1995/07/29 Beta Mario 64 Build

I worked at Nintendo of America as one of the beta testers back in the 80s and 90s, it was pretty fun, I even got to play Mario Paint (which I loved it so much that I still have the released version of the game along with the Super Nintendo along with a few other games for said console) one time in 1995, I was looking through some games for the Nintendo Ultra 64 (released as just Nintendo 64) and one of them was Super Mario 64, I decided to play it,

Beginning

I turned it on and it was kinda odd, one of the first things I noticed is the lack of ambient sounds and severe shadow errors, I then noticed that the sky was dark red, and Peaches Castle was a bit different, one of them was the Peach glass painting on the front was replaced by a compass,Mario's voice was rather weird, probably the dev team left the placeholder audios by mistake. but it's strange that the error in the shadows code wasn't fixed. Additionally, there's a LOT of visual errors and glitches (but then again, it IS just a prototype! so that's ok) there was yet another coding error, this time with the water. the power meter seemed completely off compared to the one that appeared on Mario 64 Beta Trailer. I thought it was another placeholder and/or a concept. the pause menu was broken. another thing I noticed is the lack of signs in the area. there was just ONE sign, in front of the castle doors, I decided to read it and it said "Why are you here? You shouldn't be here. Turn back, now. Never come back. You shouldn't see this. HE is watching you. He knows that you're here. Turn the game off. Don't let him find you. It's too late - W" As soon as I left the dialogue behind, the Big Boo's Merry-go-Round music started playing expect it was a lot slower! I tried to go inside the castle, to see if the music stops...it just sped up the song. Also, the transition was incorrect. there were some texture errors inside the castle. some doors were incorrectly placed. I went inside one of the doors and there was a toad that said the exact same thing as the sign from the castle doors, but he didn't say the very last sentence, I left that room and tried to go out to stop the music. there was just Wario's head expect it was VERY faded!, The game crashed but the music kept playing with him in the background I had to turn off the TV. I couldn't turn off the console. because he wasn't turned on to start with. I then freaked out when I noticed that. I have NO idea how the game was booted up if the console wasn't. I didn't realize that because I thought I turned it on without realizing it, but no.

Aftermath

I was VERY traumatized with that prototype that I wrote a letter to the Super Mario 64 Team about it, and they apologized about it, and they said that they were still fixing the bugs, and they forgot to fix the glitches from the game I just played, there was another beta tester I knew called Bob Weller that also played another version of the game, which had something to do with a Luigi spider, silly? but that's another story!

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Credited to AyanoxTaro

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