Sixteen players. One Peach’s castle. Every object and every level synced so nobody falls through the floor while somebody else is doing the wing cap.
That’s the Co-Op mod for the unofficial Super Mario 64 PC port, and until now you had to pick it or the other big mods. Not anymore.
Three mods that finally play nice
The PC port landed in May 2020. In the six years since, the people who care most about a 1996 platformer have been quietly rebuilding it, and three mods became the ones that mattered: the Ray Tracing Mod, Co-Op, and the Render96 HD Texture Pack.
Each one nudges the look or the feel in its own direction. What’s new is that they’re all compatible with each other for the first time since the port and the mods existed. You don’t have to choose.
What each one actually does
Ray tracing is what it sounds like. Real-time ray tracing, dropped into a game built on hardware that couldn’t have dreamed of it in 1996.
Render96 is the more interesting one. The HD Texture Pack isn’t chasing photorealism or some generic modern sheen. It’s aiming at the look of the game’s original promotional material, the art that sold you on Mario going 3D before you’d ever held the controller.
And Co-Op syncs every level and object for up to 16 players, which is a sentence that would have sounded like nonsense on an N64.
Thirty years, and Nintendo’s busy elsewhere
Super Mario 64 turns 30 this year. It was the first Super Mario game with 3D graphics, it drew critical acclaim for its level design, ambition, visuals and gameplay, and it became the best-selling Nintendo 64 game of all time.
It’s widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made, and plenty of people credit it as a major inspiration for the 3D platformers that followed. Nintendo remade it for the Nintendo DS in 2004. Since then, nothing. No modern makeover.
The company has other things going, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Remake among them, so a modern-gen Super Mario 64 is probably not high on anyone’s list in Kyoto. The modders didn’t wait.
The reaction
Footage of all three mods running together is out there, and the 1996 title has never looked better while still keeping what made it work. The comments got emotional fast.
“The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!” one read. Another said, “This gives me the same feeling I first had as a kid. Crazy.”
Here’s the part that matters most: recreating this whole setup costs nothing. It’s completely free, which is a fitting way to mark 30 years of a game that taught a generation what a camera behind your shoulder could do.
