Step aside, Gordon Freeman. City 17 has a new iconic videogame mascot to act as its saviour—and this one doesn’t need a crowbar to smash in Combine heads.
This is G64, a project that fully ports Super Mario 64’s titular jumpman into Garry’s Mod. Now, Mario’s shown up countless times on the GMod Workshop before, but G64’s kicker is that it perfectly recreates the original game’s player controller inside the Source sandbox, letting you bound around the game’s maps like it’s 1996 all over again.
It’s here! G64 is now released to the public. This Garry’s Mod addon allows you to spawn a playable Mario 64 in your favorite maps. Link to installation instructions below. pic.twitter.com/3lisVWQKwkMay 30, 2022
As follow-up tweets note, getting Mario into GMod is a bit more complicated than simply downloading the associated Steam Workshop mod (opens in new tab). Mario doesn’t move like a Source character, so there’s also a GitHub repository (opens in new tab) full of the prerequisite libraries required to make him run, jump and wallbounce like the portly Italian man of decades past.
Once in, Mario can be spawned in as a playable entity—and while this early release still has a few bugs, he moves exactly as you’d expect. GMod’s levels become recontextualised as platforming sandboxes. He’ll jump and triple-jump off concrete rubble, swim through toxic canals, and even stagger and faint after taking too many explosive barrels to the face. Someone has already even managed to pull off a backwards long-jump (opens in new tab), a staple of Super Mario 64 speedrunning, on gm_flatgrass.
Garry’s Mod can plug into most Source games of the era, meaning it’s now entirely possible to bound across the entirety of Half Life 2 as Nintendo’s jumpy lil’ guy. But the best part is that, with practically endless maps out there on the Steam Workshop, there are effectively now infinite maps to Super Mario your way across.
Most of Super Mario 64’s maps are already there on the Steam Workshop (opens in new tab). And hey, there’s nothing stopping you from firing up Hammer and making your own bespoke retro platforming stages.