Rovertronic Turns Super Mario 64 Into a 360 POV Video
It's sick (or will make you so)
The ROM hacker Rovertronic has re-rendered Super Mario 64 as a spherical YouTube video seen from inside Mario's head. "Mario 64 but it's an immersive POV," follows a prerecorded run through Bob-omb Battlefield. Viewers drag the frame to look around, and health, coins, and movement cues appear in the closed-caption track, with one track for desktop and a second for phones.
In a sense, it is not playable. The run is fixed, and the only inputs are looking around and switching captions. But in another sense, it's another experiment with playing with YouTube's native POV controls in a new environment. A sketch, if you will.
Rovertronic's channel is mostly N64 modding, including the ROM hack Mario's Modules 2, released there this year. The 1996 original handed players the camera through Lakitu, a cameraman written into the fiction. The POV video leaves viewers with only that role.
For more reading, see our 2016 piece on a speedrunning glitch that exposes the code under Mario and the video on YouTube.
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