaws that game devs took a bit longer to figure out.
IIRC the reason Luigi isn't in Mario 64 is that they couldn't afford the extra few kilobytes that would take.
It's not like they wanted parts of the game to be empty, cartridges were tiny. Mario 64 had a one megabyte cartridge. They had to cut things to the bone to manage to fit the game on that.
Luigi isn't, but Yoshi is =P
Also the reason why everything on N64 were just shaded polygons (to save space) and in the PlayStation it was all texture mapped
Small correction - Mario 64 was on an 8MB cartridge.
There were some 4MB games, but a 1MB cartridge never existed.
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I don't think OoT is as liminal because they put a lot of effort into adding atmosphere. There's a lot of background animal noises and bugs flying around. It's low tech, but the environments don't feel empty in the same way as the polished and clean Mario 64 environments.
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When consoles were less powerful, all spaces were liminal, and as nobody expected anything else, none were. Now, the fact that it’s not bustling with photorealistic NPCs feels spooky and unsettling (along with the historical details, which feel creepy in the way that vaporwave makes you feel)
Honestly I don't think it's even necessarily a matter of photo-realism but moreso that 3d games from even later into the generation were more cluttered visually. Funny enough I've played some PS2 games that emulate the open sparseness style of the N64/PS1 era to invoke horror vibes.
So you’re saying when say N64 was the cutting edge, everyone playing it was loving how new and realistic everything felt.
Now compare that to the younger generation that grew up with consoles way way more powerful and saw games that had fully fleshed out cities and citizens and systems to make places feel alive. So going back to tech that’s 30 years old feels very empty and unsettling by contrast?
To be fair, now I can't unsee it anymore, after seeing it in that light.
I think this is exactly what's happening.
I thought every new generation of games looked "photorealistic" on release. Every time I thought it couldn't get more realistic, they got more realistic.
Honestly I felt the same when the game came out.
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