A fan developer does something that seems impossible: porting Super Mario 64 to the Game Boy Advance. And so far, their progress has been impressive.
Developed and published by Nintendo in 1996 for the N64, Super Mario 64 remains a landmark in video game history. Sure, it’s not the first 3D game ever created, but it popularized many features and mechanics that continue to exist in modern games. It was groundbreaking and relied heavily on the then newly released N64 and its advanced (for the time) hardware. And now this iconic platformer is being squeezed onto the far less powerful Game Boy Advance.
Discovered by NintendoLife, Developers and modders Joshua Barretto rebuilds SM64 for the Game Boy Advance. Barretto originally wanted to port the original N64 game to the GBA, but that proved unfeasible for several reasons. Instead, the modder is rewriting the game from scratch to run efficiently on a GBA. A recent video shows how much progress the creator has made on the project.
That’s pretty impressive in itself, but it’s even more amazing when you see the progress Barretto has made in a short period of time. early Maythe developer showed a red triangle that slowly moved around a vague SM64-like level. Now Barretto lets Mario jump and run through a world that looks much more like Super Mario 64.
Even crazier is that this customized version of Super Mario 64 will be playable on a real GBA. In fact, there is already a video of someone playing around with it an early version of Barretto’s work on GBA hardware.
What’s next? Barretto wants to add more features from SM64 into this homebrew port. Finally, the plan is to publish this homebrew port online, but there will be no official Nintendo assets to Avoid the publisher’s active lawyersAnd then we can finally play Super Mario 64 on a GBA, something I never wanted to do but I look forward to trying it out someday.
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